Preface: Reconciliation Landscapes

In this newly declared Anthropocene, the greatest ongoing challenge to design and planning is designing within human-dominated ecosystems. For cities, this entails a higher level of performance from urban infrastructure. Urban infrastructure will have to deliver ecosystem services in addition to its provision of traditional urban services like transportation, power and water supply, waste treatment, and land-use development.

New forms of placemaking will emerge driven by the reconciliation of ecosystems and the city—by the reconciliation of the biological and the mechanical in recombinant landscapes not imaginable from the simply biological or the simply mechanical. A key example of reconciliation is Low Impact Development（LID）, an ecological approach to urban water management, including the problems arising from urban stormwater runoff. LID landscapes, especially “green” parking lots or “green” streets, function well and are appreciated by general populations who never considered that infrastructure could be the foundation for creating beautiful yet productive civil landscapes. Indeed, as public literacy about LID grows, the more popular LID approaches become.

If public perception has grown more favorable toward LID then why is it still difficult to implement? The top reason is that prevailing managerial mindsets governing the marketplace and municipalities（the government unit where LID codes may be enacted in the USA）are by nature tied to the socio-technical models that underwrite their work approaches. No matter how robust the agreement may be on the multiple advantages of adopting new approaches like LID—even personally among conservative officialdom—urban management models tend to be technologically rooted, exhibiting a certain stubbornness or obduracy to new paradigms. Our experiences with local governments show there are two “cities” or factions that act from different interests. The first is the political city of elected mayors and council members who are often rewarded for their visioning and rhetorical skill, including advocacy for adoption of LID codes and practices. Elected officials are usually the progressive forces enabling LID supportive codes and policies. Countering this is the city of staff, the civil servants tasked with commissioning and maintaining infrastructure, and logically tend to be far more risk averse. Though the use of LID may have been enabled by the political city, the staff can place conditions on LID proposals during permitting stages, unwittingly canceling any advantages LID may hold over conventional hard engineering. A common requirement is LID be value-added to hard engineering rather than a substitute for the latter. Such ineffective redundancy in infrastructure eliminates the potential cost-savings in LID practices, the major incentive for adopting LID approaches in the first place.

Likewise, the marketplaces—financers, developers, and mortgage and insurance underwriters—are risk-averse and slow in changing their preferences. Besides the rare venture capital market, capital loves certainty and is open to change only when the public sector incents change. Moreover, marketplaces need data. There is not yet comprehensive data which convincingly favors LID, or soft engineering, over hard engineering preferences. Arguments favoring LID are mostly empirical with talk of triple bottom line benefits—that is, combined social, ecological, and economic return on investment. Here, research is needed to support design decision making. For example, our colleagues in forestry cannot convincingly recommend the use of trees in bioswales as standing water from infiltration likely leads to root rot, shortening average lifespan in trees intolerant of hydric soil conditions. The right plant needs to be in the right place for optimizing ecological functioning. Unmindful ecosystem approaches quickly move us into the realm of complexity and the inevitable unintended consequences that create negative feedback. Data then will help us recapture ecological intelligence lost to the privileging of the mechanical in the alleged fail-safe world of hard engineering.

The emerging field of resilient design will undoubtedly centralize the role of LID practices in developing a new era of reconciliation between ecosystems and cities. The experiences from ever escalating socio-natural disasters wrought by hurricanes, rising sea level and urban flooding, tornados, and earthquakes are prompting a new socio-technical paradigm in resilience. Resilience is the ability of a system to recover from disruptions, shocks, and disturbances without diminishing functionality in a system. In the aftermath of the devastating 2005 Hurricane Katrina that wrecked New Orleans and America's Gulf Coast I recall a structural engineer's startling assertion about the assumed fail-safeness of dams and levees. Essentially, there are two types of dams, he observed: ones that have failed and those that will fail. Most agree that the urbanized area of the coast would have been more resilient to the devastation of hurricanes and flooding if development had upheld watershed functioning throughout the region. Thus, resilient design demands better understanding of the corrective capacities inherent in ecological systems and their translation to urban systems. I suspect we will soon graduate to Nassim Taleb's concept of the antifragile, or systems that grow even stronger from disruption and shock, moving beyond the steady-state metrics of resiliency.

Notwithstanding the argument for soft engineering, heroic engineering has given us safe water supplies, waste management, and reliable national power grids that have greatly enhanced life expectancy and quality of life. Alternatively, place-based soft engineering systems, like LID, require a more craftsman-like design approach to creating context sensitive infrastructure. Our own experience in places with high water tables and clay soils demand LID strategies that use less infiltration techniques favoring horizontal urban water management networks. On the other hand, places with sandy soils favor vertical infiltration and accompanying groundwater recharge infrastructure. Moreover, we are exploring the role of parks as “rain terrains” to hold and evapotranspire water in cities with high water tables where evacuation of water is not possible during peak flow of urban stormwater runoff. Reconciliation does not just yield an end product, but also is a high concept/low tech design methodology that creates places with higher standards of livability. Here, design can add tremendous value while lessening our resource demands, or ecological footprint—the only path to achieving sustainability. I hope that our book becomes a helpful design tool in realizing this new promise in building cities.

2016.3

Stephen Luoni：

Director of University of Arkansas Community Design Center