TreeHugger: The Eco-Systemic Prototypical Urban Intervention

Designfor ResilientCommunities, 2023

The Systemic Approach to Architectural Performance (SAAP) looks at an ecosystem as a more-than-human community and searches for its synergy. It integrates Systems Oriented Design (SOD) and its tool gigamapping methodology for multi-stakeholders and multidisciplinary cocreation amongst humans, a ‘real-life codesign laboratory’ with more-than-human stakeholders and reflection. These appear in feedback loops. SAAP focuses on more-than-human edible and habitable landscapes in urban environments and their social and generative agendas. Therefore, it is using tools such as prototypical urban interventions such as insect hotels, etc., their DIY recipes and mobile applications to introduce a more-than-human economy, bridging the interventions, their DIY recipes and more-than-human social engagement. Therefore, a community member can be paid for reproducing a DIY recipe of an insect hotel, as well as the insect can be paid for its ecosystemic performance, such as pollination. Artificial intelligence is being used to recognise such performance for associating value. This should generate resilient communities of Post-Anthropocene where humans and nonhumans coperform in synergy. We are all dependent on the overall ecosystem. However, recent economic models and our urban environments do not reflect it. Therefore, we are facing Anthropocene Extinction, which is, of course, also destructive to humans. This paper mainly reflects on an ongoing project COLife.

2021

The traditional ecological and environmentalist thinking that theorised the 'return to nature' by contrasting cities and nature seems to be unable to remedy the destructive relationship between city and biosphere. For this reason, it is necessary to rethink the relationship between anthropised and biotic systems, in order to respect the objectives of the Paris Agreement. This rethinking process involves imagining a 'third space' with a positive environmental value, much like an intermediate landscape in which buildings and urban realities can be designed - in a backcasting process - as tools capable of incorporating different types of 'biospheric' capabilities. The essay investigates urban forestation technologies by evaluating their potential and long-term limitations in extreme climatic scenarios.

2013

This paper presents a very compact view of design, design processes and practices that forms a foundation for the concept of the design ecosystem. Design ecosystems are systems of connected and interacting designs, organized by the practices of the human participants of the ecosystem. The design ecosystem forms the context for any new designs and to creative activities, thus forming also the landscape for co-creation. Practices are also designs, and the design and adaptation of practices is the most common design activity for most people. Practices have an individual and a social dimension. New design is always based on earlier available design which forms the design toolkit. The abstract space of possible designs that can be achieved with the current resources, capabilities and constraints is the design space. Design platforms are dominant components especially in digital design ecosystems. These concepts are helpful for supporting a design-oriented analysis of diverse everyday lif...

CAADRIA Proceedings, 2019

The work fights for a shift from Anthropocene in urban environment through both, analogue and digital eco-systemic prototypical urban interventions, mixing biological as well as digital performances of post-digital landscape. It directly engages with the local human and non-human communities as well as it offers its online recipes and codes for DIY local iterations tagged in public space. Such intelligent and informed cultural landscape therefore covers several multi-layered generative and iterative agencies for its self-development.

Computing in Architecture Re-Thinking the Discourse-The Second International Conference of the Arab Society for Computer Aided Architectural Design (ASCAAD 2006) , 2006

ABSTRACT: Although cosmopolitanism implies global and even universal notions, encompassing compound readings of the urban fabric, it is essential to cultivate the specificities of place, especially during significant changes. Paradoxically, following Paul Ricoeur, how does participation in modern, universal civilization also involve surfacing rich, inherent sources for our interpretive thinking? As society becomes evermore complex, urban designs are mandated to critically correspond and emerge from systemic processes that foster productive and effective interchange of ideas from broad ranges to consequently respond with significant courses of action in the greater, immanent domain, while reciprocally preserving the inter-subjectivity of the individual-in-place. Participation in modern, universal civilization and its new technological manifestations need not leave behind cultural foundations but intrinsically surface rich, inherent sources for its future. This research focuses on the implications and applications of “critical environmentalism” as a quintessential epistemological framework for urban interventions while implementing digital applications that foster collective, round-table approaches to design, amalgamating multiple perspectives into a single, working plane. Critical environmentalism is an inclusive philosophy that addresses common issues currently emerging across numerous disciplines, but has not yet become part of mainstream architectural thinking. The concept incorporates critical social theory, practical hermeneutics, phenomenological embodiment, critical regionalism and place studies, as well as wide-ranging environmental and socio-cultural praxis. The tenets of critical environmentalism promote broader definitions of architecture, critically embodied and epistemologically accountable within a total life-space. Essentially centering the environment (Umwelt) as an encompassing and interconnecting catalyst between multiple disciplines and philosophies, it reciprocally fosters individual and critical identities associated with particular places, belief systems, and their participants. Critical environmentalism promotes a comprehensive, reciprocally unifying epistemological framework that can significantly inform architectural interventions to foster increased vitality and a certain co-invested attention to the complexities of the greater domain. This paper documents an approach to urban design and architectural education, implemented as a case-study and design scenario, where divergent perspectives amalgamate into emergent urban configurations, rooted in the conditional particularities of place. Following the above framework, the pedagogical approach fosters a critical (re)construction and on-going, co-vested regeneration of community and the context of place while attempting to converge multiple urban conditions and modes-of-thought through the dialogic co-application of various digital technologies. Critically understanding complex urban situations involves dialogically analyzing, mapping, and modeling a discursive, categorical structure through a common goal and rationale that seeks dialectic synthesis through comparison and contrast of divergent constructions while forming mutual, catalyzing connections and shared impetuses between varying facets of the epistemic and physical framework. Therefore, the process involved heuristically identifying varying facets of urban design into differing, even conflicting categories, using the technologies-at-hand effectively as the synthesizing tools. Various local particularities as well as their connectivity to global, cosmopolitan concerns are cross-pollinated to reveal new, syncretistic re-readings of urban space where multiple factors simultaneously come to bear. In essence, the integration of varying technologies in conjunction cultivates effective cross-pollination of ideas and modes through communicative and participatory interaction and as such provides greater ease in crosschecking between a multitude of divergent modes of thought playing upon urban design and community development. Since current digital technologies aid in data collection and the synthesis of information, varying factors can be more easily and collectively identified, analyzed, and then simultaneously used in subsequent design configurations. It inherently fosters the not fully realized potential to collectively overlay or montage complex patterns and thoughts seamlessly and to subsequently merge a multitude of corresponding design configurations simultaneously, which also has long-term implications as an on-going, usable database. As a result, the pedagogical process hermeneutically reveals richly textured socio-cultural fabrics and thus produces distinct amplifications in complexity and attentive management of diverse issues, while also generating significant narratives and themes for fostering creative and integrative solutions. As a model for urban community and social development, critical environmentalism is further supported the integrative use of digital technologies as an effective means and management for essential, communicative interchange of knowledge and thus rapprochement between divergent modes-of-thought, promoting critical, productive interaction with others in the (co)constructive processes of our life-space.

The design approach advocated in this paper makes one fundamental assumption: the appropriateness of any design is the extent to which it meets human needs and integrates sustainably into the life-supporting natural processes of the planetary biosphere. The author suggests that an aesthetic of health, based on ecological literacy, can inform the evaluation of the qualitative fit between design and its environment. Eco-literacy - a detailed understanding of nature as a complex, interacting, creative process in which humanity participates – results in a shift in perception toward an ecological ethics and aesthetics of participation that considers cultural, social and ecological, as well as economic value. As perception becomes informed by ecological literacy it can begin to bridge the dichotomy between the artificial and the natural, as well as between humanity and nature. Ecological literacy creates awareness of the fact that a disproportionate amount of the artificial environments, infrastructures, artefacts and processes that have been created since the Industrial Revolution are harmful to natural process and decrease the dynamic stability and health of the biosphere. The diversity of approaches within the Natural Design Movement affirms that we can create artefacts and processes that are expressions of appropriate participation in natural process. Sustainable and responsible design is a creative possibility and an ecological necessity. Ecological literacy emphasizes that humanity is an integral participant in natural processes, which are fundamentally unpredictable and uncontrollable. Local actions can have far reaching global effects. Interconnectedness results in cause and effect relationships within complex systems that are not linear but circular, multi-causal, and often time delayed. This awareness confronts us with the need to assume responsibility for the outcomes of our actions and furthermore changes the perception of humanity’s relationship to nature. The aim shifts from control and manipulation to appropriate participation. There is therefore an important ethical and aesthetic dimension to ecologically literate design. The Natural Design Movement shares an ecological worldview. The movement unites diverse disciplines ranging from ecological design, industrial and urban ecology, sustainable architecture and bioregional planning to ecological economics, eco-literate education and green politics. Furthermore it considers the philosophical, sociological and psychological implications of the ecological worldview. Design in the 21st century will be grounded in eco-literacy and aspire toward community-based designs that are adapted to the specific conditions of a particular place and culture. This paper concludes that long-term sustainable design has to integrate into natural processes as the basis for planetary and human health. There is an ecological dimension of ethics suggesting ecological imperatives that transcend the relativistic moralizing of purely socio-philosophical ethics. Eco-literacy creates awareness of these ecological imperatives that will help designers to create responsible and sustainable artefacts, processes and organizations. Designing the artificial as an expression of appropriate participation in natural process has to be based on ecological literacy and supported by the emerging aesthetics of health, also referred to as the ecological aesthetics of sustainability and the aesthetics of complex dynamic systems. Keywords: aesthetics, complexity, diversity, eco-literacy, ethics, health, interconnectedness, Natural Design Movement, participation, uncontrollability, unpredictability, salutogenesis, sustainability

Pluriversal Design Special Interest Group, 2021

In recent years, practitioners and researchers in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture and urban design have become increasingly interested in developing ecologically-informed design strategies. Within this setting, ecology is not simply a synonym for the environment, nor does it necessarily suggest a ‘green’ agenda; instead, it emphasizes a system-based holistic perspective of a given context. With such a definition in mind, a growing body of work acknowledges lessons acquired from ecological science, presenting natural systems as dynamic, interconnected, resilient, complex and indeterminate, and attempts to situate strategies for design within this flux. Yet, the tools and methods currently used by designers with which to advance such work are limited. The familiar practice of mapping, in formats such as spatial maps, timelines, organizational diagrams, and other modes of visualization, is the central driver currently used in presenting, synthesizing and mobilizing ecologically-oriented, systems-based design interventions. However, in most cases, such drivers are offered as-is, with little explication of their validity, assumptions and limits, and, as a result, are fundamentally bounded by the limits of ecological metaphor. Although metaphor is recognized as a useful communication tool across disciplines, there is a “rich technical world” that stands behind it; one which offers much opportunity to ecologically-informed design practice. Surpassing the boundaries of ecological metaphor demands a set of tools which can deal with managing the dynamic processes and forces, flows and feedback loops, which characterize ecological systems. While current techniques are helpful in isolating and abstracting certain aspects of these ecosystems, much of their inherent complexity is lost due to our human limits in managing and working with complex, parallel relational chains. Herein rests an opportunity for computational design to appropriate ecological modeling, as a point of access to the full technical richness of ecological science. In this context, the computational designer is able to abstract a problem for initial action and then, relying on the machine as an automatic accountant, incrementally rebuild the lost complexity, thereby allowing the relevant characteristics of the problem space to be maintained. An appropriation of ecological modeling into design practice offers a parametric and relational framework for advancing ecologically-informed design as a process of formation, which affords both generative and exploratory opportunities to the development of landscape infrastructure. Similarly, hybrid ecological models, which couple multi-disciplinary parameters and characteristics, offer a mechanism for simulating emergent ecological-urban possibility spaces, extending a designers ability to both navigate and cultivate epigenetic potentials, toward the formation of a synergistic territory where human-centered needs and ecosystem logics coexist to mutual benefit. Such a vision need not be utopian; emerging thinking and investigation surrounding natural capital and ecosystem services suggest that market-driven metrics need not be left behind. Drawing on existing precedents around the world of such redirected agency, we can begin to speculate on a new future for the post-industrial city that resists simple categorization and advances a new language for emerging landscape potentials.

Far from being antithetical to nature, cities are places where human and nonhuman actors come into intense contact and form complex assemblages, where resources are highly concentrated, and where various ecological principles are neglected, reinvented, or put to extreme test. A majority of writing on “the city,” however, leaves nature by the wayside. Meanwhile, the natural sciences, including ecology, often treat the urban context, and the social more generally, as external to their purview. This course—co-taught by a natural scientist and an arts and humanities scholar specialized in the built landscape—takes a hybrid approach, putting a number of specific urban ecological design projects at the center in order to begin unpacking the various issues at stake, especially by addressing them from the respective vantage points of design and ecological thinking. Among other topics, we will investigate: efforts to revitalize cities by way of greening them, wherein natural metaphors and economic imperatives collide; terrain vague, a concept with which both architecture and ecology have had overlapping, if somewhat differently-articulated, multi-decade love affairs for its promise of liminal, as-yet underexplored spaces as well as the potential for a kind of ruinous, postnatural re-wilding (or self-organized healing, depending on one’s perspective); and the growing fortification of cities by built and green infrastructure meant to ward off rising sea levels, urban heat islands, and other perceived environmental threats. Through this, we will consider, in shared step, key concepts and debates within ecology (e.g., restoration, ecosystem services, resilience, wild nature) and the humanities (e.g., social nature, climate justice, green capitalism) today. By switching between alternative, co-dependent, and sometimes conflicting, viewpoints, we aim to hone the skills for engaging in trans-disciplinary dialogue about the role of design in shaping urban nature, especially in a world characterized by ever more intensive urbanization and extreme ecological instability. Special events: field trip to Lettenpark; guest talks by Mierle Laderman Ukeles (USA), Ashley Dawson (USA), Lara Almarcegui (ESP/NL), Stalker (IT), and Michael Beuttler (DE).

2016

Citation for published version (APA): Lamm, B. (2016). From Alley to Garden: Co-Creating Spaces Through a Build-Design Process. In P. Bauer, M. Collender, M. Jakob, L. Ketterer Bonnelame, P. Petschek, D. Siegrist, & C. Tschumi (Eds.), Bridging the Gap. ECLAS Conference 2016, Rapperswil, Switzerland. Conference Proceeding (pp. 133-135). HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil,. Series of the Institute for Landscape and Open Space, HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswill, No. 14