Recombinant Ecologies: Place-Building Models for Sustainable Cities and Landscapes

One of the greatest ongoing challenges to planning is design within human-dominated ecosystems. Since most ecosystems are no longer “naturally” determined independent of the transformative inputs from human technology (e.g., atmospheric and riparian systems), design must reconcile ecological and urban parameters to achieve a lower energy future. Indeed, fossil-fuel based economies have allowed us to momentarily exceed the carrying capacities of local environments to support human life, while irrevocably diminishing life-affirming biogeochemical processes that deliver valuable ecological services. A lower energy future requires new combinations of plant and animal species with design for human habitat. Designed to promote self-organization, emergence, resilience, and productive forms of feedback between environment and the city, these recombinant ecologies manage natural capital in the delivery of environmental and urban services.
Emphasizing the city as ecology, the University of Arkansas Community Design Center (UACDC) is developing a longitudinal repertoire of place-building models in watershed urbanism, context-sensitive highway design, green and shared streets, transit-oriented development, big box urbanism, urban forestry, and low impact development. These building blocks for the everyday public realm address issues in each of the three environmental-social landscape types outlined by ecologist, Mark Brown: “Protected Wild Systems used for watershed control and life support, Extractive Yield Systems such as agriculture, forestry, mining, and aquaculture that provide products for the economy, and Interface Systems that are self-organizing with society.” Recombinant ecologies offer new forms of energy management requiring less fossil fuels by recombining social and environmental measures into economic development. By solving through biological and urban patterns simultaneously, sample projects illustrate the modularity of the environment and infrastructural components’ fit with one another.