An Ecology for Cities: A Transformational Nexus of Design and Ecology to Advance Climate Change Resilience and Urban Sustainability

Daniel L. Childers, Mary L. Cadenasso, J. Morgan Grove, Victoria Marshall, Brian McGrath and Steward T. A. Pickett
Additional contact information
Daniel L. Childers: School of Sustainability, Arizona State University, Tempe, AZ 85287, USA
Mary L. Cadenasso: Department of Plant Sciences, University of California, Davis, CA 95616, USA
J. Morgan Grove: Forest Service, Baltimore, MD 21201, USA
Victoria Marshall: Parsons The New School for Design, New York, NY 10011, USA
Brian McGrath: Parsons The New School for Design, New York, NY 10011, USA
Steward T. A. Pickett: Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies, Millbrook, NY 12545, USA

Sustainability, 2015, vol. 7, issue 4, 1-18

Abstract: Cities around the world are facing an ever-increasing variety of challenges that seem to make more sustainable urban futures elusive. Many of these challenges are being driven by, and exacerbated by, increases in urban populations and climate change. Novel solutions are needed today if our cities are to have any hope of more sustainable and resilient futures. Because most of the environmental impacts of any project are manifest at the point of design, we posit that this is where a real difference in urban development can be made. To this end, we present a transformative model that merges urban design and ecology into an inclusive, creative, knowledge-to-action process. This design-ecology nexus—an ecology for cities—will redefine both the process and its products. In this paper we: (1) summarize the relationships among design, infrastructure, and urban development, emphasizing the importance of joining the three to achieve urban climate resilience and enhance sustainability; (2) discuss how urban ecology can move from an ecology of cities to an ecology for cities based on a knowledge-to-action agenda; (3) detail our model for a transformational urban design-ecology nexus, and; (4) demonstrate the efficacy of our model with several case studies.

Keywords: urban design; urban ecology; design-ecology nexus; urban sustainability; ecology for cities; climate change; climate adaptation; urban resilience (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: O13 Q Q0 Q2 Q3 Q5 Q56 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2015
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (31)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/4/3774/pdf (application/pdf)
https://www.mdpi.com/2071-1050/7/4/3774/ (text/html)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:gam:jsusta:v:7:y:2015:i:4:p:3774-3791:d:47533

Access Statistics for this article

Sustainability is currently edited by Ms. Alexandra Wu

More articles in Sustainability from MDPI
Bibliographic data for series maintained by MDPI Indexing Manager ().