Industrial ecologies: Manufacturing the post-industrial landscape

Abstract

The sustainable design of urban centers has been the aspiration of many architects, urban designers, and planners throughout history. From Frank Lloyd Wright’s proposal for Broadacres City, Le Corbusier’s Radiant City, and the garden city movement, to the more recent principles of new urbanism and sustainable urbanism, the challenge of integrating the natural and built environment continues to allude designers. Sustainability in architectural research today centers around building performance and the technology and design principles that increase energy efficiency, reduce energy consumption, and minimize a building’s impact on the environment. On the scale of cities, environmentally conscious urban design practices, as defined by sustainable development, sustainable urbanism, and ecological urbanism also seek to minimize or prevent further degradation of ecological systems. Although diminishing the impact of the built environment on the natural world is crucial to the success of future generations, definitions of sustainability should be expanded to also include the restoration of any environmental degradation that already exists. The definition of regenerative urban development and regenerative cities captures this notion, but few case studies of how the entirety of the idea can be implemented exist. Given the inherent ecological damage associated with post-industrial sites, their rehabilitation offers an opportunity to implement these concepts to not only prevent further ecological degradation but to also restore the land itself.