Smart Sustainable Cities of the New Millennium: Towards Design for Nature

Urban environments consist of a mosaic of natural fragments, planned and unintentional habitats hosting both introduced and spontaneous species. The latter group exploits abandoned and degraded urban niches which, in the case of plants, form what is called the third landscape. In the Anthropocene, cities, open spaces and buildings must be planned and designed considering not only human needs but also those of other living organisms. The scientific approach of habitat sharing is defined as reconciliation ecology, whilst the action of implementing the ecosystem services and functioning of such anthropogenic habitats is called Urban Rehabilitation. However, urban development still represents the main cause of biodiversity loss worldwide. Yet, the approach of planners and landscape architects highly diverges from that of ecologists and scientists on how to perceive, define and design urban green and blue infrastructure. For instance, designers focus on the positive impact that nature (generally associated with indoor and outdoor greeneries) has on human well-being, often neglecting ecosystems’ health. Instead, considering the negative impact of any form of development and to achieve the no net loss Aichi’s objectives, conservationists apply mitigation hierarchy policies to avoid or reduce the impact and to offset biodiversity. The rationale of this review paper is to set the fundamentals for a multidisciplinary design framework tackling the issue of biodiversity loss in the urban environment by design for nature. The method focuses on the building/city/landscape scales and is enabled by emerging digital technologies, i.e., geographic information systems, building information modelling, ecological simulation and computational design.

Green roofs: new ecosystems to defend species diversity

Many contributions to the symposium seek to expand the role of green roofs in the conservation of biodiversity. Indeed, if green roofs can be harnessed for biodiversity, they will add area to that now available to nature. That would have the mass effect of increasing the sustainable number of species in simple conformity with the species--area relationship. Because all green roofs are novel ecosystems, all represent instances of reconciliation ecology, i.e., re-engineering human uses to permit simultaneous beneficial use by people and nature. Green roofs can provide a large number of experiments that might teach us how to improve their design. But those experiments, like any in science, must be overtly designed so that their hypotheses are clear and explicit, their methods repeatable, and their data appropriate for rigorous analysis. I present an embryonic example using native plant species growing at ground level in the urban environments of Tucson, AZ, USA. Steps include: (1) formulating a hypothesis; (2) developing a database of species' attributes to allow intelligent selection for hypothesis testing; (3) developing software to allow winnowing the list of species to sets with a good chance, according to the hypothesis, of growing together; (4) installing the sets of plants and measuring the results; (5) defining a continuous measure of conformity with the hypothesis; and (6) comparing results to hypothesis. If ecologists can successfully design reconciled ecosystems in urban settings – green roofs included – city people will be able to re-establish their everyday connection to nature.

Hybrid Encounters in Reconciliation Ecology

Over the past century, environmental scientists have developed a range of conservation approaches. Each of these, from management to restoration has embedded within it certain dualisms which create exclusive spaces or agencies for “human” and “nature.” I begin with a critique of these binaries as they occur in philosopher, Florence R. Kluckhohn’s influential model and in more recent narratives about the “Anthropocene,” and then turn to examine some of the novel features of “reconciliation ecology” as it has recently been deployed in the environmental sciences. Though this model is beginning to see wider use by scientists, it has not yet been explored within a religious framework. Taking up Miroslav Volf’s suggestion that reconciliation involves a “double strategy” I highlight ways that reconciliation can (1) provide a viable model for promoting an “embrace” of the other and (2) better integrate the past history of negative human biotic impacts.