1 Introduction
Towards an ecologies design practice
Peter Connolly, Maibritt Pedersen Zari, and Mark Southcombe
Introduction
The title of this book, Ecologies Design: Transforming Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism, was carefully chosen. Our shared focus is to fully embrace design practices that are ecologically oriented. To mention âecologyâ and âdesignâ together however, tends to imply designers working with or applying biologically technical or scientific types of knowledge and practices. This is certainly vital at present, and is an important focus of this book. We refer to this realm of ecology as âbiological ecologiesâ, to reflect that this term refers to a range of ways of thinking and practicing. In Part 1 of this book, âBiological ecologies design and regenerationâ, we argue that professionals of the built environment, including designers, need to take biological ecology, and human factors as part of it, much more seriously.
We are also focused on a realm of ecology that involves humanâspace relations relevant to designers. We refer to this realm, to distinguish it from âbiological ecologiesâ, as âsocial ecologiesâ. Designers have recently been exploring various approaches to these human-space and human-non-human ecologies or âsocial ecologiesâ and we argue these approaches contribute to a strong non-metaphorical conception of âsocial ecologiesâ. This is examined and discussed in Part 2 of the book, âDocumenting social ecologiesâ.
The third of the types of ecologies we focus on in this book relates to design practice itself. There is a tendency to see practice, in opposition to academic research, as something compromised by the imperatives of professional reality, and somehow less rigorous. Design practice has recently been embraced as a serious academic realm, through design and practice-based or design-led research. This has been an important step. In this book we embrace the potential of practices as ecological; as fully real and vitally engaged in our increasingly complex world. Practice is about doing, and the powers of doing, in often fraught and complex situations, as evident in the range of examples of ecological design practices in Part 3: âEcologies design practicesâ.
Ecologies design involves each of these three realms of ecology: the biological, the social, and design practices. What distinguishes this book is not just that it includes these three kinds of interdependent ecologies, but that there are powerful synergies between them, that are really only starting to be explored and experimented with. It is the potential of these synergies that draws together the collection of essays, discourse, case studies, and research within Ecologies Design: Transforming Architecture, Landscape, and Urbanism. Together they form a set of provocations and precedents designed to shift thinking and practices.
A single living realm: reconciling design practice with ecological reality
There is an obvious greater context to our interest in these three types of ecologies. Cities, regions, and nations are experiencing and will continue to experience momentous impacts caused by climate change, the decline of ecological health, rapid population growth, urbanisation, and other significant converging drivers of change (Grainger, 2017). These changes are already affecting and will continue to affect the physical fabric and infrastructure of cities as well as the social and economic context they exist in. The changes are impacting other life on the planet, as well as humans; biologically, physically, culturally, and emotionally. It is clear that the way we build and live in cities must change rapidly. This requires not just strategies to more effectively employ existing appropriate technologies and techniques (Mitchell, 2012; Pedersen Zari and Hecht, 2019), or to develop new ones (Gebeshuber et al., 2009), but also requires design professionals and researchers to fundamentally alter how they comprehend and work with complex biological and social ecologies of neighbourhoods, cities, and whole regions. Before we can find the right answers to ecological architecture, landscape, and urban design issues we must first be able to ask the right questions.
Converging ecological and climatic drivers of global change, increasing scientific and technical knowledge, current experimentation in many fields, and new philosophies, along with ideas of interconnected ecologies suggest that it is problematic to approach design through the creation of isolated and discrete objects, spaces, buildings, and landscapes. Understandings of relationships to context and time can too often be superficial, ill considered, or even absent (Pedersen Zari, 2012). Contemporary spatial design must urgently understand and integrate with wider living contexts, systems and networks that are unfolding, and changing in time and space. To consider an interior, building, site, or larger landscape as a static, separate entity is to remove it from the world that enlivens it, and neglect or even destroy opportunities for human living that is a part of, not apart from a constantly changing living world. These seemingly separate entities are parts of ecologies that are continuous in both time and space. They are interrelated, connected to, and part of a single larger living realm: that of Nature or the planet Earth. Humans are dependent on, affected by, affect, and are part of this realm, rather than simply observers and manipulators of it. As professionals of the built environment our actions have significant consequences both individually and collectively.
Nature as resource and the Anthropocene
âNatureâ, and with it ecology, is often understood, both technically and in an economic sense, as simply a pool of resources or services for human use. The purpose and meaning of ecology can therefore become reduced to understanding and maximising the eco-technical and financial benefits humans derive from Nature (Heal et al., 2005). Some ecological design concepts and methods explicitly try to avoid this conception of ecology, and the political implications of affirming the economic and technical value of Nature in the contemporary economically rational world should be examined. This view that has been cemented in westernised cultures over the past 500 years (Bosworth et al., 2011). Wahl (2006) traces the advent of the âreductionist science of detached objectivismâ to several key figures such as: Galileo Galilei (1564â1642) who regarded the measurable quantitative aspects of an understanding of nature as more important than qualitative ones; Francis Bacon (1561â1626) who advocated that humans should be masters of nature; and RenĂ© Descartes (1596â1650) who created a philosophical separation of humans and nature, body and mind, and subject and object, thus transforming these into dualistic mutually exclusive categories (Pedersen Zari, 2018). Nature was seen as wild, dangerous, hostile and in need of taming and civilising (Wahl, 2006). This way of relating to the living world can be termed the anthropocentric view.
âThe Anthropoceneâ, defined as the âcurrent epoch in which humans and our societies have become a global geophysical forceâ (Steffen et al., 2007), relates to the converging drivers of rapid and non-linear environmental changes caused by human activities that characterise the time from 1800 to the present (Grainger, 2017). Perhaps paradoxically, naming the current era of human-induced degradation and disruption of ecosystems and climate âThe Anthropoceneâ may actually reinforce the idea that humans (âanthroposâ) are the most important species on the planet because of their absolute dominance and ability to influence global systems. This is a time however, when humans must become aware of, and urgently act upon, the intrinsically interdependent and vital nature of relationships between living organisms for the ongoing viability of all species, including humans. In order for âanthroposâ to survive the Anthropocene with civil society intact, there must be a swift move away from understanding humans as more important than, and therefore separate to Nature, and Nature simply as an endless supply of resources for humans.
Nature and ecology do much more than just the quantifiable technical functions that are useful to human economic activity or even to an agenda of increasing human wellbeing through contact with Nature (Soderlund and Newman, 2015; Louv, 2005). Studies of introduced water-sensitive ecologies in new suburban developments in Melbourne for example, reveal that introduced ecologies are always doing more than the techno-ecological things that they tend to be championed for (Connolly, 1992). They variously perform urbanistically, experientially, culturally, socially, and neighbourly, and perhaps even spiritually. The inattention to such âfunctioningsâ points to an inattention to the everyday world and to the limitations of contemporary notions of performance, which tend to regard only certain kinds of performance as correct or proper (Connolly, 2004).
The techno-science-oriented version of ecologies design
A common assumption is that what we understand as ecology can be understood solely in scientific terms (or quasi-scientific or technical ways as is sometimes the case with designers (Gruber, 2008)) and can be operationalised in terms of âsystems designingâ. The notion of systems designing is directly inspired by âopenâ and âcomplex systemsâ thinking (Deleuze and Guattari, 1988; Gunderson and Holling, 2002). It is often assumed in the design world that systems designing is the way to engage with complex ecological systems involving human life. In practice however, the resulting systems can be more akin to engineered closed quantitative and technical systems. Biological science is certainly important for understanding human-related and non-human ecologies, yet to assume that quantitatively understood closed systems are akin to, or can replace open and complex systems directly involving humans is a significant and prevalent problem.
The emphasis on systems has been important in recent progressive design discourse. Architectural theorist Simone Brott (2016) argues that this emphasis on systems, quantities, and extensive or spatially understood ideas of change over time comes directly from a specific way that east coast United States of America architectural discourse interpreted Deleuze and Guattariâs ideas, from the late 1970s onwards. She refers to the way that these ideas were and still are largely comprehended through a âtechno-scienceâ understanding of Deleuze and Guattari. This techno-science mode of understanding generated a range of powerful and productive lines of inquiry but deferred away from a strong embrace of humanâenvironment relations or social ecologies; and also led to an anti-theory pragmatism which in turn legitimised a particular style of practice in a self-reinforcing and self-protecting feedback loop of thinking (Frichot, 2009). This techno-science theory, which denies itself as a theory in the name of practice, has had the powerful effect of closing down criticism and other forms of practice and theory in favour of working with realities that tend to be understood in terms of quantitative metrics or numbers, or where these metrics are strongly privileged over other ways of knowing (Connolly, 2012).
Rem Koolhaas, among others, has also been important in the unfolding of the techno-science story. His early work opened up a powerful ecological perspective by embracing what the world âdoes itselfâ, beyond designer ideas or metaphors, and had much to do with the new interest in âhow things workâ. He began to invent ways to see and understand the âanonymousâ workings of the world (Koolhaas and Mau, 1995). These new perceptual capabilities and his emphasis on âhow things workâ, however, tended to defer to the quantitative and the âperformativeâ understood quantitatively.
In progressive landscape architecture and in architectural engagements with the landscape, most conspicuously associated with the term âlandscape urbanismâ, what we are calling social ecologies are almost completely obscured behind the quantitatively technical (Connolly, 2004). These practices are dominated by the techno-science version of ecological understanding.
Biological ecologies and regeneration
âEcologyâ, as it is applied to design, is a rapidly growing field of interest, but its meaning varies greatly (Mostafavi and Doherty, 2016). Ecological design, which can be thought of as an umbrella term for many other kinds of ecologically oriented practices, often has a motivation (alongside others) to restore biodiversity or the health of ecosystems through various built environment design methods (Van der Ryn and Cowan, 2013). Like social ecologies, âbiological ecologiesâ also however focuses on and encompasses relationships between humans and ecosystems, from a different perspective. We, like many others, champion the need for a shift to understanding that humans live within ecosystems as integral parts, and that we are entirely dependent upon them (Daily and Matson, 2008). Along with this, we call for a less mechanistic understanding of how Life works, and therefore how to design with and for it. In architecture this emerging shift might be represented as a move away from the modernist âblank slateâ, or the metaphor of a house as a machine for living in (Le Corbusier, 1923), to an ideal of design where human built environments and landscapes are symbiotically integrated with ecosystems (in an expanded sense) and contribute to, rather than harm, ecosystem health. Professionals of the built environment of all disciplines must consider how this notion could be better reflected in ecological design practices.
Efforts towards the practical positive integration of humans and nature can be recognised in the regenerative design approach (and Birkelandâs (2008) related âpositive developmentâ concept). In regenerative design, the goal is an increase in the health of people, communities, and biological ecosystems through the functioning of a building or wider built environment, along with the initial (and ongoing) processes of conceiving and creating it. This is in contrast to the depletion of ecosystems (even at reduced rates) which is typically a consequence of conventional âsustainableâ architectural and urban design (Cole, 2012). A regenerative approach is useful because while aiming to return biological ecosystem health to levels where ecosystems thrive and are self-managing, it also challenges traditional dichotomous humanânature relationships, because of the focus on human health and wellbeing (physical, societal and cultural) as an indivisible and interdependent aspect of ecosystem health (Reed, 2007; Cole, 2012).
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