Reconnecting with nature: Designing cities and developing urban spaces in balance with Green Space

This paper tells the narrative of how our urbanization models have been disconnecting humans from nature. Non-sustainable, non-resilient patterns of urbanization, along with the neglect of inner-city areas, have resulted in fragmentation and urban decline, led to a loss of biodiversity, and caused the deterioration of ecosystems and their services. Urban regeneration projects allow us to ‘repair’ and restore some of this damage whilst enhancing urban resilience. Connecting existing and enhanced ecosystems, and re-establishing ecosystems both within cities and at the peri-urban fringe is vital for strengthening ecosystem resilience and building adaptive capacity for coping with the effects of climate change. Cities worldwide need to look for suitable solutions to increase the resilience of their urban spaces in the face of climate change. The paper addresses this timely question across research and practice, and explores how this can be achieved through the integration of nature-based solutions, the re-greening of neighbourhoods and by correctly attributing value to natural capital. Transforming existing cities and neighbourhoods in this way will enable ecosystems to contribute their services towards healthier and more liveable cities (including how urban metabolism analytical frameworks might support effective management of natural capital contributing towards more “circular” urban resource flows). Revisiting the “wisdom of nature” could help to inform new and probably less resource-intensive and more climate-resilient organisational structures. From Descartes to Fairchild to Howard to McHarg, the author identifies the linkages that exist between a rich palette of seminal literature and different schools of thought about nature within the city.

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ISBN
978-1-944214-31-9