7/30/2019 010901_article_02

1/5

1 Ecological Design, Urban Places, and the Culture SPUR www.spur.org

Ecological Design, Urban Places,and the Culture of Sustainability

By William Eisenstein

______________________________________________________________________________________

September 1, 2001

This article appeared in the September, 2001

SPUR Newsletter, p. 1, and can be found online

at http://www.spur.org/.

In a world facing a future characterized both

by expanding metropolitan regions and by

ecological crisis, it is imperative that we re-think

the relationship of urban dwellers to the natural

environment. The 21st century is expected to be

the first in history in which a majority ofhumanity lives in cities, and if present trends

continue, it may also be the one in which those

urban populations inflict irreversible damage on

the earths living systems.

Although there has been a great deal of

debate about sustainable cities in recent years,

much of it has offered accountings of the

ecological costs of sprawling growth or physical

analyses of the need for compact, high-density,

mixed-use cities that minimize automobile

transportation. Comparatively little of the

discussion has focused on urban residents

themselves, and how they might live more

sustainably within the city, or, equally

importantly, how they might develop a greater

understanding of the ecological crisis and the

natural cycles that sustain all life, including their

own. As ecological educator David Orr has put

it, The vast majority of thought about a

sustainable societyC9 has to do with hardware. I

think it is time to ask about the software of

sustainability as well, and thus about the

qualities that people will need to build and

maintain a durable civilization.

The combination of a need to develop

practical strategies for sustainable urban living

and to develop a greater ecological

consciousness suggests that the landscapes of our

cities, and the ways that people relate to them

and learn from them, will be critical to the

prospects for sustainability. This is true not only

because most people in the modern world spend

most of their time in the city, but also because

these same urban landscapes have extraordinarypotential to reveal the tangible relationships

between urban residents and the natural

environment.

Ecologically designed urban landscapes are

ones that can use both ecological processes and

human values as form-giving elements. In

addition to their many environmental benefits,

these landscapeswhich include systems such

as energy-efficient buildings, stormwater

infiltration, sewage treatment wetlands, and

urban forestscan also contribute to local

cultures of sustainability that, like all cultures,

both shape and are shaped by the built and

designed environment. If they are to do so,

however, their designers must think clearly about

the experience of the users of the urban

landscape, and particularly about the meanings

and lessons that they derive from their

surroundings. The ways that people learn from

and respond to the urban environment are critical

to the prospects for sustainability, if for no other

7/30/2019 010901_article_02

2/5

2 Ecological Design, Urban Places, and the Culture SPUR www.spur.org

reason than that for most of us, it is the

landscape of the city that helps to shape our view

of nature and our relation to it.

Taking this experience-based approach to the

problem of designing urban landscapes yields

three major insights for fostering sustainability:

ecologically designed urban landscapes shouldcommunicate cultural cues for sustainable

behavior; these landscapes should be

implemented in partnership with ecological

education efforts; and the cultural meanings and

ecological place values created over time will be

fundamentally local. Each of these is explained

below.

The importance of visibility

Many designers and planners have become

concerned in recent years with revealing (i.e.,

making visually apparent) ecological processes

in their designs so that the users of the

environment may experience, learn about, and

appreciate those processes. In practice,

revelation of ecological process has meant

everything from capturing stormwater on the

surface of the land before it drains away to the

storm sewers (and creates flooding problems) to

planting a row of trees in a plaza where a creek

once ran (and may still, but in a concrete culvert

underneath the ground). In addition, the

ecological processes that are revealed may

themselves be truly natural, in the sense that

they could continue to exist without themanagement of humans, or they may be highly

artificial, engineered systems that need constant

supervision if they are to persist in an urbanized

context.

The range of design possibilities lumped

together under the banner of eco-revelatory

design, therefore, is very broad indeed. Some

such designs make tangible improvements in

local ecological healthby treating wastewater,

for examplewhile others are merely symbolic

gestures that at best remind users of the pre-

development site conditions. Curiously, almost

all designs within this large spectrum arecasually assumed to yield the same outcome in

terms of the ecological education of the user.

This is one indication of how undefined the

presumption of a significant psychological and

educational impact from design often is. In other

words, the visibility of ecological process in

design is often assumed to be adequate for

people to develop ecological perspectives,

without considering in detail how such a thing

might occur.

The Arcata Marsh and Wildlife Sanctuary, a

real-world example of eco-revelatory design,

highlights some of the positive potential of using

visibility as a design strategy. Since 1986, this

constructed wetland on the shores of HumboldtBay has performed secondary treatment on the

city of Arcatas sewage water before it is

discharged into the larger environment. This

type of treatment, required by law, ordinarily is

performed by massive indoor treatment plants,

such as the Southeast Water Pollution Control

Facility in San Francisco. By creating a wetland

to do the same thing, the city is not only able to

provide this critical infrastructural service, but

also to design a recreational and cultural amenity

for the community. The residents of Arcata who

stroll by the wetland can, for instance, see that

wastewater treatment wetlands can be importanthabitat for fish and birds, as well as an energy-

efficient, biologically based method of

controlling water pollution. The experience of

the Arcata wetland shows that ecological

processes, even if designed and controlled by

engineers, can be brought into a constructive

partnership with human settlements. For the

residents of Arcata, it is not just human society

or wastewater in the abstract that is creating

the wetland; it is their wastewater. What goes

into that wastewater therefore becomes an issue

of more visible, more immediate, and more local

consequence than it had been before.

How, then, can we ensure that lessons about

not only ecological processes themselves, but

also the relationship between ecological

processes and urban life, are available to the

users of the urban environment? One way to

approach this problem is to consider what

environmental psychologists and architectural

researchers have said about how people derive

meaning from the built environment. A major

theory in this fieldcalled the theory of non-

verbal communicationholds that people

receive non-verbal messages from the builtenvironment in much the same way as we do

when interacting with other people. In the latter

case, we gather much more information from

another person than simply what their words

communicate; their facial expressions, gestures,

clothing, personal appearance, and other

nonverbal aspects of their behavior also send us

powerful signals. And as most of us can attest

7/30/2019 010901_article_02

3/5

3 Ecological Design, Urban Places, and the Culture SPUR www.spur.org

from experience, these signals to a large extent

only have meaning within a given cultural

context. When we travel abroad or interact with

another culture, many of these subtleties are lost

to us, and communication suffers as a result.

The architectural scholar Amos Rapoport has

argued that the built environment is itself apowerful form of non-verbal communication.

Our everyday environment contains large

numbers of non-verbal cues which

communicate messages about cultural

expectations for behavior in a given context. As

with inter-personal communications, the

meaning of these cues is highly context-

dependent (and culture-bound) and must be

interpreted holistically in concert with other cues

in a given environment. The list of potential cues

in the built environment is very long; in some

sense almost any design feature can be used to

communicate cultural meanings and behavioralexpectations if the user of the environment is

able to interpret the messages properly.

Among the most common environmental cues in

cultures throughout the world are the use of

height, size, color, details and decorations in

buildings, and horizontal scale, plantings, and

materials in landscapes. A moments reflection

upon famous cathedrals, imperial palaces, and

corporate headquarters around the world

unsurprisingly tends to confirm the simple idea

that these and other design elements are used to

communicate meanings about power, cultural

importance, and sacredness.

If we propose to use ecological design of

urban places to promote cultural change in the

human relationship to the environment, then, we

should be thinking about how to create physical

settings with cues for sustainable behavior. How

can stormwater swales, solar-oriented structures,

sewage treatment wetlands, and energy-efficient

building clustering patternsin short, the

elements of an ecologically designed urban

landscapebecome part of settings that, when

viewed and experienced holistically,

communicate cultural expectations forsustainability?

Characteristics of settings

According to Rapoport, for a setting to

communicate meanings and cultural behavior

expectations effectively the cues must be

characterized by three things: clarity; strong,

noticeable differences, and redundancy. These

characteristics reflect the fact that nonverbal

communications are often quite subtle, and need

to be reinforced through a variety of channels

simultaneously if they are to be understood.

At first glance, this appears to return us to the

issue of visibility discussed earlier. But it also

points up the fact that not all kinds of visibilityare made equal. Some eco-revelatory designs, for

example, have sought to bring ecological

processes (such as water flows) into the open,

but then blend them in with the surrounding

landscape as much as possible. Many proposals

to capture rainfall in grassy areas and infiltrate it

into the soil before it runs off into the storm

sewers would use either parks or front lawns for

this purpose. Although this strategy reveals an

ecological process occurring during and just after

a rainfall, the rest of the time these spaces would

simply look like what they have always looked

likelarge grassy expansesand would forfeitan opportunity to communicate a clear,

consistent, and meaningful landscape message.

By contrast, a real-world project that created

stormwater gardens in a working-class

neighborhood in Minnesota achieved the same

ecological purposeinfiltration of

rainwaterbut marked the places in the

landscape where infiltration occurred with

plantings of native vegetation. Thus, the plants

could make the infiltration spots clear and

noticeable even when no rain was falling, and, at

the same time, achieve beneficial redundancy by

incorporating more than one ecological good

(native plant restoration and stormwater

infiltration) into the same design.

In an intensely urban setting, there are

valuable opportunities to achieve this clarity and

redundancy with the interplay of buildings and

landscapes. There are important ecological

implications to the built form of cities, and sound

planning and design decisions that minimize

negative impacts should be understandable to the

public. The siting and design of a building, for

example, has a tremendous influence on the

overall energy consumption of that building overits lifetime. But the major decisions about siting

and design are made early in a development

process, and few members of the public will ever

know whether they were made correctly from an

energy point of view. How, then, would such

buildings ever be able to communicate cultural

meanings to their users unless there were other

elements in the environment that were helping to

7/30/2019 010901_article_02

4/5

4 Ecological Design, Urban Places, and the Culture SPUR www.spur.org

reinforce these ideas? The creation of clearer and

more noticeable small-scale energy-efficient

design features both within the building

(operable windows, perhaps) and in the

landscape around it (trees or vine trellises to

shade windows on the south side, for example)

are then crucial to creating a cultural setting forsustainability.

Partnership with ecological education

The foregoing examples also require that the

cues in the designed environment be

interpretable by the user. At some level, no

amount of eco-revelatory design will help people

to think and act more sustainably if they have no

understanding of simple ecological relationships.

A design difference between the south and north

sides of a building will have very little

significance for the buildings users if they do

not know that far more sunlight strikes a south-

facing surface than a north-facing one (at least in

the northern hemisphere).

Any transformation of the physical

environment intended to support sustainability

must therefore be carried out in concert with

efforts to increase and improve ecological

education. Basic knowledge of ecological

processes will be a necessary complement to the

implementation of ecologically designed urban

landscapes. Though much of this education

undoubtedly would occur through schools,

books, and other traditional means, it should benoted that the landscape itself could play a major

role. The philosopher Marcia Mulder Eaton, for

example, has noted that the aesthetics of

landscapes may be crucial to the process of

learning about ecological processes. She argues

that [a]esthetically relevant information helps to

enable sustained attention; indeed it not only

sustains but regenerates it. When one learns

something that directs perception to or stimulates

reflection on an aesthetic property of an object or

an event, one is drawn back to the object or

event and, in turn, the rich experience that

results may lead one to seek for moreinformation about the object.

The experimental results of the

environmental psychologists Rachel and Stephen

Kaplan about Americans landscape preferences

support this conclusion. Their research shows

that these preferences are strongly shaped by

whether the spatial organization of the elements

in the space (or scene) suggests opportunities for

two key things: understanding and exploration.

This finding lends credence to the notion that

aesthetics and education share a symbiotic

relationship in the landscape, and that landscapes

themselves can therefore be crucial educational

tools. This is especially true if local, site-specific

ecological processes are not obscured, as theyoften are in traditional park designs.

Ecological landscapes and local placevalues

A third major design implication for

ecological urban landscapes follows from this

emphasis on using local ecological processes as

an educational tool. Because ecological design is

inherently site-specific, the cultural formations

that are encouraged by it will tend to be local as

well. While the overall imperatives of

sustainability may be somewhat generalizableacross the worlds citiesthe need for compact,

transit-oriented urban form, for examplethe

techniques for actually building sustainable

human settlements in specific places will differ

importantly based on local ecological

characteristics.

As ecological urban landscapes would differ

among cities, so too would the cues, settings, and

environmental meanings that influence

sustainable behavior. In California, for example,

the great majority of the annual rainfall occurs in

the winter, meaning that stormwater swales and

infiltration basins will be dry much of the year,yielding a very different landscape appearance

than the same system would possess in a place

where precipitation is more uniform. The same

thing is true of passively heated and cooled

buildings, which take very different forms in

various climates. These diverse forms would in

turn create very different physical settings on the

ground.

Far from being a handicap for the formation

of cultures of sustainability, this sort of local

distinctiveness is usually thought to be crucial to

the development of local place values (i.e., the

sense of affection for and loyalty to a specificplace). As the landscape architect Randolph

Hester discovered in community design exercises

in Manteo, North Carolina, a small town

grappling with major development proposals,

place values are often formed through the day-to-

day interaction of people in familiar local

settings. In Manteo, in fact, the places that the

community most valued were so humble and

7/30/2019 010901_article_02

5/5

5 Ecological Design, Urban Places, and the Culture SPUR www.spur.org

outwardly unremarkable that they were not even

consciously identified by the community until

they were threatened with irreversible change.

They were meaningful as cultural settings only

to the relatively small group of local people that

lived close enough to use them, and interact with

other community members in them, on aconsistent basis.

This is a significant finding for the

implementation of ecologically educational and

culturally meaningful urban landscapes. As

ecological processes are made visible through

designwhether they be water flows, energy

flows, or some other processdesigners should

think about how the unique building and

landscape forms that arise from each local

ecological context can form the basis for place

values to flourish. As these values emerge,

people will develop more intimate cultural

associations with the features of the landscapethat make their place specialin other words,

the same features that manifest and make

meaningful their particular tangible relationship

to the larger natural world.

Here again, there are important distinctions

among various methods of making ecological

process visible. While stormwater swales and

constructed wetlands are important ecological

design techniques, they tend to look much the

same everywhere they are employed. Energy-

efficient building forms, by contrast, look

dramatically different across the world, from the

tightly clustered, white-washed structures of

Middle Eastern towns to the individual earth-

covered house of the American Great Plains. The

building forms of traditional and indigenous

cultures were often exquisitely well suited to

local climatic conditions and strikingly varied in

their aesthetics. Even in relatively homogenous

modern cities, the clear and noticeable physical

differences between different places are one of

the first and most significant devices that we use

to distinguish our place from somewhere else

(think of how unmistakable San Franciscos

waterfront is). Ecological design has tremendouspotential to amplify these locally unique features

in the landscape and thereby foster ecologically

informed local place values.

Conclusion

Overall, ecological design will be a crucial

component of the sustainable city, not only

because of its potential to reduce the ecological

impacts of urban life, but also because of its

potential to communicate new cultural

conceptions of the human relationship to nature.

If designed to embody clarity, noticeable

differences, and adequate redundancy, if

implemented in partnership with ecological

education efforts (of which landscapes form acrucial part), and if created to be meaningful and

interpretable to local communities, ecologically

designed urban landscapes can create a fertile

piece of cultural and educational ground in

which sustainability can take root and spread to

neighboring communities and to generations

beyond.

William Eisenstein is a doctoral student in

Environmental Planning at the University of

California at Berkeley. He presented a version of

this article this summer at the MESH Landscape

Architecture Conference in Melbourne,Australia.