Nature and Cities: Urban Ecological Design and Planning (review)

This seminal event, introduced under the headline With half the world’s population now living in urban regions, the future of cities is arguably the most important social and environmental issue of the twenty-first century, comprised fifteen 45-minute presentations delivered over two days by sixteen experts recognized as scholars in the fields of planning and design. The Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and The University of Texas at Austin (UT) co-organized the event.

The first day was staged in a conference center on the UT campus, an absolute urban setting in contrast to the second day at Lady Bird Johnson Wildflower Center, a fusion of nature and cities. Frederick Steiner, Dean of the UT School of Architecture, facilitated and hosted the entire event, moving from speaker to speaker in his appealingly informal storytelling style. Steiner called the speakers the “Dream Team” (see photo), giving a distinctive international flavor to the event. The speakers’ backgrounds—based on college education alone—included Australia, Canada, China, England, Italy, Nigeria, the United States, and Venezuela. The audience came from across the United States, including Georgia, Florida, Hawai’i, Utah, Wisconsin, and Texas, together with a group of attendees from Manitoba, Canada.

Steiner welcomed the audience with a story from 1993, when he and George Thompson “pulled together the leading established scholars and young ‘Turks’ in ecological design and planning for a conference in Tempe, Arizona, to celebrate the establishment of the Landscape Architecture Program at Arizona State University.” That conference led to Ecological Design and Planning (Wiley, 1997), an influential book still in print. This year’s Nature and Cities symposium will also produce a book that captures fresh perspectives from speakers at this symposium.

Opening speaker Forster Ndubisi, of Texas A&M University at College Station, talked about Adaptive and Regenerative Urban Places: A Pathway, challenging the audience as to whether a landscape can be simultaneously resilient, stable, and beautiful. He advocated for the design of “regional-cities,” implementation of an integrated design-management approach, and an adoption of ecosystem services as a basis of design, with a required ongoing assessment of a landscape’s performance. Ndubisi’s encompassing message set the tone for the symposium. Anne Whiston Spirn of MIT followed with a presentation entitled Thirty Years after the Granite Garden: [her 1985 book] Where Do We Stand? Spirn summarized what is new in the field, including a revolution of visualization, social media, climate change, a wealth of nature and cities articles, a flood of “green” city publications, and a host of projects all over the world. She urged listeners to contribute to a clearinghouse of models of best practice.

Carol Franklin and José Almiñana of Andropogon gave the joint lecture Creative Fitting: Towards Designing Cities as Nature, illustrating the practical experience that helped them unravel Ian McHarg’s ground-breaking theory of creative fitting. Richard Weller of the University of Pennsylvania addressed the symposium via an iPad, offering a broad historical overview, weaving authorities such as Adam Smith, Charles Darwin, Albert Einstein, and Isaac Newton into the fabric of natural urban design. He concluded by encouraging us to see “City as Nature.”

Susannah Drake of Dlandstudio in Brooklyn, addressing WPA 2.0: Beauty, Economics, Politics, Ecology, and Creation of 21st Century Public Infrastructure, melded the concepts of politics, design, renovation, and landscape use. She reviewed the changing U.S. national infrastructure over the past 400 years and ended her lecture with a video of her firm’s winning proposal for Montréal transit whereby ‘infra-sutures’ would ‘restitch’ what she termed the city’s divided, buried, fragmented, wounded landscapes. Tim Beatley from the University of Virginia presented Biophilic Cities + Blue Urbanism, arguing the need for biophilic cities that take into account the emotional affiliation of human beings with nature. He explained the qualities of biophilic cities and ‘blue urbanism’—a concept of integrating aquatic and...