The Future of Nature-driven Urbanism

Abstract

Current urban design and urban planning aim to facilitate global, regional and local urbanization programs. This implies most of the planning documents give room to the types of land use that seem to require space ‘here and now’. The amount of new housing, office and other industrial and commercial space, accompanying amounts of parking lots and the necessity of new transportation routes, infrastructure and corridors are the main topics in the majority of future oriented plans. This is what is called ‘fast urbanism’ ((Roggema, R., Special Issue Urban Planning 6:946-956, October 2015)). It is the natural preferred habit of planners, decision-makers and politicians, and many developers, economists and municipal land departments. It seems as if this way of future planning brings the highest revenues, and this may be true, on the short term and for only a limited part of involved groups in the city. The impact of this way of planning the city has negative consequences for our health in general (see Roggema, this volume, Chap. 5 ; Han and Keeffe, this volume, Chap. 4 ; Monti, this volume, Chap. 11 ), and more specifically the quality of nature and biodiversity in our urban and natural environments (Birtles, this volume, Chap. 10 ; Tillie, this volume, Chap. 6 ; Monti, this volume, Chap. 11 ; Backes et al., this volume, Chap. 3 ; Sijmons, this volume, Chap. 2 ). One way of coping with the effects is to ‘repair’ the damage after the city has been built. Aiming to increase the quality of small green spaces (Veldman, this volume, Chap. 13 ; Casagrande, this volume, Chap. 7 ), add temporary nature (Backes et al., this volume, Chap. 3 ), or greening buildings (Bosse, this volume, Chap. 15 ), could help to prevent the largest impacts of fast urbanism. However, this will always be a solution that repairs, or greenwashes urbanization that has neglected the natural systems in the first place.