Biophilic Cities: What Are They?

Abstract

While we are already designing biophilic buildings and the immediate spaces around them, we must increasingly imagine biophilic cities and should support a new kind of biophilic urbanism. Exactly what is a bio phiic city; what are its key features and qualities? Perhaps the simplest an swer is that it is a city that r~uts nature first in its design, planning, and management; it recognizes the essential need for daily human contact with nature as well as the many environmental and economic values provided by nature and natural systems. A biophilic city is at its heart a biodiverse city; a city full of nature, a place where in the normal course of work and play and life residents feel, see, and experience rich nature—plants, trees, animals. The nature is both large and small—from treetop lichens, invertebrates, and even microorgan isms to larger natural features and ecosystems that define a city and give it its character and feel. Biophilic cities cherish what already exists (and there is much, as we have already seen) but also work hard to restore and repair what has been lost or degraded and to integrate new forms of nature into the design of every new structure or built project.We need contact with na ture, and that nature can also take the form of shapes and images integrated into building designs, as we will see. I have written much in the past about green cities and green urbanism, and I continue to argue for the importance of this broader agenda. Biophilic urban design and biophiic urban planning represent one particular, albeit critical, element of green urbanism—the connection with and designing—in of nature in cities. In recognizing the innate need for a connection to nature, biophilic cities tie the argument for green cities and green urbanism more directly to human well-being than to energy or envi ronmental conservation. For some the vision of green cities is not especially green—placing the emphasis on such things as investments in transit, renewable energy production, and energy-efficient building systems. Again, these are all im portant topics as we reimagine and redefine sustainable urban living in the 45 46 Chapter 3. Biophilic Cities: What Are They? twenty—first century. But biophilic cities place the focus squarely on the fla~ ture, on the presence and celebration of the actual green features, life-forn-is, and processes with which we as a species have so intimately coevolved. While there is much overlap between biophiic cities and green ur banism, mostly complementary, there may also be ways in which these areas diverge or part. A biophiic city, as I will elucidate below, is even more than simply a biodiverse city: It is a place that learns from nature and emulates natural systems, incorporates natural forms and images into its buildings and cityscapes, and designs and plans with nature. Celebrating an urban building that assumes the shape of a form in nature, or encouraging ornamentation and textures that build connections to place and geology and natural his tory, are clearly biophilic but likely outside the usual rubric of green cities. The love of and care for nature, the core value in biophilic cities, extends even beyond its borders to take steps and programs and actions that help to defend and steward over nature in other parts of the globe. And the green elements of cities serve many other important functions—they retain stormwater, sequester carbon, cool the urban environment, and moderate the impacts of air pollution, for example. For me, biophilic urbanism rep resents a creative mix of green urban design with a commitment to out door life and the protection and restoration of green infrastructure from iEthe bioregional to the neighborhood level. The ability to reach on foot,