Creating Built Environments

Bridging Knowledge and Practice Divides

Roderick Lawrence

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781351201650
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Built environments are complex, emergent, systemic, and require contextual analysis. They should be understood before reconsidering how professionals and researchers of the built environment are educated and trained to reduce the gap between knowledge, practice and real-world circumstances. There is an urgent need to rethink the role of policy makers, researchers, practitioners and laypeople in the construction, renovation and reuse of the built environment in order to deal with numerous environmental/ecological, economic/financial and social/ethical challenges of providing a habitat for current and future generations in a world of continual change. These challenges are too complex to be dealt with only by one discipline or profession. Combinations of different types of knowledge, knowing in praxis and tacit knowledge are needed.

This book presents and illustrates recent innovative contributions with case studies focusing on five strategic domains and the interrelations between them. These transdisciplinary contributions apply concepts, methods and tools that facilitate convergence and concerted action between participants collaborating in policy definition and project implementation. The methods and tools include experiments in living-labs, prototypes on site and virtual simulations, as well as participatory approaches including citizen science, the development of alternative scenarios, and visioning plausible futures.

PART I

Strategic Domains

1

Constructing With Nature in Mind

Introduction

All buildings and infrastructure are created using cognitive structures, individual and group behaviour, and social conventions and rules that are transmitted across generations. The construction of buildings, neighbourhoods, and cities is a cultural act.¹ Built environments are significant societal achievements that rely on collective decisions, numerous resources, technology, and visions about the way people live. Throughout human history, shared beliefs, prescriptions, and religious practices were meant to ensure a harmonious relation between the cosmos (the universe) and anthropos (human society). Collective beliefs, non-monetary values, rituals, and myths are expressions of social- and place-identities. They are meant to ensure ontological security. Given that threats of drought, famine, floods, and landslides have never been fully controlled by scientific knowledge or technological innovation, symbolic culture traits are still used in contemporary societies to alleviate anxieties about these kinds of threats.

Unfortunately, practitioners and policy makers rarely address the fundamental metaphysical nature of built environments as human-made places. They have anchored their work in normative frameworks, dominant power structures, and rationalized systems of public administration described by Richard Williams (2019). These societal conditions have changed planning and constructing built environments from interventions for innovation and radical change, to technocratic procedures for piecemeal, incremental change. In contrast, built environment practitioners can contribute creatively to maintaining or challenging the status quo, and promoting health and well-being. We propose that land-use planning, building construction and landscaping, and the conservation of natural ecosystems, should be reinterpreted as societal processes that require using different types of knowledge and know-how by concerted action between practitioners, policy makers, scientists and lay-people.

Since 2000, ‘nature-based’ architecture and urban planning, especially green building design and urban infrastructure, have been proposed to counteract polluted air, soil, and water, to convert industrial sites, and to promote health and well-being (Tan, 2017). Urban built environments and lifestyles are considered to be unnatural and ‘nature-based solutions’ are meant to improve ambient urban conditions, thus reducing risks to health and well-being. Cities and neighbourhoods are being ‘re-naturalized’, or embedded in vegetation (Winkless, 2016). There are two dominant approaches. The first involves the provision of ‘green buildings’ and urban parks irrespective of energy and water consumption and their financial costs (Zhang et al., 2017). Planted vertical gardens, pocket gardens, or public parks, are human-made objects that cannot always provide an oasis, or a retreat to the purity of nature. In addition, building interiors are inseparable from ambient outdoor conditions, despite the assertions of innovative construction technologies. Hence, false claims and illusions maintain that scientific and technological innovations in the building construction sector can provide improved living conditions detached from the ambient conditions of their surroundings.

The second approach is grounded in principles derived from biological science that considers the web of relations linking constituents of natural ecosystems. This systemic approach has been used to interpret cities and urban regions as metabolisms with the provision of infrastructure and services to supply all that is required to sustain human populations. In particular, supplies of food, energy, and water, are quantified by materials flows analysis. Applying principles of industrial ecology and a circular economy require relational thinking (Stahel, 2016). Another application is the calculation of ecological footprints: Urban areas occupy large surfaces of land, but their ecological footprints (e.g. the quantity of resources needed to sustain them and assimilate all their wastes) exceed these surface areas many times and have significant impacts on hinterlands (Seitzinger et al., 2012). This global phenomenon confirms that cities are resource intensive: Built environments and urban development processes occupy only about 2–3% of the land surface of the World whereas they use about 75% of all resources consumed globally (Harrison et al., 2000). Since 2000, the ecological, economic, health and other consequences of the attributes of natural and built ecosystems have been analysed using the concepts of ecosystem services and co-benefits (Elmqvist et al., 2013). These concepts are discussed in this book.

This chapter presents core ideas and principles applied over several generations to interpret relationships between built environments and nature. Relations between culture and nature have commonly been interpreted by analogies used to describe buildings and cities. Urban history and theory have focused on the dichotomy between culture-nature, city-country, and urban-rural, often applying an anthropocentric worldview that stresses the differences and disconnections between human-made and natural environments, between cities and the hinterlands. This dichotomy has been challenged because, alone, the rural hinterlands of cities could not sustain the rapid demographic and economic growth of cities during the last century. Today networks of cities and their commercial markets have expanded around the world creating a global commercial and economic system that transgresses geo-political boundaries.

This chapter presents a different interpretation founded on core principles of human ecology. These principles emphasize the interrelations between the abiotic, biotic and anthropo-logic of ecosystems across several geo-political levels, extending from local to international (see Chapter 6). This approach is illustrated in this chapter by the contribution of Arthur Dahl (1996). His contribution combines different types of knowledge with fundamental values of different human groups. Human ecology principles include co-action and symbiotic interrelations between components of human and natural ecosystems (Boyden, 1992; Lawrence, 2001). They also refer to ecosystem services and their co-benefits for health and quality of life. Ethical principles are also fundamentally important. We propose that the dichotomy between culture-nature, city-country, and urban-rural can be bridged by reconsidering the intrinsic characteristics, meanings and values of ecosystems at the same time as their utility function for human life and well-being.

Important advances in understanding the mutual interactions between human-made and natural ecosystems have been published; for example, the United Nations 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development provides a coherent framework for rethinking these fundamental issues in the context of rapid urban development (United Nations, 2015). The contribution of built environments in these processes is not neutral. Policy makers, practitioners and researchers can actively contribute to promoting ecologically responsible, socially just, and financially viable buildings and infrastructure for current and future generations.

This chapter includes some innovative projects that can serve as beacons for change. The first is the case of Cheonggyecheon Regeneration Project, in Seoul, completed between 2003 and 2008 (Seoul Museum of History, 2011). This is a recent example of remedial and corrective measures applied in urban planning to improve the functions of urban ecosystems by reducing negative outcomes of city planning in the 1960s and 1970s. The example is included because it was founded on a strong political vision for this central district in Seoul. In addition, the outcomes have been monitored systematically. Results include numerous collateral benefits for local environmental conditions (including air quality and local climatic conditions); traffic circulation and improved mobility of vehicles and public transport services; increased pedestrian circulation and safety in public spaces; increased property values in the district; and lower risk factors for health and well-being of citizens. These co-benefits confirm the pertinence of intersectoral convergence and collaboration.

The second example is the recent Jade Eco Park, in Taichung, Taiwan. This innovative project, the result of an international competition, created land forms, vegetation, and innovative infrastructure to construct and maintain several micro-climatic zones in the park so that visitors experience different zones in the framework of climate change and its impacts on urban ecosystems. This example illustrates how creative thinking can interpret climate change as an opportunity for innovative architecture, engineering, landscape and urban planning, rather than as a constraint. This conceptual shift required a reorientation from focusing on visual and functional designs to a sensitive understanding of how climate variables influence the layout and uses of public spaces. The content of this park highlights symbiosis between culture-nature interrelations. The didactic function of this park in the second largest city in Taiwan is innovative and, by scaling up it, can have far-reaching influences beyond Taichung.

The third example describes the coordinated and strategic vision of land-use planning in Singapore, known today as a ‘green’ and ‘smart’ city-state. The development of Singapore illustrates the important role of planning and constructing built environments in conjunction with conserving natural ecosystems, and enabling property developers to construct high-density built environments (Tan et al., 2013). This is fundamentally important given the debate about densification, suburban development, access to public green spaces, and the conservation of arable land and forests on the outskirts of cities around the world.

These three examples show the role and contribution of symbiotic relations between built and natural environments to meet the targets of the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs), especially SDG 11, which aims to ‘make cities and human settlements inclusive, safe, resilient and sustainable’; and SDG 15 which aims to ‘protect, restore and promote sustainable use of terrestrial ecosystems, sustainably manage forests, combat desertification, and halt and reverse land degradation and halt biodiversity loss’. If built environment practitioners and researchers want to contribute professionally to implementing the SDGs, they should reconsider their interpretation and applications of key concepts and principles of sustainability, including necessary tradeoffs between environmental, economic, ethical, political and other societal dimensions of built environments and infrastructure (see Nilsson et al., 2018). These considerations require relational thinking and process-oriented applications that we consider have not been given the attention they merit in the field of built environments.

Nature and Built Environments

This section discusses different ideas and conceptual frameworks used by researchers and practitioners to interpret relationships between nature and built environments. It begins by describing how analogies and metaphors are commonly used to interpret...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Endorsements
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Foreword
• Preface
• Acknowledgements
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• PART I Strategic Domains
• PART II Conceptual and Methodological Foundations
• Postface
• Weblinks Index
• General Index