The Urban Environment has developed over the centuries into a complex machine to host human beings and their activities, actively excluding external factors that disturb anthropogenic activities. Part of this process consists of excluding “nature” (with the exception of a few selected species) from cities. Today a new consciousness of the effects of anthropogenic activities on our planet and the regulating properties of nature is causing us to reconsider the introduction of nature in cities. A discussion has begun in recent years on the process of rethinking cities as environments which can encourage multispecies co-existence and collaboration. Studies performed in different fields such as biology, ecology, urbanism and design agree that emphasizing the agency of life-forms and their ability to set goals may foster local and global sustainability. The example of natural ecological systems reveals that mutualistic attitudes between living beings help to shape their ecosystems, making them stronger, longer-lived and more resilient. Which methodologies and tools can we use to foster mutualistic multispecies attitudes in cities that are designed to exclude nature? The integration of nature in cities requires thinking beyond inherited categories and capacities as today co-existence and collaboration are mainly conceived and planned for a single spaice environment. The development of cities designed for multispecies habitation requires imagining environments able to attract and host different living organisms, which can foster dynamic processes of exchange. This session aims to widen the debate on Nature Based Solutions, a debate which usually focuses on plants and the ecosystem services that they provide from a human centred perspective, instead embracing a broader vision that takes all living beings equally into consideration (human, flora, fauna, microbiota), their encounters, contamination, collaboration and evolution-enhancing resilience. We welcome papers, projects and case studies by academics and practitioners, from different fields (architecture, ecology, botany, social sciences, etc.) focussing on the following questions: Which innovative methodologies and tools can most help us integrate living systems in urban environments? How can we foster mutualistic attitudes, enhancing urban resilience? Can we build the cities of the future through unexpected collaborations and combinations?
Centres to human life, cities represent the main threat to fine ecological balances, but are also responsible at multiple levels for the health of citizens. Metropolitan areas are therefore key in addressing such issues to maintain the wellbeing of all living things. To this end, concepts like renaturing and rewilding offer an unprecedented challenge for designers: to approach landscape under a dynamic, collective, multidisciplinary and multiscalar perspective. These frameworks have the potential to empower designers to engage with nature as an active partner, through a set of new elements to understand, represent and create landscapes. In doing so, they reconsider the polarisation between ecological forces and anthropocentric ones, providing an opportunity to consciously design for, and within, climate change adaptation.
The paper discusses an experimental methodology for design and planning processes that detect and amplify potential and beneficial ecological connections within urban areas, towards their transition into life centred sustainable cities. It embraces the complexity of life in cities and their surrounding territories at multiple scales of analysis, and identifies site-specific major drivers to support this process. The proposed data-driven methodology uses computational logics exploited in environmental studies to foresee ecological patterns and include nature based solutions as drivers to the design process. The methodology has been approached from three main perspectives:
- Fostering key-stone species as drivers for ecological connectivity: exploiting ecological connectivity analysis - computed through the open source Circuitscape application - to overcome territorial fragmentation and identify ecologically relevant areas and corridors to support through design and citizen engagement, and in partnership with keystone species (insect pollinators, beavers, and bats);
- Simulating flooding dynamics to design river renaturalisation: embedding dynamic complexity into hydrological simulations to study the behaviour of rivers in order to design and introduce new topographies within the riverbed integrating nature based solutions, necessary to tackle pollution as well as to reduce soil erosion and improve biodiversity; finally allowing the river ecosystem to thrive holistically;
- Enabling life centred and inclusive urban development through network analysis: understanding the micro mobility patterns of specific communities, through network analysis, to design low impact but highly connected urban systems through toolboxes for citizen engagement enabling the ecological transition of identified urban areas.
The paper collects two years of experimentation in Barcelona, London and Luxembourg, providing an overview on viable approaches for designers to effectively and dynamically design with nature as an active partner for the ecological transition of urban areas. We exploit data relative to context specific ecological actors, performances and environments to frame the effectiveness of their ecological networks, and combine this with the physical properties of specific metropolitan environments. This allows us to evaluate design solutions and identify relevant pathways for ecology to holistically thrive, as well as enabling toolboxes for citizens to activate this process. This consequently provides the methodological basis and a viable approach for designers to effectively, dynamically and systemically design with ecology for ecological transition towards connected living environments, also offering a multi contextual benchmark for the comparison of sustainability-related assessment methodologies and their related design strategies.
This paper presents the development of an efficient software for managing, visualizing, analyzing, and integrating different datasets that are referred to as the Observatory platform to serve the co-creation of NBS to reach sustainable cities. The study imparts a methodological approach for designing and developing a digital platform in multidisciplinary and participatory NBS projects with several partners such as research institutions and municipalities. The digital Observatory platform operates data management and provides tools to the stakeholders of the project in both web-accessible and application programming interfaces. The platform is based on the use of open software to enable co-creation by giving the stakeholder the possibility to shape their cities. Furthermore, the platform preserves data privacy by introducing different levels of accessibility so that not only can open public data be shared but also private data can be accessed by users respecting levels of accessibility and permissions. In general, data are essential for these innovative platforms and systems, being the specific datasets of paramount importance for urban regeneration projects. The methodology comprises steps to achieve this vision; 1) to take stock of all existing information and available tools of data collection in the intervention cities 2) to harvest, combine and map data and provide tools to introduce more user-friendly features, opening up the possibility for citizens to make use of city data 3) to contribute to the establishment of a Community of Practice for knowledge exchange between citizens, city administrators, and project partners, to play as a virtual research hub for all the stakeholders, a cyberinfrastructure for data population, look-up, discovery, data fusion, and analysis, as an internal environment for sharing and creating in-progress data collection serving monitoring and evaluation of the Nature-Based solutions in the study areas. We proposed an approach to building a data platform based on the Integration of multiple open-source software, distributed systems, and the semantic web. Long-term term sustainability and maintainability of a system is a serious concern for many institutions and projects. It is customary for several proprietary soft- ware systems and services that are not supported anymore or discontinued. Therefore the choice of using open source software and integrating them into a component-based architecture to reach a single coherent system was very vital and significant for this research project. The proposed architecture increased the functionalities and paved the way for flexibility and scalability in robust and long-term maintenance. This approach avoids complexity and possible shotgun surgery anti-pattern by component-based architecture, facades, and middleware that could improve maintainability. Summarizing the main achievements from this research are integrating open-source software to build a collaborative data platform to meet advanced supporting queries, underpinning knowledge and experience sharing throughout a digital environment, and tackling maintainability and scalability issues in the long term.
References
1-C. Yang, Q. Huang, Z. Li, K. Liu, F. Hu Big Data and Cloud Computing: Innovation opportunities and challenges International Journal of Digital Earth (2016)
2- A.B.Chan,Z.-S.J.Liang,N.Vasconcelos, Privacy-preserving crowd monitoring: counting people without people models or tracking, in (2008) IEEE Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition, IEEE, pp. 1–7.
3- H. Shen, L. Huang, L. Zhang, P. Wu, C. Zeng, Long-term and fine-scale satellite monitoring of the urban heat island effect by the fusion of multi-temporal and multi-sensor remote sensed data: a 26-year case study of the city of Wuhan in China, Remote Sens. Environ. 172 (2016) 109–125.
2022 marks the 50th anniversary of the Stockholm Declaration on the Human Environment (UN, 1972) and the Convention Concerning the Protection of the World Cultural and Natural Heritage (UNESCO, 1972). Both documents are historical milestones in the ways of understanding the desirable safeguarding and improvement of the quality of life on Earth, a worldwide problem for humankind.
Considering that climate change and its consequences now constitute a pressing and increasing threat to Cultural Heritage all over the World, in 2020 at its General Assembly under the leadership of the "Climate Change and Heritage Working Group" (CCHWG), the International Council on Monuments and Sites (ICOMOS) declared a Climate and Ecological Emergency.
Does the ongoing urgency for concrete action in face of climate change risks, led to an integration of both visions, environment and heritage conservation?
The aim of this article is to present a critical analysis of Declarations, Conventions, Charters, Reports or other documents of international scope that have followed these milestones over the last 50 years, looking for any convergences that may exist between those dealing with the safeguarding of Cultural Heritage, on one hand, and those dealing with the conservation of the Biosphere, on the other.
Analysing these documents, it is possible to observe that they report the increasingly evidence of the anthropogenic climate change harmful consequences. Warnings are being reiterated about growing pollution, particularly that related to greenhouse gases (GHG) and to oceans. Concurrently, given the constant global increase in temperature, the decrease in biodiversity, the depletion of natural resources essential to life and the quality degradation of landscapes, the call for all countries and stakeholders action in collaborative partnership is strengthened.
A global plan of action in areas of critical importance for humanity and the planet is launched in 2015 – "Transforming our world: the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development". The 17 Sustainable Development Goals and 169 targets balance the three dimensions of sustainable development: economic, social and environmental. Same year, the Paris Agreement is approved, reinforcing, beyond institutional commitments, the importance and urgency of the local communities’ active participation and of each person engagement in climate action.
The reading also reveals that the search for answers to the global problem of safeguarding life and improving the quality of life of all persons and communities has improved the understanding and demand for a holistic, multi-sectoral, transdisciplinary and collaborative approach, integrating scientific and technical knowledge in an interdependent manner, as well as both traditional knowledge and local knowledge systems.
In this framework, Cultural and Natural Heritage can not only be a driver to respond faster to the implementation of adaptation and mitigation measures facing climate change, but it can also inspire methodologies and provide tools, as a palette of Nature-Based Solutions at the community's disposal for the sustainable transformation of the city.
References:
ICOMOS, 2020
https://www.icomos.org/images/DOCUMENTS/Secretariat/2020/Cultural_Heritage_and_the_Climate_Emergency-Resolution_20GA_15_.pdf
UN, 1972
https://www.un.org/en/conferences/environment/stockholm1972
UN, 1987
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/5987our-common-future.pdf
UN, 1992
https://www.un.org/en/conferences/environment/rio1992
UN, 1992-Agenda-21
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/Agenda21.pdf
UN, 1992-Rio-Declaration
https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/1709riodeclarationeng.pdf
UN, 1992-United-Nations-Framework-Convention-on-Climate-Change
https://unfccc.int/process-and-meetings/the-convention/what-is-the-united-nations-framework-convention-on-climate-change
UN, 1992-Convention-on-Biological-Diversity
https://www.cbd.int/convention/text/
UN, 2015
https://www.un.org/en/conferences/environment/newyork2015
UN, 2015-Agenda-2030
https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/UNDOC/GEN/N15/291/89/PDF/N1529189.pdf?OpenElement
UN, 2015-Paris-Agreement
https://unfccc.int/files/essential_background/convention/application/pdf/english_paris_agreement.pdf
UNESCO, 1972-Convention-Concerning-the-Protection-of-the-World-Cultural-and-Natural-Heritage
https://whc.unesco.org/en/conventiontext/
Keywords: Sustainable Built Environment / Landscape and Architectural Heritage / Sustainable Development Goals (SDGS) / Climate Action/ Global Environmental Action.