FRAMEWORK FOR NATURE IN THE CITY
The Henry Halloran Research Trust
Biophilic Living Cities was developed under a generous grant received under Postdoctoral Urban Research Translation Scheme in 2022.
The Biophilic Potential..
Climate change is inevitable, with cities being most affected by rising temperatures. Greener cities are crucial, and solutions must contribute to a low-carbon future. Biophilic design, integrating natural elements, has potential to create greener, cooler cities. Initially a novel concept, biophilic city planning enhances human-nature connectedness by incorporating natural systems. Currently, biophilic design focuses on health and wellbeing, but there's significant potential for improved sustainability through natural processes.
The biophilic living cities framework emphasises sustainable performance, reducing heat gain, and supporting NetZero transitions using nature-based solutions.
Sensory and Performance together
The Biophilic Thought...
The aim of the Biophilic Living Cities framework is to facilitate designers to bridge between sensory place-making approach in biophilic design and environmental performance-based approach in sustainable design.
This required a thinking that can allow for a common categorisations for both approaches. Biophilic Thought is based on elemental view of nature. Hence, categories that are common are : Earth, Air, Water, Fire and Habitat
Categories
Structure
Five levels
Five categories are the highest level expanded with criteria that support the urban design to bring the elemental experience into the city. Urban design strategies are given for each criterion, further elaborated with typical urban components that could adopt the strategy at the next level. Urban level design strategies and urban components are proposed as a guidance.
This framework should be contextualised and developed into a planning guide to be applied for a certain context...
Contextualisation
..taking into consideration the climate, community, capacity and compliance..
These aspects are not included into the Biophilic Living Cities framework allowing the designers to integrate them if they were to develop specific design guides.
These aspects were also not considered explicitly in evaluations for credits at this framework level
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Biophilic Living Cities V.1.0 can be found here.
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