Embracing Nature: Ecological Planning and Trends in Sustainable Community Design

The long term survival of the planet is inextricably linked to achieving more sustainable land use and community planning practices.  The way people live, work, play, grow, move and bond is responsible for large levels of natural resource consumption and greenhouse gas emissions that need to be reduced to achieve ecological balance.  Urban planners and community designers are the professionals most capable of shaping the built environment and finding new ways to achieve more sustainable development practices.  Through the rational planning process, planners are able to address the requirements of place-making, creative thinking, interdisciplinary problem solving, and public engagement in a manner that often enables effective “tactical” planning interventions, but that is less transformative at “strategic” interventions.  This presentation suggests that by engaging the scientific community in an interdisciplinary planning process, planners can address broader and more meaningful problems and move from the “tactical” to the “strategic” level of influence in shaping a more sustainable built environment.  A brief presentation of how ecological planning thinking has developed in the past century is followed by examples of contemporary ecological planning practices at the regional, city, campus and site scale with examples of the benefits of interdisciplinary collaboration with the scientific community.