The relationship between humans and nature is in permanent change. Where the city and nature used to be seen as enemies that needed to be kept away from each other, the current paradigm looks at a more symbiotic relationship. In this, man is seen as part of nature, and the city is seen as a determining factor in providing conditions for a rich urban ecology. In this study, urban conditions are seen as the starting point for urban design, enabling biodiversity to thrive. The aim of the research is to distill design strategies that enhance nature in an urban context. These strategies are derived from existing theories, the typical relationship between the city and nature, and the understanding of the natural landscape, and are applied in the heated, dry, and rocky conditions in the metropolitan region of Monterrey, Mexico. The main finding is that the city contains ecologies with their own characteristics, often distinct from rural or natural ecologies. These specific conditions can be amplified using adequate design strategies, which may lead to a greater biodiversity. For improving urban biodiversity, the perspective on the city shall be transformed from seeing it as an enemy of nature towards a symbiotic relationship between the two. At the same time, this perspective requires additional research into two main aspects: the way the city is able to create its own climatic conditions, and how landscape-based design can enhance the urban conditions in a way nature occupies these novel ecological niches. ... Read more

De Kennisregio aan Zee 2070 is een ruimtelijk-economische samenwerking tussen de steden Den Haag, Zoetermeer, Delft en Leiden, de provincie Zuid Holland en kennisinstellingen TU Delft, Universiteit Leiden en de Haagse Hogeschool. De missie: laat de economie bijdragen aan oplossingen voor maatschappelijke problemen; waar schaarse ruimte onze kennis en praktijk uitdaagt tot innovatieve oplossingen voor een veilige, gezonde en inclusieve leefomgeving. De samenwerking heeft tot doel bouwstenen te ontwikkelen voor een toekomstperspectief dat richting geeft aan de maatschappelijke en ruimtelijk-economische regionale ontwikkeling; een verbindend verhaal dat de organisaties aanzet tot langdurige samenwerking als basis voor een duurzame kennisecologie en brede welvaart.

Maar hoe zit het kennisecosysteem van de Kennisregio aan Zee eigenlijk precies ruimtelijk in elkaar? En welke ruimtelijke condities zijn aanwezig en moeten verder ontwikkeld worden op de schaal van de regio? En wat betekent dit voor innovatiedistricten in bijv. Delft, Den Haag, Leiden en Zoetermeer? Hoe zit het met de regionale samenhang, diversiteit en complementariteit en waar zitten mogelijkheden voor verbetering? Hoe kan het landschap dienen als basis voor klimaat-adaptief en natuur-inclusieve ruimtelijke ontwikkeling gerelateerd aan bijvoorbeeld woningbouwopgave? Ondanks dat we hier nog niet alle antwoorden op hebben kunnen we wel een aantal ruimtelijke voorwaarden benoemen die de Kennisregio aan Zee 2070 productiever, sociaal en ecologisch inclusiever en toekomstbestendig maken; en slimme groei op de juiste plekken faciliteren.

Deze publicatie beoogt een aantal ruimtelijke bouwstenen te benoemen en uit te werken in een regionaal ruimtelijk-economisch perspectief. Het natuurlijke landschap en de stedelijke context zijn de basis voor een duurzame kennisecologie en brede welvaart op de lange termijn. Centraal staat een eerste ruimtelijke verkenning, een regionaal ontwerp waarin wonen, mobiliteit, economie, water, natuur en landschap integraal bekeken zijn. Dit lange termijn perspectief maakt het mogelijk middels backcasting terug te redeneren met welke strategische regionale projecten morgen begonnen kan worden. Een aantal verdiepende essays geven inzicht in hoe stad en landschap als condities dienen voor ruimtelijk-economische ontwikkeling van de Zuid-Hollandse kustregio. ... Read more

Cultivating and stirring up urgencies: wait and plan.Spotlighting the jewels of North-Holland.Formulating new tasks to speed up housingconstruction.Quicker, cheaper, nicer, and more adaptive living through changeable and modular thinking, and becoming more sustainable by lengthening the timechain (prefab to the max).Architecture students are explorers of new practical and technical products that contribute to housing development.Calculate and estimate the effect of technical innovation of one million homes in terms of carbon, ecology, and materials.Consideration of ecological, social, and aesthetic aspects of urban planning and landscape.Do not abandon the landscape: we need a bigger voice on this from architects and landscape architects.Conduct the conversations on the future on a yearly basis.Strengthen bonds with industry. ... Read more

Importance of the region as integrating level.Doing more in less space.Through systemintegration, we can become an energy-supplying society.Making connections between themes and sectors.Building on communities of education, interdisciplinarity, society, and professional practice. ... Read more

The current state of nature is concerning. The levels of biodiversity are rapidly decreasing; existing policies sketch ambitious objectives, but their effectiveness is relatively low. This is caused by a combination of three main elements: physical elements, planning processes, and psychological reasons. In dealing with these deeply rooted problems, following qualities are missing: attention to planning and design in nature-based solution policies, the gap between plan and execution of plans, and the transformation to eco-leadership of young people. In four consecutive years, research design studios have been executed, in which students collaboratively design eco-solutions for complex and urgent problems. The core subjects of each of these studios were four interlinked aspects of eco-design: (1) designing in parallel at master plan and concrete project level, (2) planning, designing and building within a short period, (3) the emergence and succession of ecosystems on site, and (4) ecological leadership practice. By investigating these aspects year after year, designing integrated and coherent solutions, and realizing these solutions in built form, an ecological spatial framework emerged within which smaller projects were and will be embedded. This way, the ecosystem on campus grows, matures, and develops as a self-regulating system. Moreover, new leadership emerged amongst the young participants in the research design studios ... Read more

To base urbanization on nature, inspiring ecologies are necessary. The concept of nature-based solutions (NBS) could be helpful in achieving this goal. State of the art urban planning starts from the aim to realize a (part of) a city, not to improve natural quality or increase biodiversity. The aim of this article is to introduce a planning approach that puts the ecological landscape first, before embedding urban development. This ambition is explored using three NBS frameworks as the input for a series of design workshops, which conceived a regional plan for the Western Sydney Parklands in Australia. From these frameworks, elements were derived at three abstraction levels as the input for the design process: envisioning a long-term future (scanning the opportunities), evaluating the benefits and disadvantages, and identifying a common direction for the design (determining directions), and implementing concrete spatial cross-cutting solutions (creating inspiring ecologies), ultimately resulting in a regional landscape-based plan. The findings of this research demonstrate that, at every abstraction, a specific outcome is found: a mapped ecological landscape showing the options for urbanization, formulating a food-forest strategy as the commonly found direction for the design, and a regional plan that builds from the landscape ecologies adding layers of productive ecologies and urban synergies. By using NBS-frameworks, the potentials of putting the ecological landscape first in the planning process is illuminated, and urbanization can become resilient and nature-inclusive. Future research should emphasize the balance that should be established between the NBS-frameworks and the design approach, as an overly technocratic and all-encompassing framework prevents the freedom of thought that is needed to come to fruitful design propositions. ... Read more

In the Anthropocene, climate impacts are expected to fundamentally change the way we live in, and plan and design for, our cities and landscapes. Long-term change and uncertainty require a long view, while current planning approaches and policy making are mostly short-term oriented and are therefore not well suited to respond adequately. The path-dependency it implies causes an irresolvable dilemma between short-term effect and long-term necessities. The objective of the research is to investigate an alternative planning and design approach which is able to overcome the current constraints and take a holistic long-term perspective. Therefore, the methods used in the study underpin a creative process of future visioning through backcasting and finding a dynamic equilibrium in the past as a primer for long-term climate adaptation. This way, the individual vulnerabilities of current sectoral policies can be leapfrogged and integrated into one intervention. This design-led method is applied to the northern landscape of the Groningen region in the Netherlands. This intervention is positioned as a re-dynamization of the landscape by re-establishing the exchange between the land and the sea. The findings in the study show that a long-term perspective on the future of the regional landscape increases climate adaptation and enriches the opportunities for viable agriculture, increased biodiversity, and a raised land that is not only protected against possible storm surges, but benefits from the sediments the sea brings. The economic analysis shows that a new perspective for farming within saline conditions is profitable on a fraction of the land, the biodiversity can be enriched by more than 75%, and the ground level of the landscape can be raised by one meter or more in the next 50–100 years. Moreover, the study shows how a long-term perspective can be implemented in logic stages that comply with the natural step-changes occurring in climate change. ... Read more

In this article a planning approach is proposed to accommodate different paces of urbanisation. Instead of responding to a single problem with a Pavlov-type of response, analysis shows that the transformational tempi of different urban landscapes require multiple deployment strategies to develop urban environments that are sustainable and resilient. The application of nature-based solutions, enhancing both human and natural health in cities, is used as the foundation for the design of deployment strategies that respond to different paces of urban change. The results show that urban characteristics, such as population density and built space is, partly, dependent on the underlying landscape characteristics, therefore show specific development pathways. To create liveable and sustainable urban areas that can deal holistically with a range of intertwined problems, specific deployment strategies should be used in each specific urban context. This benefits the city-precinct as a whole and at the local scale. Even small nature-based solutions, applied as the right deployment strategy in the right context, have profound impact as the starting point of a far-reaching urban transformation. The case-study for Oimachi in Japan illustrates how this planning approach can be applied, how the different urban rhythms are identified, and to which results this leads. ... Read more

Many cities across the world have the ambition of becoming carbon neutral, but exact figures of progress toward that goal are limited. Regarding Europe’s not overly ambitious 2020 carbon emission targets, many countries still have a long way to go (see Fig. 1), with cities as the prime objects for improvement. It is fair to say that the energy transition is lagging behind, for which several reasons can be given.
One assumption, based on experience with projects with various European cities, is that cities—their administrations and other stakeholders—generally have insufficient understanding of how to gain and maintain control over the complex process of the energy transition with its multiple actors and diverse objectives and responsibilities.
Another suggested reason is the lack of appropriate approaches, strategies, and methods to guide the energy transition in formulating clear targets and intermediate steps of mainly technical and spatial interventions. These, however are currently under development, and are being tested in cities across the continent—such as in Gothenburg, London, Rotterdam, Cologne, and Genova within the EU project Celsius (www.celsiuscity.eu), and in Amsterdam and Grenoble, for the EU project City-zen (www.cityzen-smartcity.eu)—with promising results so far.
The main research question underlying this chapter is: How can cities be supported in their energy transition toward carbon neutrality?
We will describe the development of approaches, strategies, and methods for the urban energy transition, their background and theoretical basis, and present urban case studies where they were applied. Finally, an outlook will be given for methodological developments in the near future. ... Read more