Ecology | IDEAS

A hundred years ago, landscape architect Arthur Comey proposed Houston’s first comprehensive city plan. In his plan, Comey envisioned the city’s bayous overlaid with a network of parks and trails. As he wrote, the “bayous and creek valleys readily lend themselves to trails and parks and cannot so advantageously be used for any other purpose.”… Read more »

But in the 1930’s, in response to major floods that engulfed the city, work began clearing, straightening and enlarging the bayous. Flood mitigation projects continued through the 1960s, in some cases eliminating all riparian vegetation and lining the channel with concrete. Construction of thoroughfares and freeways encouraged the spread of the city far beyond Comey’s plan and encroached on lands that might have been intended for bayou parkways.

However in the last 40 years, there has been a proliferation of grassroots organizations and programs to protect and enhance Houston bayous and reduce flooding in environmentally sustainable ways, including the Houston Parks Board, The Bayou Preservation Association, the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, the White Oak Bayou Association, the Brays Bayou Association, the Sims Bayou Coalition, the Cypress Creek Flood Control Coalition and the Greens Bayou Corridor Coalition, among others. These organizations, each with a unique point of view depending on the special circumstances of the bayou they represent, all work to influence the outcomes of the primary government agencies whose projects impact the bayous: the Harris County Flood Control District and the US Army Corps of Engineers.

One particular bayou success story has been that of the Buffalo Bayou Promenade. Sponsored by the Buffalo Bayou Partnership, the 1.2 mile long Buffalo Bayou Promenade is a critical link that connects Buffalo Bayou Park to Houston’s theater district and downtown. Prior to its creation, development had turned its back on this portion of the bayou. Freeway structures blocked light and shed sheets of water off their sides during rain storms. Pedestrians in this portion of the bayou were more than 30′ below the grade of the surrounding streets, out of view and with few access points. Invasive plantings were overgrown and created unsafe walking conditions.

Forward to today. Re-grading of the site helped to improve views into the park while reducing the impact of erosion and improving flood water conveyance. A system of stair and ramp connecting points at each roadway crossing provides safe, convenient and frequent access opportunities and commissioned artwork frames each park portal providing a link between the city’s art district and its historic channel. Buffalo Bayou Promenade is not only a successful park and pedestrian environment but it also provides the city of Houston with highly effective flood control and storm water management.

The success of Buffalo Bayou Promenade is just one story among many of the major change in awareness of the importance of Houston’s bayous. Major works are under way along Brays Bayou, Sims Bayou, Clear Creek, Cypress Creek and White Oak Bayou. These and others are testaments to the persistence of Arthur Comey’s vision and they demonstrate how parks and greenspaces can improve the economy, the environment and the health of the city.

But there is more work to do and there is no better time than the present. Property values throughout Houston will continue to climb and there is now the opportunity to purchase distressed properties along the city’s bayous in the hopes of further revitalizing and expanding Houston’s parks and greenspaces before those properties are sold for development or redevelopment.

The national non-profit organization Redfields to Greenfields hopes to help do just that. Their goal is to acquire adjoining properties along Houston’s major bayous and protect them and convert them from existing industrial or commercial use into greenspace and to help create one continuous greenbelt.

In addition, the Bayou Greenway Initiative – a $480 million effort led by the Houston Parks Board – is working to secure 4,900 acres of new greenspace that will control flooding, provide storm water management and more than 300 miles of continuous hike and bike trails along the bayous.

As a landscape architect and long-time Houston resident, I believe there is tremendous value in preserving, protecting and restoring the city’s bayous. Not only do the city’s bayous provide important natural habitat corridors for plants and wildlife, but Houston’s bayou’s are also an amazing, almost untapped recreational resource for a fast growing urban population and play a vital role in establishing the city’s identity well into its future.

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Posted by KevinShanley
in Bayou By Us
on 1 May, 2012

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Urban heat island effect is measured as the temperature difference between the air within the urban canopy layer and that measured in rural areas. Built urban environments can suppress air movements, obstructing cool flows and exacerbating pollution. However, as Alexander Robinson argues in his research for SWA, “high density cities may be our best sustainable… Read more »

FORMATTED Freeway Potential Heat Island Mitigation_001

Borne of the urban condition, urban heat island effect has even more complex impacts, from precipitating the formation of smog (as temperature rises) to creating scenarios that encourage huge consumptions of energy (e.g. air conditioners during a heat island-induced heat wave). This phenomenon is mainly caused by the absorption of solar radiation by urban surfaces, and subsequent trapping of the heat-energy by the geometries of built environments. Mitigating these impacts is just as complex.

Los Angeles is currently posed for worsening heat island effects. Projected temperature rises from global warming will make Los Angeles hotter regardless of heat island effect. With a growing population, the increased development and mineralization of the urban environment seems inevitable. Surface modification, in the form of rooftop greening, has the potential to mitigate heat islands in Los Angeles. The temperature was moderated at one point in history with surface modification: the agricultural irrigation of orchards drastically dropped summer temperatures. The most water-efficient method of surface modification are trees, which produce deep shade and comfortable microclimates.

Facilitated air movement and surface modification are used as urban heat mitigation techniques. The city of Stuttgart in Germany provides an excellent precedent in designing for air movement to mitigate urban heat island effect. The city’s Urban Climatology department has identified areas critical for nocturnal air flows, called “STEP” zones. Cold-air generators (e.g. agricultural fields, forests, oceans) and flow corridors are identified and protected from development, so cool air can flow into the otherwise poorly ventilated city at night. Corridors must be at least 100m wide and kept free of obstructions (including trees).

Many reports provided in Alexander Robinson’s research for SWA recommend wider streets and stepped back buildings to improve air circulation. Depending on urban geometry, freeways have the potential to act as corridors for cool-air movement. Perhaps freeways can be enlisted in moving cool air from the Pacific Ocean through the urban neighborhoods of Los Angeles?

Alexander Robinson was a designer at SWA from 2007-2009. He is currently an Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Masters of Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Southern California.

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Posted by YingYuHung
in Landscape Infrastructure
on 27 March, 2012

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Urban landscapes are most often designed within a limited range of expectations. Visually interesting, sometimes providing important ecosystem services, designed landscape environments should include other, richer possibilities. There are urban farms. There are community, rooftop and kitchen gardens. There are growing numbers of people interested in reducing the carbon and energy footprint of our foods…. Read more »

There are urban farms. There are community, rooftop and kitchen gardens. There are growing numbers of people interested in reducing the carbon and energy footprint of our foods. Even more dedicated people are actively engaged in efforts to provide sustainable local foods and healthier eating choices.

Groups and individuals are mobilizing to locate suitable land, organize communities and figure out ways to bring food and the process closer where people live in urban areas. These admirable efforts often focus on locating suitable, often under-utilized land, volunteer labor or people ready to support the vision, subscribe to the effort (CSA’s), provide opportunities for weekend-warrior gardeners (community gardens) or other creative mechanisms to bring food into our urban settings. These endeavors also include myriad educational and sales efforts enlisting legions of backyard gardeners into the fray.

While all of these activities are great, perhaps we are not fully seeing the forest through the trees (or the orchard through the windrow). There are thousands upon thousands of acres of land, currently landscaped with often ample budgets for maintenance that could be converted or adapted to include food-producing components. These lands are in public and private ownership and will require creativity and design to introduce changes to these non-farm landscapes, overcoming conventional expectations and sometimes cost and aesthetic barriers as well.

Our cities include vast areas of suburban residential landscapes: in yards, streets, parks and buffer lands. Corporate and institutional campuses typically include significant areas of landscaped grounds for visual interest, recreation, visual buffering and other functional uses for employees and visitors. Maintenance budgets for these types of sites are often in the $.50-1.00 per square foot per year (significant amounts when compared to many types of traditional farming operations). Introducing employee gardens or other food-producing landscapes could simply divert a portion of the money already spent on these single-purpose landscapes could provide a diversity of additional benefits. Particularly for corporate, medical or educational campuses with cafeterias, the on-site gardens could supplement daily food needs: Organic, of course, no transport costs and fresh! Imagine the dramatic allees of trees that often grace our landscape plans, still flowering in spring, but producing fruit in summer and fall? What if the climbing vines produced fruit? What if the pears and olives were the fruiting varieties, not the sterile or male only varieties–same landscape sensibilty from a formalistic standpoint perhaps, but richer in production and utility? What if parks and streetscapes, in addition to underutilized road and utility rights of way actually produced food? Many difficult questions need to be addressed, of course. Who takes care of these landscapes? Who picks the fruit? Who is the market and how does it get from tree/plant to consumer? These are important operational and logistical questions, but forward thinking designers, farmers and commercial landscape maintenance companies are exploring these issues, particularly the diverting of traditional landscape maintenance monies into “urban farming” efforts. Give our broad-based approach to design, landscape architects are the on the forefront of these trends: understanding and accommodating the unique operational needs of productive landscapes; balancing ecological functions, and considering the aesthetic and experiential result of our designs—to the benefit of our cities and communities.

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Posted by JoeRunco
in Urban Agriculture
on 27 January, 2012

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In recent posts we’ve been discussing art and science as related to ecology. Art and science are two concepts that are generally considered to be binaries-terms in opposition to one another. Yet we are interested in creating hybrids between these two, exploring relationships in which art and science are fused together in our design methodology…. Read more »

Hybridity refers to a mixture in which the constituting parts are not just combined but thoroughly distributed amongst one another. Hybrids maintain characteristics from their original elements yet form distinctly unique conditions and relationships. Initially a biological or agricultural term, hybridity has also become a philosophical term espoused to linguistics and more broadly, globalization—not just referencing recent forms of globalization but focused on the way in which civilizations have mixed throughout human development. (See Jan Nederveen Pieterse, Globalization and Culture: global mélange, 2004). Hybridity itself has become a mix of both science and culture.

The hybridization of art and science within an ecological design methodology has the potential to create innovative relationships not otherwise possible when starting from either condition on its own. Akin to the classic form versus function tug-of-war that permeated design methodologies throughout the 20th century, hybridity suggests form AND function, creating no distinction between the successes of one ideal versus the other.

In our design methodology of built environments, we strive to create as little distinction between the art and science of our proposals, believing that one is integrally tied to the other—beauty is analogous to the organization of natural processes. Just as art is a process of creation through the properties of its medium, design of the built environment can use properties of natural processes as the medium for formal expression. Not only does this fuse the performative characteristics of design to the formal characteristics, it also suggests that the design process may be more closely linked to the actual construction process. Just as art is the creation—the final product, a hybridized design methodology may move beyond just an a priori representation to become the actual final creation. As form and performance are more closely tied together, design becomes less focused on the final form than on a process, constructed and natural.

Thus, we seek to combine the scientific understanding of natural processes with their formal exhibition into an artistic composition that reflects an intentional vision. This is the form of ecology.

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Posted by Andrew Watkins
in Urban Ecologies
on 21 January, 2012

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If there is magic on this planet, it is contained in water…. Its substance reaches everywhere; it touches the past and prepares the future; it moves under the poles and wanders thinly in the heights of air. It can assume forms of exquisite perfection in a snowflake, or strip the living to a single shining… Read more »

As urban designers we are at once moved by the tremendous challenges facing our urban imprint upon the land—the city; and its affect upon our planet—her atmosphere, oceans, and living systems. In our search for solutions, we look to nature for guidance; that perhaps within her experimentation with complex outcomes and interdependence there exists a clue to our built environment. The following three projects are an exploration of this relationship between nature and the city; of not only a latent attempt to emulate her beauty, but her processes as well.

In The Art of Ecology we attempt to paint urban solutions as an artist paints the landscape, with an eye towards boldness; but understanding that our limited attempt is only the first step in unlocking the relationship between ecology and urban development.

The inspiration behind Jining New City, Rugao District, and the Shunde Guipan Riverfront lies in capturing what is unique and most beautiful about the place and enhancing it. In all three, we explore the most fundamental landscape element of the site, the river, and its affect upon urban pattern.

In all three, though representing various scales of development, the idea of water or canal is rooted in the history of the place and has influenced the growth of their respective locations since their inception. In all three, emulating the art of ecology is less about imitating her physical beauty, but more about learning from her processes.

Imitating Ecology

Beyond the mere inspiration of her beauty and formal language, we must begin to understand natures processes in our attempt to imitate her. From the air, we are inspired by natures patterns; of vast forests and grasslands, weaving mosaics of color, but must ask ourselves, what is the science behind this painted canvas? Are there natural laws that govern her art?

For example, flat terrain often leads to braided water systems that seek to find paths of least resistance, responsive to the forces of fluid dynamics. The end result are often tree-like patterns that grow and branch, moving and changing relative to fluctuating environmental conditions. As the finer-grained water systems branch out, increased edge conditions result, giving way to a variety of opportunities. Environmentally these opportunities manifest in the increased ability for nutrient exchange (along the edges of wetland marsh) and organism exchange (predator and prey along open water edges versus protected grassy waters). Maximizing edge surface area increases opportunity for exchange. Within the urban context, a similar relationship can be said to exist between circulation (roads) and real estate (commercial property); and yet again between residential property values and green space (parks). And so the opportunity exists to exploit this corollary between edge intensity; namely water and real estate, evolving this braided ecology into a kind of braided urbanism.

Filtering Ecologies, Filtering Urbanism

At the same time, all three sites exhibit a need to improve water quality. At Jining, the project area exists at a critical threshold between existing city and major lake; at Rugao, the proposed development straddles a key bend along a polluted river; and at Shunde the proposed river park lies between a new city and a culturally important waterway. As an ecological principle, braided systems have the ability to increase filtration capacity through increased edge condition and nutrient exchange. Thus, by incorporating this braided design as a fundamental framework for urban development, we can conceptually increase the filtering capacity of city-making.

These braided water patterns then give rise to braided districts and braided neighborhoods, each varying in land use (commercial, residential) and density. Furthermore, density (apartment towers versus single family) can have a direct correlation with water pattern; more course and larger waterways create larger islands and greater flexibility for higher densities, while finer-grained waterways create opportunities for more secluded low densities (single-family residential). A wholistic pattern begins to emerge in which real estate and development objectives coincide with and compliment environmental ones. A braided ecology becomes a braided and filtering urbanism.

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Posted by SeanOMalley
in Arts and Culture
on 21 January, 2012

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As designers, we have the responsibility to intentionally form the urban environment, to “paint the city in bold strokes, as O’Malley writes in “The Art of Ecology, the Art of Urbanism,” inspired by the way natural processes create beautiful patterns at a large scale. O’Malley’s post triggered some critical ideas about our intentionality as designers, specifically in relation to the method or process by which we transfer design inspirations into our own formal concepts. Ecological design inspiration from natural patterns brings up an interesting problem: we find inexplicable beauty in the form of nature, forms that we desire to emulate both for their formal beauty and for their ecological performance, yet nature does not rely on the intention of a designer for its form but rather on a set of natural laws and processes—gravity, erosion, climate—that have acted upon the earth based upon rules set in place long ago.

Several questions arise: In the same manner that natural patterns do not rely directly on a designer for their formal expression, should designers focus their design intention on forms or processes—that is, static descriptions or flexible guidelines? How much can we control the formal product of a design in a flexible, ever-changing environment? Should we think of ‘form’ as an initial intervention, subject to change over time, or as a fixed entity, such that the landscape never changes? Increasingly in our work, we strive to create places that change over time – that bend and yield with the processes and systems of the landscape. How do we draw this? How do we design this? In the end, how do we communicate our vision for an ecological city – something that is always changing over time? The subject of our intention—the agency with which we design and communicate our ideas—continues to be a topic of critical discussion.

An enlightening correlation to both these questions and O’Malley’s original poetic reference to the painter can be found in James Corner’s exploration of representation. In ‘Representation and Landscape’, Corner describes how an artist’s medium directly influences the formal representation of their intention—the medium, be it paint or metal or a digital tool, determines a set of possibilities in the final piece. In some regards, the final piece embodies the performative characteristics of its medium, not just the design intent. In fact, as Corner recognizes, some artists may not know the final form of the piece when they begin their work but rather rely on the properties of the medium with which they are working to lead them to the final form. [Corner]

For ecological design, our mediums are the processes—natural, social, and economic—that define a living system or an urban environment. Ecological design, as defined by Van der Ryn and Cowan, is “any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes.” [Van der Ryn]

Corner goes on to identify that designers are one step removed in the artist’s process—our hands do not touch the materials that will finally construct our designs. Rather, we use representations, traditionally drawings and models, to communicate our design intent to a builder—the intermediary who actually constructs the project. For Corner, the distanced condition of the designer from their medium results in an informative essay on representation, an exploration of the drawings we use as designers. For us, particularly in ecological design, this same realization allows us the opportunity to identify the medium with which we do directly interact and construct a process in which we may ‘paint’—in which we explore the relationship between medium and form. Our challenge is to understand the connection between the formal and performative characteristics of ecological processes within the strategy of our design intent.

References:

Corner, James. ‘Representation and Landscape’. Theory in Landscape Architecture: A Reader, 2002.

Van der Ryn S, Cowan S. Ecological Design. Island Press, 1996, p.18

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