City as Urban Ecology: Ecosystems as Climate Regulators and Sources of Resilience

Due to its carbon impact, building has become increasingly questionable: famous architects and urban designers contend, the disciplines should either deploy mapping skills towards better decision-making, or focus on careful small-scale interventions. A combined approach to climate and resilience addresses contexts of population growth and housing scarcity: The method combines dense conversion of buildings to reduce carbon footprint, together with transformation and revegetation of urban spaces for climate mitigation. Two co-developed projects illustrate in combination a strategy mapping out such urban renewal potentials, testing design at precinct scale through precise interventions, and application through 1:1-prototypes. The design-research investigations propose to look beyond buildings into whole city approaches to urban resilience, which rehabilitate urban structures and spaces. Two complementary blueprint case-studies investigate how landscape can combine with urban renewal strategies to address challenges of climate (urban heat, flooding) and biodiversity (extinction) as well as the very human need for engaging urban spaces. The strategies combine architecture, urban and landscape design to re-envision city spaces as new urban ecologies. They test how to reappropriate underused urban spaces, creating blue-green urban networks of amenity as optimistic perspective for the future. The intertwining studies unpack how we may reconceptualise city spaces as resilient and adaptive urban ecosystems comprising flora, fauna and humans within urban environments. Such ecosystems are able to absorb heavy rainfalls and heat and thus reduce vulnerability to climate change and weather extremes. A first study focused on identifying underused spaces within Melbourne’s existing urban fabric for ecosystems that could host new resilient infrastructures and programs. The redesigned spaces create a balance between urban and natural systems. A second study delved into how to design and implement such ecosystems within urban contexts though a precinct strategy and four 1:1 prototypes. Starting from specific urban spaces, it explored their capacity to host particular types of ecosystems framed around specific endemic animals. The article will develop how these explorations have culminated in an expansion of the one-health concept (WHO, 2024) applied currently in health sciences in the field of urban design and planning. A new expanded concept conceptualizes the interdependency between human, biological and infrastructural health in cities. Thereby, it highlights the importance of thinking the city as an interlinked ecosystem while redesigning urban spaces for resilient and optimistic futures.