Contemporary Urban Design Thinking Rob Roggema Editor Nature Driven Urbanism Contemporary Urban Design Thinking Series Editor Rob Roggema Research Centre for the Built Environment NoorderRuimte Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen, The Netherlands CITTA IDEALE Office for Adaptive Planning Wageningen, The Netherlands This series will investigate contemporary insights in urban design theory and practice. Urbanism has considerably changed and developed over the years and is about to undergo a transformation moving into a new era. In the 1990’s and early 2000’s economic driven urban design was prevalent in many countries around the world. Moving forward it is no longer feasible to continue to develop in the same way and new ideas for creating urbanism are urgently required. This series will publish titles dealing with innovative methods of urbanism including, sustainability driven urbanism, smart urbanism, population driven urbanism, and landscape based urban design. The series will include books by top researchers and leaders in the fields of urban design, city development and landscape urbanism. The books will contain the most recent insights into urbanism and will provide actual and timely reports filling a gap in the current literature. The series will appeal to urbanists, landscape architects, architects, policy makers, city/urban planners, urban designers/researchers, and to all of those interested in a wide-ranging overview of contemporary urban design innovations in the field. More information about this series at http://www.springer.com/series/15794 Rob Roggema Editor Nature Driven Urbanism Editor Rob Roggema Research Centre for the Built Environment NoorderRuimte Hanze University of Applied Sciences Groningen, The Netherlands CITTA IDEALE Office for Adaptive Planning Wageningen, The Netherlands ISSN 2522-8404 ISSN 2522-8412 (electronic) Contemporary Urban Design Thinking ISBN 978-3-030-26716-2 ISBN 978-3-030-26717-9 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26717-9 © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 This work is subject to copyright. 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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Contents 1 Nature-Driven Urbanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 1 Rob Roggema 2 Contrast, Contact, Contract; Pathways to Pacify Urbanization and Natural Processes . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 9 Dirk Sijmons 3 Temporary Nature - A Win-Win for Nature and Developers: Tinkering with the Law in Order to Combat Biodiversity Loss . . . . . 43 Chris Backes, Arnold van Kreveld, and Hendrik Schoukens 4 Stepping-Stone City: Process-Oriented Infrastructures to Aid Forest Migration in a Changing Climate . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Qiyao Han and Greg Keeffe 5 Landscape First! Nature-Driven Design for Sydney’s Third City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 81 Rob Roggema 6 From Urban Green Structure to Tidal River in Rotterdam: Testing Grounds for Urban Ecology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 111 Nico Tillie 7 From Urban Acupuncture to the Third Generation City . . . . . . . . . . 131 Marco Casagrande 8 Urbanism on Water and Ecology: The Early Example of Westerpark, Breda . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 155 Rob Roggema 9 Blue Design for Urban Resilience in Drylands: The Case of Qatar . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 175 Anna Grichting v vi Contents 10 South Creek in Far Western Sydney: Opportunities for a New Waterway Focused City . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 209 Phillip James Birtles 11 Nature-Inclusive Cities: Concepts and Considerations . . . . . . . . . . . . 225 Stewart Monti 12 Exploring New Urban Futures Through Sydney’s Hidden Grids . . . 249 Mark Tyrrell 13 A Bold Vision for Sydney’s Future . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 261 Dajon Veldman 14 A Contemporary Approach to the Design of Road Transport Infrastructure in Balance with the Landscape . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 283 Gareth Paul Collins 15 Bio-inspiration: Merging Nature and Technology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 301 Chris Bosse 16 The Future of Nature-driven Urbanism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 331 Rob Roggema Index . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 335 Chapter 1 Nature-Driven Urbanism Rob Roggema Abstract The city is nature. In many ways this bold statement can be contested, but at the same time wildlife is so abundant Rotterdam is called a wilderness park (Reumer, Wildpark Rotterdam. De stad als natuurgebied. Historische Uitgeverij, Groningen, 2014). One can discuss whether this is true or not, but more interesting is to see the city as a piece of nature, and as such undertake the actions to develop it further. In a city nature should not be treated as something worth to preserve, after all such unique nature can hardly be found inside urban contexts, rather something to increase, enrich and make more resilient. Keywords Nature · Urban ecology · Urban nature · Nature-driven · Nature-based solutions The city is nature. In many ways this bold statement can be contested, but at the same time wildlife is so abundant Rotterdam is called a wilderness park (Reumer 2014). One can discuss whether this is true or not, but more interesting is to see the city as a piece of nature, and as such undertake the actions to develop it further. In a city nature should not be treated as something worth to preserve, after all such unique nature can hardly be found inside urban contexts, rather something to increase, enrich and make more resilient. Nature in cities is discovered. In many studies ‘green Infrastructure’ is declared to be beneficial to decrease concentration disorder with kids, reduce violence in house, minimize obesity, reduce the recovery time after illness and improve the exercise rate of people living close to green spaces (see Chap. 5). Green cover, trees, green roofs and facades have the ability to reduce the Urban Heat Island (UHI) effect, a phenomenon that, with climate change, will increase in the (near) future. Recently an Urban heat island is no longer defined as an island in R. Roggema (*) Research Centre for the Built Environment NoorderRuimte, Hanze University of Applied Sciences, Groningen, The Netherlands CITTA IDEALE, Office for Adaptive Planning, Wageningen, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]; [email protected] © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 1 R. Roggema (ed.), Nature Driven Urbanism, Contemporary Urban Design Thinking, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26717-9_1 2 R. Roggema Fig. 1.1 Urban heat Continents in Sydney (Brook 2019) a broader urban context, but the first ‘urban continents of heat (Fig. 1.1), a conglom- erate of linked islands, have been identified (Brook 2019). Health of human beings, but also of the ecosystems themselves are at stake, and a profound effort to increase the amount and quality of green spaces is needed to create livable urban areas. And with green spaces close to home being beneficial for your health, it also increases the real estate value of your house (Swinbourne and Rozenwax 2018) hence there is no reason not to pay more attention to green in the urban environment. Even in highly technological contexts the value of green and nature is increas- ingly used as an important factor in city planning, as is proven in ten cities in the US (Ahuja 2016). The starting point of designing the city driven by nature, is to analyze the existing pockets of nature, such as the Nature map of Rotterdam (LOLA 2016) illustrates (Fig. 1.2). The map also illustrates the fragmented nature of the existing patches of ecological valuable space. If we take a look at how the population values green and landscape space it becomes clear the landscapes close to urban or industrialized land use are valued significantly lower than green and undisrupted areas (Buijs et al. 2019). So, what can be concluded is that on the one hand side people value green and nature in their vicinity, it also has benefits for their wellbeing, but on the other side green spaces are diminishing, fragmented and losing a critical size. Therefore, a fundamental choice has to be made: we no longer pursue better and more nature in the urban environment, or we take it seriously hence pay more attention. The latter seems to be the preferred choice for all the good reasons, however existing habits of urban- ization prevent this from happening (Fig. 1.3). 1 Nature-Driven Urbanism 3 Fig. 1.2 Urban nature map Rotterdam (LOLA 2016) In order to comply with the desired role of nature and green a new approach to urban design is needed (Garrard et al. 2017). The following objectives can be defined: 1. To protect and create habitat, extend the size of small areas; 2. To help species disperse, establish connections between ecological cores; 3. To minimize anthropogenic threats, minimize environmental impacts and disturbance; 4. To promote ecological processes, allow the space for ecology to emerge, decline, grow, and follow the resilience cycle (Holling and Gunderson 2002); 5. To encourage positive human-nature interactions through arranging green in close proximity and improving the accessibility of green spaces. A range of design solutions are possible (Roijackers 2017), such as green roofs and facades, climate trees and water to deal with heat stress, planting trees, wadi’s, infiltration gardens and water squares to minimize urban floods, using helophytes to improve the water quality, integrate sufficient parks, trees and green to improve the air quality and reduce sealed surfaces, enlarge the area of parks and green spaces and increase the number of street trees to contribute to biodiversity.