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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
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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
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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
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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
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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.