This book discusses the way that a nature-driven approach to urbanism can be applied at each of the urban scales; architectural design, urban design of neighborhoods, city planning and landscape architecture, and at the city and regional scales. At all levels nature-driven approaches to design and planning add to the quality of the built structure and furthermore to the quality of life experienced by people living in these environments. To include nature and greening to built structures is a good starting point and can add much value. The chapter authors have fiducia in giving nature a fundamental role as an integrated network in city design, or to make nature the entrance point of the design process, and base the design on the needs and qualities of nature itself. The highest existence of nature is a permanent ecosystem which endures stressors and circumstances for a prolonged period. In an urban context this is not always possible and temporality is an interesting concept explored when nature is not a permanent feature. The ecological contribution to the environment, and indirect dispersion of species, from a temporary location will, overall add biodiversity to the entire system.
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This article discusses the question: where to with sustainable urbanism? It includes a historic review of the concept of sustainable urbanism and reviews of recent literature in the field of eco-cities. Through these reviews, it deliberately interrogates new pathways for sustainable urbanism. The result of this investigation is the insight that there are six design principles that are required to create a sustainable city: a design in which cycles are closed, redundancy is built in, anti-fragility is created, citizens are seen as (design) experts, the landscape is used as the basis, and innovative, rule-breaking designs are developed. These six design principles are then captured in three comprehensive concepts, which together support the design of a sustainable city: the design approach needs to be a (1) society-based; (2) complexity-led, and (3) landscape-driven design approach.
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This chapter explores the use of “responsive” or “interactive” urban media technologies as a tool or “building block” in the (re)design of urban public spaces. This is especially relevant as in the last two decades, urban development and digital technologies have brought out new types of urban typologies and practices often referred to as “networked urbanism.” These typologies and practices bring out specific challenges with regard to their functioning as public space. We argue that responsive technologies could reinforce qualities of public space in this condition of “networked urbanism”; however, their implementation demands new strategies and above all new forms of cooperation between disciplines such as architecture, urban design, and urban interaction design. To aid such an approach, this chapter introduces a heuristic of five mechanisms of responsive media. These are meant to function as a shared vocabulary aiding designers of various backgrounds to collaborate in an interdisciplinary design process for public spaces in a broader development of networked urbanism.
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Current urban design and urban planning aim to facilitate global, regional and local urbanization programs. This implies most of the planning documents give room to the types of land use that seem to require space ‘here and now’. The amount of new housing, office and other industrial and commercial space, accompanying amounts of parking lots and the necessity of new transportation routes, infrastructure and corridors are the main topics in the majority of future oriented plans. This is what is called ‘fast urbanism’ ((Roggema, R., Special Issue Urban Planning 6:946-956, October 2015)). It is the natural preferred habit of planners, decision-makers and politicians, and many developers, economists and municipal land departments. It seems as if this way of future planning brings the highest revenues, and this may be true, on the short term and for only a limited part of involved groups in the city. The impact of this way of planning the city has negative consequences for our health in general (see Roggema, this volume, Chap. 5; Han and Keeffe, this volume, Chap. 4; Monti, this volume, Chap. 11), and more specifically the quality of nature and biodiversity in our urban and natural environments (Birtles, this volume, Chap. 10; Tillie, this volume, Chap. 6; Monti, this volume, Chap. 11; Backes et al., this volume, Chap. 3; Sijmons, this volume, Chap. 2). One way of coping with the effects is to ‘repair’ the damage after the city has been built. Aiming to increase the quality of small green spaces (Veldman, this volume, Chap. 13; Casagrande, this volume, Chap. 7), add temporary nature (Backes et al., this volume, Chap. 3), or greening buildings (Bosse, this volume, Chap. 15), could help to prevent the largest impacts of fast urbanism. However, this will always be a solution that repairs, or greenwashes urbanization that has neglected the natural systems in the first place
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The surge of smart city technology, thinking, publications and consultancy offerings is significant. This implies there is something seriously developing. But to what extent is this a new development? In this paper the case will be made that urban design has always had to include new technologies and the smart city movement is just another wave of technology that demands inclusion in urban design practice. Nevertheless, city designers and policy makers should make use of the new possibilities on offering. Interactive urban environments could support healthy living, while smart and responsive regulators could minimize our energy use, and anticipative traffic management could help minimising congestion. Further to this, crowd-sensing could smoothen urban mobility and new forms of 3d-printing may re-use and reduce waste. The core of all new technological potential however is still to service people and to make life for urban citizens better. How could people in search for a convenient life be better serviced? Many of them want to have a nice house, a clean, safe and healthy environment, access to resources such as clean water, renewable energy and healthy food, a resilient place that is not vulnerable for all kinds of climate impacts and possibly some room for contemplation. With Maslow’s ladder in mind, achieving this not only depends on the availability and use of technology, rather a well-designed and integrated urban plan is asked for. Meeting the needs of contemporary urban citizens must be served by what urban design is supposed to deliver, only now with current available technologies in the back pocket. The paper emphasises how to design the convenient city by making use of the available technology, but it also takes a stand on the relativity of the current hype of smart cities.
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In this chapter we move back in time, to when it was not an usance to base our city designs on the natural systems of water and ecology. By the end of the 1980s the dogma of separation of functions, and dividing the city in areas for working, living, leisure and traffic was slowly abandoned and especially the focus on the traffic system, more in particular the car, was leading to uproar. In this timeframe an alternative to apply the principles of nature in urban design was very new and, in the beginning, needed to be conquered on the traditionalists who would pertain using their old-school design standards. In this chapter the development story of Westerpark, and Heilaar-Steenakker is presented. This area in the western outskirts of the city of Breda, in the south of the Netherlands, was one of the first, maybe even the first to use knowledge about the water system, ecological typologies and nature as the basis for urban planning. This article starts with a description in sections two and three of the policy context at national level to illustrate the momentum of change from rationalism towards ecological planning. In section four the policy context in Breda in the early nineties is presented as the context within which the planning of Heilaar-Steenakker (Sect. 8.5) and Westerpark (Sect. 8.6) could be based in a strong sense of the natural processes of ecology and water that formed the landscape in history.
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Does our knowledge about city and urban planning have solid ground? Can historical research promote creative thinking? How can we theorise about urban design and architecture in our age of the media? These questions have guided the creation of this multi-layered, richly documented and illustrated triptych, in which the Dutch architectural theorist Wim Nijenhuis pursues a creative goal: to stimulate new ways of thinking in architectural culture.Each part of the triptych treats distinctive issues with a particular style of writing:I – a treatise on urban history. Using the archaeological-genealogical toolkit Nijenhuis reveals the difference between urbanistic discourse in the modern and the classical age; the first staging the street and public space, the latter adhering to representation and mathematical order. In great detail he shows how modern urbanism did not emerge from idealistic motives and technical urgencies, but from an accidental mix of medical, engineering and aesthetical parlances, and how classical thinking on the city dissociated from Renaissance by an intertwining of military science, political science, anthropology and ethics.II – a bundle of essays about the condition of the city in our media age. In strikingly composed texts the author prophesies how rapid traffic and transmission speed of media will distort the perception of our real cities. This gradual event will profoundly influence the cultural role of architecture.III – a set of meditations about epistemological problems. Questioning the practice of critical writing, Nijenhuis proposes change of subjectivity (and thereby worldview), ethical indifference, parody, curative mythomania and hypermodern dilettantism.The book is composed as a cloud essay that serves to enrich the reader’s theoretical understanding of urban interventions. Dialoguing with philosophers like Bataille, Deleuze, Foucault, Klossowski, Sloterdijk and Virilio, Nijenhuis covers multiple disciplines such as urbanism, architecture, history, media science, philosophy and art. Stretching urbanistic thinking beyond its limits he carries the reader along into the miraculous world of the street, the engineer, the norm, the form, order, fortresses, discipline, army camps, city frontiers, the Temple of Salomon, the quest for beauty, the ‘impressiveness’ of images, speed, the tragedy of the omnipolis, solidification of time, and the liquidising potency of apocalypticism and Taoist non-action.The Riddle of the Real City testifies to four experimental exercises: transitory subjectivism to reveal hidden dimensions of the person, transhistorical verticality to communicate with singular events from the past, theory as toolkit and pursuing a personal path in reading and investigation.
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Short clip as result of research week FreshBrains Bonn.
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In the debate about smart cities, an alternative to a dominant top-down, tech-driven solutionist approach has arisen in examples of ‘civic hacking’. Hacking here refers to the playful, exploratory, collaborative and sometimes transgressive modes of operation found in various hacker cultures, this time constructively applied in the context of civics. It suggests a novel logic to organise urban society through social and digital media platforms, moving away from centralised urban planning towards a more inclusive process of city-making, creating new types of public spaces. This book takes this urban imaginary of a hackable city seriously, using hacking as a lens to explore examples of collaborative city-making enabled by digital media technologies. Five different perspectives are discussed. Hacking can be understood as (1) an ethos, a particular articulation of citizenship in the network era; (2) as a set of iterative and collaborative city-making practices, bringing out new roles and relations between citizens, (design) professionals and institutional actors; (3) a set of affordances of institutional structures that allow or discourage their appropriation; (4) a critical lens to bring in notions of democratic governance, power struggles and conflict of interests into the debate on collaborative city-making; and (5) a point of departure for action research. After a discussion of these themes, the various chapters in the book are briefly introduced. Taken together they contribute to a wider debate about practices of technology-enabled collaborative city-making, and the question how city hacking may mature from the tactical level of smart and often playful interventions to a strategic level of enduring impact.
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