Biophilic Urban Design

This dissertation aims to identify the opportunities and constraints for the implementation of biophilic design patterns and assess its need/importance in UK landscape architecture.

This dissertation has utilized various sources, including peer reviewed academic journal articles, recent publications, online
sources and personal communications with leading experts in the field of biophilic design, including William Browning, Catie Ryan, Timothy Beatley, Gayle Souter-Brown, Stephen Kellert, Val Kirby and Nick Grayson.

The methodology of this dissertation has included a literature review, professional work experience with Terrapin Bright Green (a company specialising in biophilic design in the built environment), interviews with professional UK landscape architects and biophilic design experts, two online surveys of UK based landscape architects and an educational workshop on biophilic design for UK based landscape architects.

The main findings of this dissertation have been: a knowledge deficit exists among UK landscape architects on biophilic design; no direct references to biophilic design exist in either local or national planning policy and; clients do not envision biophilic design as being important or necessary in their developments.

It is the recommendation of this dissertation to: incorporate biophilic design into landscape architecture university curricula; establish biophilic design CPD events; produce individual guidance documents for each project type on biophilic design; incentivise developers to incorporate biophilic design in their projects to increase acceptance and awareness; incorporate biophilic design into local and national planning policy and; found a national, multi disciplinary professional body for biophilic design in the UK, to oversee and help implement these recommendations.

Across the United States, the movement to reconnect children with nature has grown immensely in the past decade. Many urban children are disconnected from nature, yet nature can provide many important benefits and freedoms for these same children. Biophilic cities seek to incorporate nature into urban life at many scales. Because nature can play an important role in childhood development and because children operate at such small scales, this paper examines the characteristics of a biophilic city in the context of children's experience. Using case studies from Boulder, Colorado, U.S.A., we illustrate various aspects of biophilic cities that are successful in fostering nature experiences for children and provide design recommendations for other cities that may wish to incorporate biophilic elements into urban design.

How can streets reduce people’s daily stress and mental fatigue by becoming public spaces surrounded by natural, green, bright, and restorative environments? What are the principles for
designing such restorative streets?
Streets are a predominant element in cities. Defined as paths, conduits, structural lines, and even a place with its own rights, the design of streets is still an important issue to be understood and resolved in order to improve the residents’ quality of life. Stress is a public health concern that affects residents and is constantly originated by multiple circumstances.
This problem not only affects mental health but also overall well-being by reducing the capacity of people to restore themselves on a daily basis.
Environmental psychologists show that people can release stress and mental fatigue by providing cities with a restorative environment. Urban environments provided with natural light, vegetation, water and a certain amount of wilderness, increase the psychological restoration of people. Biophilic design, aimed at maintaining, enhancing, and restoring the beneficial experience of nature in the built environment, allows people to be part of the larger whole.
Streets can be designed as places that improve people’s well-being on a daily basis. The connection between environmental psychology (what works for well-being and why), and urban design (how to design urban spaces) is missing. This research is intended to fill this gap. Theoretical relationships among urban design theory on streets, environmental psychology and the restoration theory, and biophilic design will be presented. These interrelations become inputs to define guidelines for the future design of restorative streets.

Earth population is expected to increase to 9 billion in 2050, and 75% of that population will live in cities. The expansion of built areas causes loss of natural environments in cities, hence diminishing humans' connection with nature. The human need for nature is linked not just to the material exploitation of the environment but also to the influence of the natural world on our emotional, cognitive, aesthetic and even spiritual development. The quality of human life depends on an underlying beneficial relationship to nature. So people-nature connection and its benefits have become a major goal in sustainable urban landscape designs. Biophilic design and biophilic cities concepts could offer new opportunities in this endeavor by creating common language among architects, landscape architects and urban planners. While biophilic design has been implied on many examples on buildings, its urban scale applications have been rare. The present work explores the notion of biophilic city and displays the implementation of the biophilic design and biophilic cities concepts in Konyaaltı, Antalya, Turkey. Antalya Konyaaltı Beach Urban Design project is a nationally awarded design that aims to strengthen the relationship between nature, people and built environment in the city. The project focuses on how the biophilic ideas can be incorporated to the urban matrix by following a system approach.

Abstract
Hypotheses based on the concept of biophilia describe specific biological and psychological relationships between humans and the surrounding environment.
In the design context, it is an approach based on evolutionary, natural aspect of relationship between place and man, both in the everyday experience of hard definable quality of places to live, work, or study, as well as in emergency situations (eg. medical care or recovery). In architectural and urban design, environmental protection issues (against man), or energy efficiency (conservation of resources and/or climate against unsustainable exploitation and irreversible change), on a scale of not only individual buildings but whole urban areas, are becoming more widely accepted professionally, legally, or finally – by the general public. They are slowly, but surely, becoming an alternative standard in relation to construction and planning legal regulations. The inverse relationship – not only „protection against", but rather "benefits of" adapting the architectural and urban design to evolutionary relationships on both the level of biological and psychological with natural environment – is an interesting approach in interpretation and synthesis. This paper specifies the conditions and assumptions, interdisciplinary fields of implementation of design solutions, humanistic base and economic consequences of design based on biophilia.

Hipotezy bazujące na pojęciu biofilii opisują specyficzne, biologiczne i psychologiczne powiązania między człowiekiem i otaczającym go środowiskiem.
W kontekście projektowym określają podejście uwzględniające ewolucyjny, naturalny aspekt relacji między miejscem i człowiekiem, zarówno na polu codziennego doświadczania trudno definiowalnej jakości miejsca zamieszkania, pracy czy edukacji, jak i w sytuacjach wyjątkowych (np. opieki zdrowotnej, czy rekonwalescencji). W projektowaniu architektonicznym i urbanistycznym zagadnienia ochrony środowiska (przed człowiekiem) bądź efektywności energetycznej (ochrony zasobów i/lub klimatu przed niezrównoważoną eksploatacją i nieodwracalną zmianą), w skali nie tylko pojedynczych budynków, ale całych założeń urbanistycznych, zyskują coraz szerszą akceptację zawodową, prawną, czy wreszcie publiczną. Stają się powoli, lecz nieuchronnie, alternatywną normą w stosunku do prawa budowlanego. Odwrotna relacja – nie tylko „ochrony przed”, co raczej „korzyści z” dostosowania designu do ewolucyjnych relacji na poziomie zarówno biologicznym, jak i psychologicznym z naturalnym środowiskiem – jest podejściem interesującym w interpretacji i syntezie. Niniejszy tekst określa przesłanki i założenia, interdyscyplinarne pola implementacji rozwiązań projektowych, humanistyczne podstawy oraz ekonomiczne konsekwencje projektowania opartego na biofilii.

We cannot zero energy our way out of the climate crisis. With projections doubling our global
1
real estate footprint by 2060 to five trillion square feet,
standards and permit pathways should be updated with existing technology that promote resilience in the built environment. Cities are responsible for meeting the basic needs of its citizens in times of diminishing natural resources and impending climatic disasters. Current building policies around energy are both presently inefficient and insufficiently forward thinking as it relates to water’s relationship to energy. In order to build cities that are truly resilient in the face of growing water scarcity, city leaders should be integrating their energy and water policies, with an eye towards decentralizing outdated water infrastructure and promoting the creation of self-sustaining units which are both (i) energy efficient by today’s standards and (ii) contain building infrastructure and technology dynamic enough to harness the energy needed to achieve and maintain the water energy nexus for such unit in the future. In modern colloquial terms, this can be thought of as effectively crowdsourcing water and energy.