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Urban design is an approach to the design of buildings and the spaces between them that focuses on specific design processes and outcomes. In addition to designing and shaping the physical features of towns, cities, and regional spaces, urban design considers 'bigger picture' issues of economic, social and environmental value and social design. The scope of a project can range from a local street or public space to an entire city and surrounding areas. Urban designers connect the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and urban planning to better organize physical space and community environments.
Exaptation and the related term co-option describe a shift in the function of a trait during evolution. For example, a trait can evolve because it served one particular function, but subsequently it may come to serve another. Exaptations are common in both anatomy and behaviour.
Sustainable urban infrastructure expands on the concept of urban infrastructure by adding the sustainability element with the expectation of improved and more resilient urban development. In the construction and physical and organizational structures that enable cities to function, sustainability also aims to meet the needs of the present generation without compromising the capabilities of the future generations.
Psychological resilience is the ability to cope mentally and emotionally with a crisis, or to return to pre-crisis status quickly.
A sustainable city, eco-city, or green city is a city designed with consideration for social, economic, environmental impact, and resilient habitat for existing populations, without compromising the ability of future generations to experience the same. The UN Sustainable Development Goal 11 defines sustainable cities as those that are dedicated to achieving green sustainability, social sustainability and economic sustainability. They are committed to doing so by enabling opportunities for all through a design focused on inclusivity as well as maintaining a sustainable economic growth. The focus will also includes minimizing required inputs of energy, water, and food, and drastically reducing waste, output of heat, air pollution – CO2, methane, and water pollution. Richard Register, a visual artist, first coined the term ecocity in his 1987 book Ecocity Berkeley: Building Cities for a Healthy Future, where he offers innovative city planning solutions that would work anywhere. Other leading figures who envisioned sustainable cities are architect Paul F Downton, who later founded the company Ecopolis Pty Ltd, as well as authors Timothy Beatley and Steffen Lehmann, who have written extensively on the subject. The field of industrial ecology is sometimes used in planning these cities.
Green infrastructure or blue-green infrastructure refers to a network that provides the “ingredients” for solving urban and climatic challenges by building with nature. The main components of this approach include stormwater management, climate adaptation, the reduction of heat stress, increasing biodiversity, food production, better air quality, sustainable energy production, clean water, and healthy soils, as well as more anthropocentric functions, such as increased quality of life through recreation and the provision of shade and shelter in and around towns and cities. Green infrastructure also serves to provide an ecological framework for social, economic, and environmental health of the surroundings. More recently scholars and activists have also called for green infrastructure that promotes social inclusion and equity rather than reinforcing pre-existing structures of unequal access to nature-based services.
In ecology, resilience is the capacity of an ecosystem to respond to a perturbation or disturbance by resisting damage and subsequently recovering. Such perturbations and disturbances can include stochastic events such as fires, flooding, windstorms, insect population explosions, and human activities such as deforestation, fracking of the ground for oil extraction, pesticide sprayed in soil, and the introduction of exotic plant or animal species. Disturbances of sufficient magnitude or duration can profoundly affect an ecosystem and may force an ecosystem to reach a threshold beyond which a different regime of processes and structures predominates. When such thresholds are associated with a critical or bifurcation point, these regime shifts may also be referred to as critical transitions.
Regenerative design is an approach to designing systems or solutions that aims to work with or mimic natural ecosystem processes for returning energy from less usable to more usable forms. Regenerative design uses whole systems thinking to create resilient and equitable systems that integrate the needs of society with the integrity of nature. Regenerative design is an active topic of discussion in engineering, landscape design, food systems, and community development.
Ecological design or ecodesign is an approach to designing products and services that gives special consideration to the environmental impacts of a product over its entire lifecycle. Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan define it as "any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes." Ecological design can also be defined as the process of integrating environmental considerations into design and development with the aim of reducing environmental impacts of products through their life cycle.
Antifragility is a property of systems in which they increase in capability to thrive as a result of stressors, shocks, volatility, noise, mistakes, faults, attacks, or failures. The concept was developed by Nassim Nicholas Taleb in his book, Antifragile, and in technical papers. As Taleb explains in his book, antifragility is fundamentally different from the concepts of resiliency and robustness. The concept has been applied in risk analysis, physics, molecular biology, transportation planning, engineering, aerospace (NASA), and computer science.
Urban resilience has conventionally been defined as the "measurable ability of any urban system, with its inhabitants, to maintain continuity through all shocks and stresses, while positively adapting and transforming towards sustainability".
An important part of the heritage of family resilience is the concept of individual psychological resilience which originates from work with children focusing on what helped them become resilient in the face of adversity. Individual resilience emerged primarily in the field of developmental psychopathology as scholars sought to identify the characteristics of children that allowed them to function "OK" after adversity. Individual resilience gradually moved into understanding the processes associated with overcoming adversity, then into prevention and intervention and now focuses on examining how factors at multiple levels of the system and using interdisciplinary approaches promote resilience. Resilience also has origins to the field of positive psychology. The term resilience gradually changed definitions and meanings, from a personality trait to a dynamic process of families, individuals, and communities.
In the fields of engineering and construction, resilience is the ability to absorb or avoid damage without suffering complete failure and is an objective of design, maintenance and restoration for buildings and infrastructure, as well as communities. A more comprehensive definition is that it is the ability to respond, absorb, and adapt to, as well as recover in a disruptive event. A resilient structure/system/community is expected to be able to resist to an extreme event with minimal damages and functionality disruptions during the event; after the event, it should be able to rapidly recovery its functionality similar to or even better than the pre-event level.
Parametric design is a design method in which features, such as building elements and engineering components, are shaped based on algorithmic processes rather than direct manipulation. In this approach, parameters and rules establish the relationship between design intent and design response. The term parametric refers to the input parameters that are fed into the algorithms.
Climate resilience is a concept to describe how well people or ecosystems are prepared to bounce back from certain climate hazard events. The formal definition of the term is the "capacity of social, economic and ecosystems to cope with a hazardous event or trend or disturbance". For example, climate resilience can be the ability to recover from climate-related shocks such as floods and droughts. Methods of coping include suitable responses to maintain relevant functions of societies and ecosystems. To increase climate resilience means one has to reduce the climate vulnerability of people and countries. Efforts to increase climate resilience include a range of social, economic, technological, and political strategies. They have to be implemented at all scales of society, from local community action all the way to global treaties.
Nature-based solutions is the sustainable management and use of natural features and processes to tackle socio-environmental issues. These issues include for example climate change, water security, food security, preservation of biodiversity, and disaster risk reduction. Through the use of NBS healthy, resilient, and diverse ecosystems can provide solutions for the benefit of both societies and overall biodiversity. The 2019 UN Climate Action Summit highlighted nature-based solutions as an effective method to combat climate change. For example, NBS in the context of climate action can include natural flood management, restoring natural coastal defences, providing local cooling, restoring natural fire regimes.
Alessandro Melis is an Italian architect and the curator of the Italian National Pavilion at the 17th Venice Biennale. He is also a professor of architecture and the inaugural endowed chair of the New York Institute of Technology.
The 15-minute city is an urban planning concept in which most daily necessities and services, such as work, shopping, education, healthcare, and leisure can be easily reached by a 15-minute walk, bike ride, or public transit ride from any point in the city. This approach aims to reduce car dependency, promote healthy and sustainable living, and improve wellbeing and quality of life for city dwellers.
Temporary appropriation refers to the action in which a person or a group of people realises an activity in a public space for which it was not designed for. According to Lara-Hernandez and Melis, it is process that implies dynamism similar to what Graumann called the humanisation of the space, which is the fundamental societal defined meanings interiorised by the individual. Representative activities of temporary appropriation can be grouped in three main categories: 1) sports, leisure and cultural activities; 2) activities related to economy such as work and services; and 3) activities related to sacralisation or worship. Authors stress two main factors that encourage the temporary appropriation phenomenon, on the one hand the cultural factor while on the other the configuration or design of the built environment. The former refers to the group of symbols, values, attitudes, skills, knowledge, meanings, communication ways, social structure and physical objects that make possible the life of a determinate society. While the latter refers to human-made structures, features, and facilities viewed collectively as an environment in which people live and work. Temporary appropriation is an example of Architectural Exaptation in the urban environment.
Climate change and cities are deeply connected. Cities are one of the greatest contributors and likely best opportunities for addressing climate change. Cities are also one of the most vulnerable parts of the human society to the effects of climate change, and likely one of the most important solutions for reducing the environmental impact of humans. The UN projects that 68% of the world population will live in urban areas by 2050. In the year 2016, 31 mega-cities reported having at least 10 million in their population, 8 of which surpassed 20 million people. However, secondary cities - small to medium size cities are rapidly increasing in number and are some of the fastest growing urbanizing areas in the world further contributing to climate change impacts. Cities have a significant influence on construction and transportation—two of the key contributors to global warming emissions. Moreover, because of processes that create climate conflict and climate refugees, city areas are expected to grow during the next several decades, stressing infrastructure and concentrating more impoverished peoples in cities.
References
- ↑ "Architectural Exaptation: When Function Follows Form". Routledge & CRC Press. Retrieved 2023-10-03.
- ↑ Melis, Alessandro; Pievani, Telmo (2022), Rezaei, Nima (ed.), "Exaptation as a Design Strategy for Resilient Communities", Transdisciplinarity, Integrated Science, vol. 5, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 307–327, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-94651-7_15, ISBN 978-3-030-94651-7 , retrieved 2023-08-11
- 1 2 3 Lara-Hernandez, Jose Antonio (2023-01-01), Allam, Zaheer; Chabaud, Didier; Gall, Catherine; Pratlong, Florent (eds.), "Chapter 29 - Building urban resilience through infrastructure exaptation", Resilient and Sustainable Cities, Elsevier, pp. 537–549, ISBN 978-0-323-91718-6 , retrieved 2023-08-11
- ↑ Melis, Alessandro; Lara-Hernandez, Jose Antonio; Melis, Barbora (2022-01-01). "Learning from the biology of evolution: exaptation as a design strategy for future cities". Smart and Sustainable Built Environment. 11 (2): 205–216. Bibcode:2022SSBE...11..205M. doi:10.1108/SASBE-08-2021-0141. ISSN 2046-6099. S2CID 245792698.
- ↑ Lara-Hernandez, Jose Antonio (2022), Carta, Maurizio; Perbellini, Maria R.; Lara-Hernandez, Jose Antonio (eds.), "Resilience, Architectural Exaptation, and Temporary Appropriation", Resilient Communities and the Peccioli Charter: Towards the Possibility of an Italian Charter for Resilient Communities, Cham: Springer International Publishing, pp. 257–264, doi:10.1007/978-3-030-85847-6_27, ISBN 978-3-030-85847-6 , retrieved 2023-08-12
- ↑ Melis, Alessandro (2021-01-01). "Community Resilience Through Exaptation. Notes for a Transposition of the Notions of Exaptation Into a Design Practice to Promote Diversity and Resilience as an Alternative to Planning Determinism During Crisis". Design and Non-Normativity. In the Era of Paradigm Shifts (22): 70–77. doi: 10.37199/f40002208 . ISSN 2227-7994. S2CID 260799439.
- ↑ Gould, Stephen Jay; Vrba, Elisabeth S. (January 1982). "Exaptation—a Missing Term in the Science of Form". Paleobiology. 8 (1): 4–15. Bibcode:1982Pbio....8....4G. doi:10.1017/S0094837300004310. ISSN 0094-8373. S2CID 86436132.
- ↑ Pievani, Telmo; Serrelli, Emanuele (October 2008). "Education in Evolution and Science Through Laboratory Activities". Evolution: Education and Outreach. 1 (4): 541–547. doi: 10.1007/s12052-008-0072-5 . ISSN 1936-6434. S2CID 9559191.
- ↑ Lara-Hernandez, Jose Antonio (2023-01-01), Allam, Zaheer; Chabaud, Didier; Gall, Catherine; Pratlong, Florent (eds.), "Chapter 29 - Building urban resilience through infrastructure exaptation", Resilient and Sustainable Cities, Elsevier, pp. 537–549, doi:10.1016/b978-0-323-91718-6.00021-9, ISBN 978-0-323-91718-6 , retrieved 2023-08-11
- ↑ Lara-Hernandez, J. Antonio (August 2023). "Emergent temporary appropriation versus lockdown regulations: The case of Venice". Sustainable Cities and Society. 99: 104854. doi:10.1016/j.scs.2023.104854. ISSN 2210-6707. S2CID 260879763.