![]() If design is so important, then why not call this theory and practice ‘ecological urban design’? Simply because ‘urban design’ doesn’t suggest to designers that they ought to be thinking more comprehensively and more critically beyond the norm - that is, beyond ‘giving form’ and its history. Governance can create the opportunity, but cannot deliver more sustainable urban fabric, fabric that needs to be not only (re)engineered but (re)designed. It may well be ‘the failure of effective governance within cities that explains the poor environmental performance of so many cities’ (Mitlin & Sattherthwaite 1996), but it is without a doubt also the absence of an environmentally literate urban design, that is, urban design hand-in-glove with environmental engineering. In the copious analysis of the unsustainability of cities from the UN’s Brundtland Report (1987) onwards, the vital importance of design is neither understood nor acknowledged. The brilliant 19th-century engineer Joseph Bazalgette achieved just such a synthesis with London’s Embankment, which is both sewer infrastructure (below) and urban promenade (above). A design-centred Ecological Urbanism is essential to integrate necessary environmental engineering with the city-as-culture. Theories about the urban condition are useless without the ability to deploy them, and design incorporates both the framing of an intention to intervene, and the guiding of the intervention itself. ![]() The importance of designĮcological Urbanism has the potential to be a new bridgehead between urban design and ecology one that projects and defends design as a vital element in the necessary physical transformation of our cities. Its cultural (including design) implications remain largely unexplored, and even fragments of its complex provenance rarely appear in publications addressing ‘the sustainable city’. It is an engineering model, vitally important, but isolated from conventional urban design theory and practice. ![]() The emphasis on environmental systems is a very different way of thinking about the city: urban sites are seen as locations of, not only demand for but supply of, resources. The goal of Ecological Urbanism is to create ‘artificial ecosystem’ cities that achieve the same interdependent efficiencies and life-preserving redundancies as natural ecosystems, turning the current linear pattern of energy-in-one-end/wastes-out-the-other into a loop: wastes become energy. Urban flooding, for example, isn’t just a headline-grabbing aspect of climate volatility, it ruins lives and urban fabric and costs money to put right. What is most dispiriting in the general refusal to engage with these processes is the inability of too many to perceive the indivisibility of the environmental and the social, and both with the economic. At its best, it challenges the way we conceive of urban and non-urban, and the way we privilege the city as cultural construct over the city as metabolism - literal metabolism, taking in energy and resources and evacuating wastes. At its worst, ecological urbanism trails these in its wake. On the contrary, it is an active disincentive, promising the worthy and the dull: buildings lost in generic greenery and garnished with wind turbines. ![]() ‘Ecological Urbanism’ - the term does not exactly trip off the tongue. Architects have been steadily pushed out of urban design but through embracing Ecological Urbanism may reclaim their authority and create cities in symbiotic harmony with nature
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