Ecological Urbanism

‘Defines biomimicry for sustainable design and translates ecological knowledge into practical methodologies for architectural and urban design that can proactively respond to climate change and biodiversity loss. Tests and exemplifies methods through a series of case studies of existing cities in a variety of climates.’

Also available in part for free on google books: https://books.google.de/books?id=aEVbDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=Regenerative+Urban+Design+and+Ecosystem+Biomimicry&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwiQj6rJ_LnbAhXMMewKHTvlCvwQ6AEIKTAA#v=onepage&q=Regenerative%20Urban%20Design%20and%20Ecosystem%20Biomimicry&f=false

Routledge is trialling a system of letting their authors share their books in their entirety for free (60 days). So... here is a link to the book 'regenerative urban design and ecosystem biomimicry'  https://rdcu.be/4ftj Valid till late October 2018.  Enjoy!!!

Si bien el cambio climático, la arquitectura sostenible y las tecnologías ecológicas son cuestiones perfectamente asentadas en el imaginario colectivo, no ha ocurrido lo mismo con aquellos temas que afectan a la sostenibilidad de la ciudad. Este libro nace precisamente de la apremiante necesidad de abordar el urbanismo desde un enfoque ecológico como método práctico e imaginativo para enfrentarse a la realidad de la ciudad, y constituye, por ello, una apuesta deliberada por asentar definitivamente el concepto de “urbanismo ecológico” a través del compendio de una serie de textos clave sobre la materia.

Urbanismo ecológico recopila los artículos del simposio homónimo que tuvo lugar en 2009 en la Graduate School of Design de la Harvard University, así como otros ensayos, conferencias y lecciones vinculados a esta línea de investigación auspiciada por la célebre universidad estadounidense. El libro, editado por Mohsen Mostafavi y Gareth Doherty, parte de un enfoque interdisciplinario donde confluyen las miradas de arquitectos, urbanistas, diseñadores, teóricos, economistas, ingenieros, artistas y científicos, entre otros especialistas. El resultado es una amplia panorámica que contribuye a dibujar la imagen plural, compleja y repleta de matices que adquiere el sistema urbano cuando se estudia desde la óptica ecológica. Una aportación importante, en suma, que da carta de naturaleza a una nueva ética y estética de lo urbano.

From the book:

"With the aim of projecting alternative and sustainable forms of urbanism, the book asks: What are the key principles of an ecological urbanism? How might they be organized? And what role might design and planning play in the process?

While climate change, sustainable architecture, and green technologies have become increasingly topical, issues surrounding the sustainability of the city are much less developed. The premise of the book is that an ecological approach is urgently needed both as a remedial device for the contemporary city and an organizing principle for new cities. Ecological urbanism approaches the city without any one set of instruments and with a worldview that is fluid in scale and disciplinary approach. Design provides the synthetic key to connect ecology with an urbanism that is not in contradiction with its environment.

The book brings together design practitioners and theorists, economists, engineers, artists, policy makers, environmental scientists, and public health specialists, with the goal of reaching a more robust understanding of ecological urbanism and what it might be in the future.

Contributors include:
Homi Bhabha, Stefano Boeri, Chuck Hoberman, Rem Koolhaas, Sanford Kwinter, Bruno Latour, Nina-Marie Lister, Moshen Mostafavi, Matthias Schuler, Sissel Tolaas, Charles Waldheim.

In recent years, the world has seen the emergence of a number of urban projects which, under the banner of experimentation, have promoted alternative models of city-making capable, in theory, of creating sustainable built environments. Among these supposedly experimental models, the smart city and the eco-city stand out in terms of geographical diffusion, and are hailed by their advocates as the mark of an innovative urbanism based on a scientific approach to urban development. Through the analysis of Hong Kong and Masdar City, examples of a smart-city agenda and an eco-city project respectively, this paper questions the sustainability of so-called smart cities and eco-cities, by investigating the extent to which they are developed in a controlled and systematic manner as their developers claim. More specifically, the paper counterclaims mainstream understandings of smart and ecological urbanism, arguing that what are promoted as cohesive settlements shaped by a homogeneous vision of the sustainable city, are actually fragmented cities made of disconnected and often incongruous pieces of urban fabric. Theoretically, these claims are discussed through the concept of Frankenstein urbanism which draws upon Mary Shelley's novel as a metaphor for unsuccessful experiments generated by the forced union of different, incompatible elements.

While climate change, sustainable architecture, and green technologies have become increasingly topical, issues surrounding the sustainability of the city are much less developed. The premise of this book is that an ecological approach is urgently needed as an imaginative and practical method for addressing existing as well as new cities. Ecological Urbanism considers the city with multiple instruments and with a worldview that is fluid in scale and disciplinary focus. Design provides the synthetic key to connect ecology with an urbanism that is not in contradiction with its environment. The book brings together practitioners, theorists, economists, engineers, artists, policymakers, scientists, and public health specialists, with the goal of providing a multilayered, diverse, and nuanced understanding of ecological urbanism and what it might be in the future. The promise is nothing short of a new ethics and aesthetics of the urban.
This book is also part of an ongoing series of research projects at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design that explore alternative and radical approaches between ecology and architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and urbanism.

Since the early 20th century various planning movements have been developed. It would be useful to trace the evolution of these movements to see how their underlying principles have changed and how successful they have been in addressing the requirements of sustainable development. Literature on five selected movements is reviewed. These are, namely, Garden City, Neighborhood Unit, Modernism, Neo-traditionalism, and Eco-urbanism. Results show that evolution of neighborhood planning is characterized by the progressive inclusion of different dimensions of the sustainability concept. However, there are still many difficulties in terms of translating the rhetoric into action.

Reimagine fragmented cities and neighborhoods through a design blueprint for healthy communities to Reclaim the Public Realm, and improve mobility and connectivity.
Urban Cores within these neighborhoods will comprise a more
Livable, Walkable and Vibrant City.

A cidade, como um sistema vivo, depende de fluxos de energia, matéria e informação para sintetizar a oferta e a demanda de serviços ecossistêmicos urbanos e assim, garantir a qualidade de vida de seus habitantes. A sustentabilidade urbana e seus instrumentos de aplicações conformam-se como otimizadores da eficiência dos fluxos de recursos das cidades contemporâneas. No urbanismo, o planejamento ambiental voltado ao desenvolvimento sustentável auxilia a prática da sustentabilidade urbana através de políticas públicas. No meio físico, esta prática tem no desenho urbano seu método de efetividade.  Amparado em teorias e conceitos relacionados a problemática ambiental urbana, pode-se apontar três perspectivas de sustentabilidade urbana que tratam o desenho urbano como método: Urbanismo Sustentável, Ecologia Urbana e Urbanismo Ecológico. No presente trabalho, as diretrizes correspondentes a estas perspectivas são categorizadas para analisar  suas semelhanças e diferenças.

Ainda que as mudanças climáticas, a arquitetura sustentável e as tecnologias ecológicas sejam questões perfeitamente assentadas no imaginário coletivo, o mesmo ainda não ocorreu com aqueles temas relacionados à sustentabilidade urbana. Este livro surgiu exatamente da necessidade urgente de abordar o urbanismo sob um enfoque ecológico como método prático e criativo para enfrentar a realidade da cidade, e assim se constitui em uma aposta deliberada pela consolidação definitiva do conceito de “urbanismo ecológico” por meio da compilação de uma série de textos-chave sobre a matéria.

Urbanismo Ecológico reúne os artigos do simpósio homônimo que ocorreu em 2009 na Graduate School of Design da Universidade de Harvard, bem como outros ensaios, conferências e aulas vinculados a esta linha de pesquisa promovida pela célebre universidade norte-americana. O livro, organizado por Mohsen Mostafavi e Gareth Doherty, parte de um enfoque interdisciplinar no qual se unem os olhares de arquitetos, planejadores e desenhistas urbanos, teóricos, economistas, engenheiros, artistas e cientistas, entre outros profissionais. O resultado é um amplo panorama que contribui para desenhar a imagem plural, complexa e repleta de nuances que o sistema urbano assume quando estudado sob a ótica ecológica. Em suma, trata-se de uma contribuição importante que atesta o nascimento de uma nova ética e estética do meio urbano.

L’interazione esplosiva tra aumento dell’impronta urbana sul pianeta e crisi di un modello finanziario di sviluppo, tuttavia, ci impone di rivedere i paradigmi che guidano le politiche urbane non più in termini esclusivi di crescita, accumulo e consumo, ma programmando e regolando anche la decrescita e il riuso.
La città espansiva tendeva infatti ad incorporare le aree marginali nell'organismo della città, adottando misure per regolamentare la marginalità (introduzione di servizi pubblici, strade, social housing, ecc.) che spesso hanno contribuito ad aggravare il problema, incentivando l’effetto attrattore e il consumo di risorse (prima fra tutte il suolo). La città che si ricompatta (Shrinking City), invece, richiede che le nuove morfologie insediative siano individuate attraverso uno sforzo creativo di interpretazione delle identità e delle risorse, di integrazione delle azioni e di riconfigurazione degli spazi liberati dal
processo di riduzione, producendo tessuti urbani più “relisienti”, "addattativi" e "fluidi" (Coyle S.J., 2011). E pertanto chiede di essere progettata e regolata con nuovi strumenti di pianificazione e progettazione.

There is a disconnection between commercial architecture and environmental thinking, where green features can be included as part of a strategy for gaining approvals and marketing projects, but those features are not reviewed after completion and occupation of the building and knowledge is not shared. High levels of air conditioning are still considered unavoidable. Elaborate double skin facades and complex motorized shading systems are adopted; often masking an underlying lack of basic environmental thinking. This article returns (in principle) to the physics of comfort in buildings and the passive strategies which can help achieve this with a low energy and carbon footprint. Passive and active facade design strategies are outlined as the basis of a critical tool and a design methodology for new projects. A new architectural sensibility can arise based on modeling the inputs of sunlight, daylight and air temperature in time and space at the early stages of design. Early but sound strategies can be tested and refined using advanced environmental modeling techniques. Architecture and environmental thinking can proceed hand in hand through the design process.

Keywords: climatic design; day-lighting; facade design; shading; solar heat gain; cross disciplinary; design workflow; nearly zero carbon; business buildings

Over the past few decades, both in the USA and Europe, many cultural landscapes (CL's) facing social and economic decline have been revitalized through processes embracing planning, design, touristic ideas, heritage resources, local administrations and communities, resulting in cultural or heritages parks (HP's). This paper forms part of the debate on CL's and highlights their rehabilitation via HP's. The research raises the question of the role HP's have played within the restoration of CL's' while aiming to bring the discussion into the current sustainable planning and land design debate. As a case study, it takes the experience of the Mondego River Heritage Park (MRHP), located in the central region of Portugal. The MRHP builds upon the European Landscape Convention, HP's' accomplishments and academic studies. Conclusions suggest heritage to be an effective driving-force for sustainable development and heritage park as an operative concept in the planning, land design and management of the territory.

Banjarmasin and Banjarbaru, South Kalimantan, feature prominently in the medium-term plan Indonesia 2014-2019 of the Indonesian government: as large cities, as priority location for a new town, as future growth center, and mainly as (the only) metropolitan area in Indonesian Borneo. It explains the prospects of a doubled population by 2030 (from 652.000 inhabitants in 2010 to 1.27 million in 2030). Simultaneously Banjarmasin is undergoing a dramatic transformation, shifting its water-based origins towards road-based transport.

Recently between 2011 and 2012, Banjarmasin – together with Pekalongan and Solo – was chosen to pilot the ‘City Development Strategies’ (CDS) approach: a tool that helps local city governments develop comprehensive strategies for urban development, in order to link public funding with local amenity investments. This initiative “Making Urban Investment Planning Work” is implemented by UN-Habitat in partnership with the Directorate General of Human Settlements (DGHS) of the Ministry of Public Works. A ‘City Visioning Profile’ was drawn from participatory workshops with local city officials: “Gateway to Kalimantan” . It is based on a threefold vision of Banjarmasin as regional economic hub, as traditional river city, and as livable city. This City Vision Profile is today being implemented by strategic projects within a timeline until 2016.

Today both mentioned partners renew their focus towards ‘Advocating Urban Planning for City Leaders’, revising their guidelines towards a more integrated comprehensive planning across sectors. The focus of UN-Habitat on urban planning is framed against the very rapid and often uncontrolled urbanization, looking for more sustainable, empowering and inclusive ways to guide this expected massive urban growth or urban sprawl. Again Banjarmasin and the Banjarbakula region feature as pilot case.

This studio therefore positions itself within this ambition, thus in a way picking up with the 2009 International Ideas Competition ‘Urban Eco-Planning Concepts and Ideas’. It is clear that growth prospects pose major challenges in the specifically vulnerable and flood-prone context of Banjarmasin. It is also clear that this can only be tackled in a broader perspective, not only focusing on the Banjarmasin city boundaries nor on the short-term feasibility. The studio will learn and comprehend the rather autonomous forces (economies, ecologies, culture…) that may be steered but cannot really be altered. It will subsequently engage with the more supporting systems that translate these rather autonomous systems spatially and thus are able to generate urbanity (mobility, centralities, settlement patterns, identity…). The challenge is to thus try and guide the projected growth in a more structured and qualitative way, addressing different stakeholders public and private; to find ways where a coherent future spatial organization is matched with the very specific site conditions without a necessary fixed and final outcome; to find in other words flexible urban frames that allow for different potential growth paths.

The studio starts from ‘the assumption that even growth of the Asian kind can be canalized in sink with natural processes of the dynamic landscape and in relation to the legacy of the city/region. (…) A productive interplay between water structures and urban structures can once again become a fundamental identity for the city and its environs.

The absence of a shared definition of the variable that is sustainability is a volatile element in the multi-factor
equation known as ‘the urban landscape’. The sustainable infrastructure of our urbanised habitats is a fundamental
matter for planners and architects, but this is often more of a theoretical concern than a practical application of
innovative design implementation. The lack of a shared understanding of sustainable practices contributes to a
reliance on conventional orthodoxies, and the ‘play it safe’ approach to the design of public spaces structurally and
aesthetically. This study focuses on the methodological and creative threads that connect sustainable design concepts
to their viable outcomes. The recent phenomenon of significant population growth within UK regional city centres
has emphasised the demand for user-friendly ecologically enhanced public spaces. The synthesis of native species
ecology and innovative utilisation of hard landscaping is a fundamental element in the establishment of the concepts
of ownership and place. The successful employment of these concepts is debatable. The strands that link worthy
sustainable architectural and planning design intentions to their seemingly logical conclusions are frayed, tangled and
often severed. Through a selection of comparative case studies and examples of advanced initiatives this paper
examines the causes of this entanglement and paradoxically also highlights the innovative capacity of reversing the
existing ‘fixed mould of aesthetic convention’.

Today, design proposals like ‘Metropolitan Landscapes’ and ‘Metabolism of the Brussels Region’ aim at fusing natural and social sciences to restore the equilibrium between social and natural systems, and in extenso the urban and natural environment. However, this socio-ecological approach, typical of ecological urbanism, is often stripped down to a biological perspective. Metabolic schemes of city systems
demonstrate the current course taken by the design field, by stressing that the city is a natural organism, constructed through biological
flows rather than existing spaces and people. In this paper, I will invoke a historical reading of a biological approach towards the city by
retracing the linkages between ecologists and planners in Brussels. Using the case of Paul Duvigneaud and the Brussels Agglomeration
(1970-1980), I claim that ecology is used to both overcome political opposition and incorporate a specific (political) agenda. By performing a close reading of archival material, this historical analysis raises attention for (contested) socio-political motives and forces, thus leading to a reconsideration of the way in which ecology and design is related to political and social contexts.

Urban commons is a concept that is currently ‘trending’ in the social sciences. Most of this presently emerging research more or less uncritically builds upon the influential theory of the commons presented by Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom, and generally focus upon issues regarding the production, maintenance and access to various forms of urban common goods. One thing that the interlocutors in the expanding academic debate on the urban commons appear to take for all but granted is that the subjects of the commons, the commoners, are presumably always ‘human’, and that the objects constituting the commons are presumably always non-human. I want to argue that this taken-for-granted ontological divide between subjects and objects, humans and non-humans, means and ends, resources and extractors, is far too self-assured and remains dangerously unquestioned in this emerging literature. In the light of a dawning understanding of the fundamental ecological entanglements of humanity we must learn to rethink previously taken-for-granted ontological categories such as culture/nature and human/non-human, destabilizing them to do away with destructive preconceptions that place humans on one side and non-humans on the other.

A library is a facility that support the educational curriculum and research at any level of education in institutions of learning at local, state and national scale. With the growing concern about and increasing interest in sustainable built environments around the globe, the agenda of academic libraries is also changing. Library buildings and space designs in Nigeria are rigid, too formal and trivialized nature in its articulation. The study assesses the need for adopting a new design philosophy for the redesign of Nigerian library buildings using biophilic features. This is with the view to catch up with high level international standards and also to negotiate with the traditional library buildings and space designs of Nigerian learning institutions which are energy consuming and thermally uncomfortable. The study methodology employed the case study approach to compare the extent to which some foreign libraries shift from the traditional paradigm to the Green architecture paradigm and the need for our local libraries to adopt this transforming world class approach. The paper looks at the features of biophilic architecture in relation to library building envelope, its surrounding and suggest ways they can be applied in the design and retrofitting of existing library buildings with the view to achieving sustainability by reducing researchers' fatigue and improving productivity through high concentration and assimilation. A need and users satisfactory survey was conducted in some Libraries in ABTI American University of Nigeria in Yola, Covenant University in Otta and Ahmadu Bello University (ABU) in Zaria. It was found out that absence of passive design elements increases carbon footprints through high energy demand for cooling and lighting of the building stocks.

This paper describes the severity of climate change impacts on the urban poor, which includes impacts on ecosystem services. Through field-based research in peri-urban areas of Durban, South Africa, the importance of ecosystem services is illustrated. For poor urban residents, these services include important regulating functions such as protection from natural hazards and disease. The paper then advocates shifting debate on ecosystem-based adaptation from an ‘ecosystems’ to an ‘ecosystem services’ approach, acknowledging the importance of ecosystems – even if they are degraded – for urban adaptation.

Urban development planning needs to consider open area and green space, not only for the sake of environmental health but for the health of the community and for the sake of cultural ecology which is the basis of the community livelihood and identity. Bangkok metropolitan used to have several areas with green space that is called “rural and agricultural conservation area” in urban planning term. However, the areas have gradually been transformed into an undistinguished part of the metropolis.

The work fights for a shift from Anthropocene in urban environment through both, analogue and digital eco-systemic prototypical urban interventions, mixing biological as well as digital performances of post-digital landscape. It directly engages with the local human and non-human communities as well as it offers its online recipes and codes for DIY local iterations tagged in public space. Such intelligent and informed cultural landscape therefore covers several multi-layered generative and iterative agencies for its self-development.

The article examined Lefebvrian notion of ‘Right of the City’ with a focus of Turkish context for urbanism  and human rights in the era of insurgent citizenship. Hinterlands of Istanbul has been showcased to illustrate extends of urban growth with theories of ecological urbanism

En 1995, Marie-Claire Regniers escribió observaba cómo “en el paisaje contemporáneo de la arquitectura belga Luc Schuiten es una figura aparte”, que supera “las líneas de construcción rígidas y tradicionales [y] dibuja incansablementenumerosos proyectos guiados por la búsqueda de otros estilos de vida. Una manera de pensar que ha dado forma a una nueva arquitectura basada en una visión poética, donde dominan la invención y la relación con la naturaleza”. Veinte años después, en un contexto en que el calentamiento global, el cambio climático, las emisiones de carbono y el Protocolo de Kioto están férreamente instalados en nuestra mente colectiva,  Luc Schuiten (Bruselas, 1944) continúa produciendo desde su posición en la periferia de la disciplina. Enfrascado desde finales de los años sesenta en la búsqueda de una fusión entre ciudad y paisaje, arquitectura y naturaleza, e instalado en una posición que aúna el hiperrealismo de la construcción a la utopía militante, Schuiten resulta totalmente ajeno a clasificaciones LEED o certificaciones energéticas. Sus propuestas, que suman el espíritu megaestructural y visionario de los sesenta y setenta con una cierta sensibilidad biomórfica educada en el art nouveau de su Bélgica natal, adquieren un particular atractivo al sugerir una alternativa de desarrollo tecnológico divergente, que se sitúa simultáneamente adelante y a un
lado de las corrientes oficiales, y que dota a su obra, diseminada a lo largo de cuatro décadas, de una coherencia interna estructural más allá de su evidente eclecticismo.

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In 1995, Marie-Claire Regniers observed how “in the contemporary architecture scene in Belgium, Luc Schuiten stands out from the rest,” as someone who goes beyond “the rigid and traditional lines of construction” and “tirelessly draws numerous projects guided by a quest for other lifestyles.” Twenty years later, in a context in which global warming, climate change, carbon emissions and the Kyoto Protocol
are firmly lodged in our collective consciousness, and now that terms such
as “bioclimatic” and “sustainable” have long since passed into common parlance, the position of Luc Schuiten (Brussels, 1944) in the periphery of architecture has not changed that much. Immersed in his search for a fusion between city and landscape, architecture and nature, ever since the end of the 1960s, Schuiten occupies a place in which he combines the hyper-realism of construction with a militant utopia; his work is most definitely not about LEED classifications or energy performance certificates. Schuiten’s proposals—which combine the mega-structural and visionary spirit of the 1960s and 1970s with a certain biomorphic sensibility born of the art nouveau of his native Belgium hold a particular appeal as an alternative form of technological development, which is placed both ahead of, and to one side of, official initiatives, and this gives his work, carried out over a period of forty years, a structural internal coherence that goes beyond its evident eclecticism.

Il saggio fa parte di un volume che ricostruisce la consulenza fornita da tre scuole di Architettura (Pescara, Venezia, Ascoli Piceno) per il disseppellimento di un fiume urbano nella città cinese di Zhongshan, in collaborazione con l'Istituto di pianificazione locale. Il Jiu Qu River renewal project assume la forma del grande progetto urbano, dove gli interventi di restauro del patrimonio edilizio più antico e quelli di demolizione di altri edifici meno significativi si combinano con la creazione di nuovi assetti insediativi e infrastrutturali sostenibili, con l'obiettivo di dare origine a una parte di città vitale e attrattiva quanto dotata di marcati valori figurativi e simbolici. Il modo di intrecciare la memoria  dell'antico con l'espressione della contemporaneità, gli strati di permanenza con le morfologie di una modernità attenta ai rapporti con il contesto, rappresenta il tema portante di un'esperienza in cui il know how italiano in materia di rigenerazione urbana viene messo alla prova di un contesto eccezionale, a una scala inusitata rispetto alla città europea.

The Brazilian Amazon has provoked preservationist discussions for decades, and although there has been a breakthrough in the recognition of the role of traditional populations for the biome maintenance, most strategies adopted in the country privileged the region’s scale, without concern about local scale, particularly features of cities and of their inhabitants. The hypothesis that is pursued in this article is that the space of Western Amazonian frontier should offer innovative potential for urbanization solutions, especially in the treatment of open spaces. It also goes to prove that by not fully having structured its territory it could learn from human history, science framework, and from traditional knowledge. Assuming that urbanization process across this region takes place in a single space-time, this paper first approaches the dichotomy between city and nature built over time to deconstruct it, considering contemporary city’s emerging spatiality and possible evolution scenarios. Marabá was adopted as case study, a city located between states and biomes, in the economic frontier circumstances of Western Amazonian. The research shows that from the existing open spaces raise an encouragement to reconcile urbanism and ecology

Il saggio introduce il tema del numero doppio 25/26 della rivista Piano Progetto Città, del Dipartimento di Architettura di Pescara.  Il numero, dal titolo "Eco.Logics" è curato da Massimo Angrilli e si incentra sul tema del rapporto tra urbanistica ed ecologia. Ospita saggi, tra gli altri, di Gareth Doherty, Virginio Bettini, Francesc Munoz, Pier Luigi Sacco, Carlo Gasparrini, Paola Viganò, Peter Fend ed una conversazione con Mohsen Mostafavi.

Urban landscapes configure themselves like a mosaic of synchronic concurrences and a stratified diachronic palimpsest, at the same time, where the phenomenon of spreading dwellings out of the urban settlements is a raising question in the European context. The irregular growth of living neighbourhoods wears the landscape out, or in other words, we are talking about urban sprawl or spread city: “unplanned, incremental urban development, typified by a low-density use of  lands on the city threshold.” (Gibelli e Salzano, 2006). 
This new kind of horizontal city is diffused, widespread and growing on itself. It modifies the countryside leaving “interstitial segments, remains and fragments” among buildings:  maybe they can be seen like “urban gaps”. 
But where have we find answers to face that problem? among architects and urbanists? among people living  in spread cities? How to make people aware of the potentialities of open spaces? How to represent the gaps?  Which can be the role of representation and first of all , of communication technologies?
The paper intends to show the update examples on the issue:. a patchwork possibility is taking place, sewing up parts and fragments of not homogeneous fabrics, while awaiting a new urbanity re-build, a new landscape.  How that patchwork can be made? By open healthy spaces, public spaces, green spaces…, linked each other in order to compose a huge patchwork, more relevant than buildings, the real net able to invert the relationship between built spaces and open spaces.

Creating spaces that have many concurrent purposes -- social, ecological, and infrastructural-- is a challenge in the urban realm where large infrastructural systems have been inherited and typically serve a single purpose. This study investigates how the spaces surrounding single-purpose infrastructure can make the best use of resources and preserve necessary performance while allowing other, multiple uses to take place. In the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, an infrastructural corridor known as the Whitnall Utility Corridor contains high-tension power lines which deliver energy to the Los Angeles Region, but it is otherwise single-purpose, both socially and ecologically inert. In this study, the corridor is seen as an opportunity to reimagine how design can maintain necessary functions while allowing infrastructural spaces to participate in the larger life of the urban area both socially and ecologically. Such an approach would allow these large swaths of land to be better integrated into a city’s metabolism, transmitting energy but also offering local benefits.

By approaching the Whitnall Corridor through the lens of landscape architecture, this study focuses on reducing energy and resource use in urban ares while increasing the capacity for the corridor to support human and ecological well-being.  The corridor will be envisioned as a strategic site for urban food production, which can increase the sustainability of the city by reducing the number of miles food travels from farm to table.  Such a strategy has implications not only for carbon emissions and air quality, but for urban energy consumption and water use. This corridor can also model sustainable use and treatment of water by incorporating strategic designs to improve water quality and recharge groundwater. These strategies can be used to educate and inspire the public about Los Angeles’ arid climate and the city’s use of this valuable resource.  In addition to modeling sustainable resource use, this study seeks to transform the relationship of the surrounding communities to this neglected corridor by increasing interaction between the corridor and surrounding communities, integrating it into the daily life of residents, and allowing neighborhoods to view the utility corridor as a critical local amenity rather than a liability.

Although the corridor is over seven miles long, it passes through multiple neighborhoods and various contexts, so the specific design solutions that are most appropriate change along its length. Key infrastructural intersections occur along the corridor at several places and this proposal suggests how they can be better incorporated into the function and character of the corridor. Such intersections occur at the Tujunga spreading grounds, the channelized Tujunga wash, as well as the Chandler Bikeway. These areas are catalytic sites for specific interventions to promote recreation, education, and ecological diversity along the Whitnall corridor.

For residential areas, design solutions integrate the corridor into daily life and functions, therefore strategies specifically address the interaction of the corridor with front and back yards, streetscapes, and plan for multiple uses such as food production, recreation and social activities. Design interventions proposed for the Whitnall corridor ultimately have the potential to integrate ecological, economic, and social processes. These values, as expressed through a transformed, multi-functional urban utility corridor, can enhance the well-being of the urban area and its residents and allow the city to grow, adapt, and sustain itself into the future."

In the light of the new challenges on the horizon of contemporary urban design, emerges the sensitiveness of the landscapist, the ability to look at the complex urban metabolism as a set of processes, which increasingly include the social dimension. It is an eclectic sensitiveness, multiscalar, which looks at the ecological challenge and nature with a new spirit, measuring the health of a city in terms of the biological diversity and culture it contains. To this sensitibility the ATELIER Coloco adds a fourth dimension (of the project), which is expressed through art and performance as a liminal element, sublimating the contents, in the direction of urban design in the open space. For these young French landscape designers the project is thus an evolution of experiences at different dimensional levels: construction takes place in a processual and relational manner, also through the collective construction of gardens, spaces of conviviality, and transformation rituals of the residual space staged pragmatically, inscribed in everyday life.

Based on fieldwork in Rocinha, one of the largest favelas of Rio de Janeiro, this paper discusses the formal/informal binary in relation to the city. Ethnographic material illustrates the daily relationships of businesses and lives in this favela and shows that they are clearly enmeshed in both what is usually considered the formal and the informal parts of urban life. Through the work of Beatriz Jaguaribe and Loïc Wacquant in particular, we suggest that what is perceived as informal is not just a construction of the formal but also serves as a dangerous basis for policies such as the ‘Shock of Order’. The informal, as the ‘other’ and the ‘unknown’, needs to be better understood ethnographically to challenge the formal/informal binary in the face of the complex hybrid relationships of the contemporary city.

Metabolism is an Analogy-based protocol for accounting the material and energy flows within a city, permits quantifying the balance of resource inputs and waste outputs. The concept can relate to urban efficiency account and be explained through the first principle of thermodynamics: the amount of waste depends on inputs, which are the sum of outputs and the stock increase. Applied to architecture the term metabolism was in fact as defective translation of the japanese word shinchintaisha, term rather related to the symbolic replacement of the old with the new.  Coined in May 1960 at International World Design Conference in Tokyo, the word was used by Noboru Kawazoe whilst discussing the organic nature of Kiyonori Kikutake's Marine City Unabara, describing its essential exchange of materials and energy between the city and the exterior world.

This book tells the story of visionary urban experiments, shedding light on the theories that preceded their development and on the monsters that followed and might be the end of our cities. The narrative is threefold and delves first into the eco-city, second the smart city and third the autonomous city intended as a place where existing smart technologies are evolving into artificial intelligences that are taking the management of the city out of the hands of humans. The book empirically explores Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong to provide a critical analysis of eco and smart city experiments and their sustainability, and it draws on numerous real-life examples to illustrate the rise of urban artificial intelligences across different geographical spaces and scales. Theoretically, the book traverses philosophy, urban studies and planning theory to explain the passage from eco and smart cities to the autonomous city, and to reflect on the meaning and purpose of cities in a time when human and non-biological intelligences are irreversibly colliding in the built environment. Iconoclastic and prophetic, Frankenstein Urbanism is both an examination of the evolution of urban experimentation through the lens of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and a warning about an urbanism whose product resembles Frankenstein's monster: a fragmented entity which escapes human control and human understanding. Academics, students and practitioners will find in this book the knowledge that is necessary to comprehend and engage with the many urban experiments that are now alive, ready to leave the laboratory and enter our cities.

El verde en sí no es un color, sino una mezcla de azul y amarillo. No obstante, los colores tienen fronteras subjetivas y el punto en el que consideramos que un azul pasa a ser verde o un verde amarillo depende en gran medida de la cultura, del lenguaje del observador y de su contexto. Cuando en 1969 los antropólogos Brent Berlin y Paul Kay se referían a la relatividad de los colores en las diferentes culturas, descubrieron que aunque casi siempre hay un vocablo para ‘verde’, no puede decirse lo mismo del azul.

1. Contexto: Crisis socio-ecológica global
2. La definición performativa del Territorio occidental moderno
3. Funciones de las infraestructuras territoriales en el modelo predatorio moderno
4. Soluciones tecnocráticas para la organización del espacio urbano y de los transportes
5. Alternativas de transporte “low-tech” y “low-cost” para la transición ecológica y solidaria
6. La infraestructura pedestre: una inversión prioritaria para la movilidad en la transición urbana

During the immediate aftermath of the German invasion in Belgium in 1914, Belgian architectural and landscape professionals organized themselves in unoccupied countries to structure a common agenda to rebuild Belgium. During this exile period, Louis van der Swaelmen, a landscape architect and self-proclaimed urban planner, wrote a book on the reconstruction of his home country, linking the rebirth of Belgium to the development of a so-called sociobiolo- gical urbanization theory. In this book, van der Swaelmen proposed to develop a practice of urban planning based both on an objective and scientific survey method, and on a harmonious integration of the natural and man-made environment. By designing some garden cities around Brussels in the 1920s, he tested his theoretical framework, interlinking its spatial layout with the existing topography. today, in the wake of an environmental crisis where landscape architects again envision a central role for themselves, these disciplinary questions resurface on the research agenda. this article therefore digs deeper into the issue of adopting biological methods and metaphors in landscape architecture by analyzing how this sociobiolo- gical theory was developed. By retracing the influences of biological work onto his design practice, it defines what it means to work with a biologically-based urbanism, and reframes some key question in ecology, urbanism and landscape architecture today.

Bien avant la prise en compte des rapports entre l’injustice écologique et l’injustice sociale par la pensée anglo-saxonne, ces deux formes d’injustice avaient été pensées par Karl Marx. Le point de départ de l’écologie de Marx est sa thèse d’une « rupture métabolique » entre l’homme et la nature, c’est-à-dire le non-retour aux sols agricoles des résidus de produits consommés en ville. A partir de l’exemple des eaux usées, cet article suit les tentatives récentes de quelques écologistes américains, notamment Barry Commoner (1971) et John Todd (1993), de traiter la question de la rupture métabolique. L’argument avancé est qu’une logique d’inspiration heideggérienne – que nous nommons « poiein poïesis » – pourrait aider à surmonter la forme particulière que prend la rupture métabolique à l’époque de la société post-industrielle de consommation, ainsi que les injustices écologiques et sociales qui lui sont associées. Cette logique de poiein poïesis ne consiste ni à dissoudre la distinction entre la ville et la campagne (comme chez Marx), ni à laisser intacte, voire même à la renforcer (comme chez Commoner), mais plutôt à « faire émerger » la production naturelle et technique dans l’espace publique et politique qu’est la ville, tissant ainsi de nouveaux liens entre la ville et la campagne.