Socio-ecological resilience and urban design : defining the common ground and a way forward for practice

The macro-trends revolving around urbanisation call for revising current approaches to urban development. In this context, the concept of resilience, originally developed in system ecology, has been deemed as a useful framework to address to these challenges and as an explanatory method to describe the complex dynamics regulating urban systems. However, while resilience science has gained importance in the academic debate in vulnerability and risk management, urban planning and governance, it is only superficially investigated in the field of urban design. This paper aims at bridging the gap between urban design and socio-ecological resilience, advocating a resilience-based approach to the design of urban systems. Currently, existing literature addressing the relationship between urban design and resilience focuses on two main issues: 1) the need for a common ground upon which to build the bridge between socio-ecological resilience and urban design; 2) the need for a clear and solid conceptual framework for urban designers to foster resilience in the built environment. The paper formulates suggestions on how these issues could be addressed. These are: 1) the definition of urban morphology as the common ground upon which the bridge between resilience in system ecology and in urban design should be built, and 2), on this common ground, the definition of a research route to link approach to sustainable urban design to socio-ecological resilience. The paper concludes by presenting possible future research steps

Masterplanning for change : lessons and directions

Unprecedented worldwide urbanisation, financial instability, climate change and emerging new lifestyles are challenging the capacity of cities to attract and retain people and activities. Particularly, as many masterplan-driven developments realised from the second half of last Century have been criticised for their inability to cope with changing needs and uncertainty of future outcomes and for their incongruity with native physical, socio-economic and environmental contexts, the need to reform conventional approaches to masterplanning is now pressing. As cities competitiveness and success depends on their capacity to meet these manifold challenges, a new generation of masterplans has emerged over the recent years to respond more clearly to the sustainability agenda. However as we become increasingly aware that cities are inherently unstable and prone to unpredictable change over time, to complement the concern for sustainability, resilience as applied in the field of system-ecology needs now consideration. The paper argues that re-evaluating masterplanning against the theoretical framework of resilience would help defining a reformed approach, referred to as “Masterplan for Change”, more openly aimed at giving strategic direction and spatial quality to places, while accommodating modification over time. However the role of resilience in guiding urban design and masterplanning is still marginal. Hence, the fundamental link between sustainability and resilience is clarified and a preliminary list of guiding principles of “Masterplan for Change”, emerged from combination between urban design sustainability and socio-ecological resilience principles, suggested

Design for change : five proxies for resilience in the urban form

The sheer complexity and unpredictability characterizing cities challenges the adequacy of existing disciplinary knowledge and tools in urban design and highlights the necessity to incorporate explicitly the element of change and the dimension of time in the understanding of, and intervention on, the form of cities. To this regard the concept of resilience is a powerful lens through which to understand and engage with a changing world. However today resilience is addressed by urban designers only superficially, and an explicit effort to relate elements of urban form to resilience principles is still lacking, representing a great limit for urban designers, as form is their elective medium of intervention in the urban system. As first steps to overcome this gap, we explore in this work the combination of established knowledge in urban morphology and urban design, with knowledge developed in resilience theory and we look at the configuration of, and interdependencies between, different urban elements from the perspective of five proxies of urban form resilience, namely diversity, redundancy, modularity, connectivity and efficiency. After defining each proxy in resilience theory and in relation to urban form, we address them at five different scales which are relevant to urban morphology and urban design: plot, street edge, block, street and sanctuary area / district

The Road to Masterplanning for Change and the Design of Resilient Places

Knowing what to design is the foresight that tomorrow’s cities need more than anything. This paper presents the Urban Design Studies Unit of the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow’s coordinated approach to research in different areas of urbanism, and how we used such approach in evidence‐based masterplanning. To explain what is unarguably a complex approach to the design of the city, this paper will start with an overview into our group’s point of view on cities, and continue with a short summary of our journey to learn some aspects of how cities are. We will touch upon a few milestones only, but hopefully enough to explain the questions that have led us to what we call ‘Masterplanning for Change’, our normative approach to city design

From system ecology to urban morphology : towards a theory of urban form resilience

As cities grow in scale and complexity, the extent to which their urban forms will be able resist, adapt to or co-evolve under unpredictable circumstances and fulfil needs different from those they were originally designed for, may be crucial for the very survival of cities. In this context, the concept of resilience, originated in ecology as a way to deal with change and uncertainty in ecological systems, particularly in its ‘evolutionary’ interpretation, has gained salience in relation to urban systems where, not unlike in other kinds of complex adaptive systems, change can both be triggered by external idiosyncratic shocks and emerge gradually from internal processes of self-organisation, and is now considered as pivotal for the design and management of the built environment. Whilst several authors have tried to build a bridge between resilience thinking and urban design, the role of the morphological structure of cities in enabling or constraining resilient responses has never been addressed systematically and, indeed, evidence that the framework of evolutionary resilience can be extended to the urban form is hardly systematic. To overcome this gap, this article seeks to evidence the link between urban form and resilience theory. This is done by building a parallel between concepts, models and organisational principles developed in system ecology to explain dynamics of change in ecosystems (i.e. Adaptive Cycles, Panarchy), to analogous models developed independently in the discipline of urban morphology to describe dynamics of change in urban form (i.e. Burgage Cycle, Territorial Development Cycle, Urban Form Compositional Hierarchy). On this basis, a new theoretical model of urban form change grounded on an understanding of urban form as complex system, is formalised, substantiating the application of evolutionary resilience urban form

Principio de buena fe

Se estructura un análisis del principio de buena fe a la luz del Código Civil y Comercial dela Nación, analizando su sistematización, antecedente y ubicación. Se centra el análisis del significado del Principio y su evolución. Se estudia su valoración y funciones en doctrina y jurisprudencia. Asimismo, se analiza sus efectos en los contratos.Palabras Claves: Principio de Buena Fe – Contratos – Código Civil y Comercia

Urban form resilience urban design practice : masterplanning for change

As cities grow in scale and complexity, the extent to which their urban forms will be able resist, adapt to or co-evolve under unpredictable circumstances and fulfil needs different from those they were originally designed for, may be crucial for the very survival of cities. In this context, the concept of resilience, originated in ecology as a way to deal with change and uncertainty in ecological systems, particularly in its ‘evolutionary’ interpretation, has gained salience in relation to urban systems where, not unlike in other kinds of complex adaptive systems, change can both be triggered by external idiosyncratic shocks and emerge gradually from internal processes of self-organisation, and is now considered as pivotal for the design and management of the built environment. Whilst several authors have tried to build a bridge between resilience thinking and urban design, the role of the morphological structure of cities in enabling or constraining resilient responses has never been addressed systematically and, indeed, evidence that the framework of evolutionary resilience can be extended to the urban form is hardly systematic. To overcome this gap, this article seeks to evidence the link between urban form and resilience theory. This is done by building a parallel between concepts, models and organisational principles developed in system ecology to explain dynamics of change in ecosystems (i.e. Adaptive Cycles, Panarchy), to analogous models developed independently in the discipline of urban morphology to describe dynamics of change in urban form (i.e. Burgage Cycle, Territorial Development Cycle, Urban Form Compositional Hierarchy). On this basis, a new theoretical model of urban form change grounded on an understanding of urban form as complex system, is formalised, substantiating the application of evolutionary resilience urban form

Evolution of Urban Patterns: Urban Morphology as an Open Reproducible Data Science

The recent growth of geographic data science (GDS) fuelled by increasingly available open data and open source tools has influenced urban sciences across a multitude of fields. Yet there is limited application in urban morphology—a science of urban form. Although quantitative approaches to morphological research are finding momentum, existing tools for such analyses have limited scope and are predominantly implemented as plug-ins for standalone geographic information system software. This inherently restricts transparency and reproducibility of research. Simultaneously, the Python ecosystem for GDS is maturing to the point of fully supporting highly specialized morphological analysis. In this paper, we use the open source Python ecosystem in a workflow to illustrate its capabilities in a case study assessing the evolution of urban patterns over six historical periods on a sample of 42 locations. Results show a trajectory of change in the scale and structure of urban form from pre-industrial development to contemporary neighborhoods, with a peak of highest deviation during the post-World War II era of modernism, confirming previous findings. The wholly reproducible method is encapsulated in computational notebooks, illustrating how modern GDS can be applied to urban morphology research to promote open, collaborative, and transparent science, independent of proprietary or otherwise limited software

Big box, short life: little box, long life : the democracy of resilience: plot-based urbanism, evolution and informal participation

Sergio Porta, Ombretta Romice, Alessandra Feliciotti and David Rudlin explore how greater planning clarity would permit more self-build and fundamentally better and more sustainable patterns of development and desig

Morphological tessellation as a way of partitioning space : improving consistency in urban morphology at the plot scale

Urban Morphometrics (UMM) is an expanding area of urban studies that aims at representing and measuring objectively the physical form of cities to support evidence-based research. An essential step in its development is the identification of a suitable spatial unit of analysis, where suitability is determined by its degree of reliability, universality, accessibility and significance in capturing essential urban form patterns. In Urban Morphology such unit is found in the plot, a fundamental component in the morphogenetic of urban settlements. However, the plot is a conceptually and analytically ambiguous concept and a kind of spatial information often unavailable or inconsistently represented across geographies, issues that limit its reliability and universality and hence its suitability for Urban Morphometric applications. This calls for alternative methods of deriving a spatial unit able to convey reliable plot-scale information, possibly comparable with that provided by plots. This paper presents Morphological Tessellation (MT), an objectively and universally applicable method that derives a spatial unit named Morphological Cell (MC) from widely available data on building footprint only and tests its informational value as proxy data in capturing plot-scale spatial properties of urban form. Using the city of Zurich (CH) as case study we compare MT to the cadastral layer on a selection of morphometric characters capturing different geometrical and configurational properties of urban form, to test the degree of informational similarity between MT and cadastral plots. Findings suggest that MT can be considered an efficient informational proxy for cadastral plots for many of the tested morphometric characters, that there are kinds of plot-scale information only plots can provide, as well as kinds only morphological tessellation can provide. Overall, there appears to be clear scope for application of MT as fundamental spatial unit of analysis in Urban Morphometrics, opening the way to large-scale urban morphometric analysis