Ecological Design

"Ecological design is any form of design that minimizes environmentally destructive impacts by integrating itself with living processes." This definition was coined by Sim Van Der Ryn and Stuart Cowan in the 1970's.

In basic terms Ecological design is an ecologically sound or responsible design practice or discipline. It integrates the natural form of the land and accentuates its features.

Not only does it do this it links sustainable agriculture, ecological engineering, restoration, and green architecture into one great design. It places ecology as being one of the most important factors of the design, minimizing energy, materials used, keeps the natural habitat intact, reduces pollution, and restores the ecosystem (among other things).

This discipline focuses on making "function" fit as closely as possible the "form" of the land. This is one of the most creative new disciplines of the landscape architecture community. It pushes the creative mind to greater heights and beautiful landscape designs. "Ecological design thus can be defined as a careful and deliberate form of human intervention with the natural environment that attempts to improve natural conditions or reverse environmentally destructive impacts."

"In many ways, the environmental crisis is a design crisis," Sim Van Der Ryn and Stuart Cowan say in the book, Ecological Design. "It is a consequence of how things are made, buildings are constructed, and landscapes are used...We have used design cleverly in the service of narrowly defined human interests but have neglected its relationship with our fellow creatures. Such myopic design cannot fail to degrade the living world, and, by extension, our own health."

The reasoning behind this discipline is the desire to bring human needs and activity with the earth's ecosystem, thus minimizing the impact we are making.

Principles Behind Ecological Design:

• Follow nature’s example
• Transcend market culture
• Intervene as little as possible
• Context is everything
• Appropriate technology
• Moderate and efficient resource use
• Individual thought and action
• Green living inspiration
• True comfort
• Preserving our legacy of ancient wisdom

For more information see also Sustainablity, or read: Ecological Design, Tenth Anniversary Edition by Sim Van der Ryn, and Stuart Cowan.

The English Knot Garden

The English Knot Gardens started making their appearance during the Medieval Era. These gardens were originally found on a smaller scale, but can be found today on larger scales as well. Some of the most well know Knot Gardens of today are:

• St Fagans, South Wales
• Antony House, Cornwall, UK
• Red Lodge Museum, Bristol, UK
• Alexandra Hicks Herb Knot Garden, University of Michigan, USA
• Western Reserve Herb Society, Cleveland Botanical Garden, Cleveland, USA
• Anzac Square, Dunedin, New Zealand

The beginnings of the English Knot Garden came by way of those seeking a little peace in their world full of war and turmoil. The high walls surrounding the homes and towns were bleak and cold, and the knot gardens brought a little bit of comfort to those grounds. The idea behind the garden was to allow residence of the home to be able to look out their window, onto the grounds below to see natures beauty.

The English Knot Gardens highly manipulated boxwood, rosemary, and lavender into basic geometric patterns, giving the owners a sense of control over something in their uncertain lives. These designs were usually in box shape but, as the garden developed, the basic patterns became more and more intricate and elaborate, creating a woven or embroider look. (The patterns woven or embroider look in low growing boxwood came to be know as Parterre.)

One of the most well know books written on English Knot Garden Design was: The Gardener’s Labyrinth written by Thomas Hill in 1577.

The English Knot Gardens of today require a great amount of maintenance, but are very aesthetically pleasing for those seeking for a well balanced neat garden.

For more information on English Knot Gardens, and English Knot Garden design: Knot Gardens and Parterres by Robin Whalley

Smart Growth

Smart growth is an urban planning and transportation theory that concentrates growth in the center of a city to avoid urban sprawl; and advocates compact, transit-oriented, walkable, bicycle-friendly land use, including neighborhood schools, complete streets, and mixed-use development with a range of housing choices.
Smart growth values long-range, regional considerations of sustainability over a short-term focus. Its goals are to achieve a unique sense of community and place; expand the range of transportation, employment, and housing choices; equitably distribute the costs and benefits of development; preserve and enhance natural and cultural resources; and promote public health.

Smart Growth Overview

In communities across the nation, there is a growing concern that current development patterns -- dominated by what some call "sprawl" -- are no longer in the long-term interest of our cities, existing suburbs, small towns, rural communities, or wilderness areas.

Though supportive of growth, communities are questioning the economic costs of abandoning infrastructure in the city, only to rebuild it further out. They are questioning the social costs of the mismatch between new employment locations in the suburbs and the available work-force in the city. They are questioning the wisdom of abandoning "brownfields" in older communities, eating up the open space and prime agricultural lands at the suburban fringe, and polluting the air of an entire region by driving farther to get places.

Spurring the smart growth movement are demographic shifts, a strong environmental ethic, increased fiscal concerns, and more nuanced views of growth. The result is both a new demand and a new opportunity for smart growth.

Smart growth recognizes connections between development and quality of life. It leverages new growth to improve the community. The features that distinguish smart growth in a community vary from place to place. In general, smart growth invests time, attention, and resources in restoring community and vitality to center cities and older suburbs. New smart growth is more town-centered, is transit and pedestrian oriented, and has a greater mix of housing, commercial and retail uses. It also preserves open space and many other environmental amenities.

But there is no "one-size-fits-all" solution. Successful communities do tend to have one thing in common--a vision of where they want to go and of what things they value in their community--and their plans for development reflect these values.

(Text from executive summary of Why Smart Growth: A Primer by International City/County Management Association with Geoff Anderson, 7/98.)

Principles of Smart Growth

• Create a Range of Housing Opportunities and Choices-Providing quality housing for people of all income levels is an integral component in any smart growth strategy.
• Create Walkable Neighborhoods- Walkable communities are desirable places to live, work, learn, worship and play, and therefore a key component of smart growth.
  
• Encourage Community and Stakeholder Collaboration- Growth can create great places to live, work and play -- if it responds to a community’s own sense of how and where it wants to grow.
  
• Foster Distinctive, Attractive Communities with a Strong Sense of Place- Smart growth encourages communities to craft a vision and set standards for development and construction which respond to community values of architectural beauty and distinctiveness, as well as expanded choices in housing and transportation.
  
• Make Development Decisions Predictable, Fair and Cost Effective- For a community to be successful in implementing smart growth, it must be embraced by the private sector.
• Mix Land Uses- Smart growth supports the integration of mixed land uses into communities as a critical component of achieving better places to live.
  
• Preserve Open Space, Farmland, Natural Beauty and Critical Environmental Areas- Open space preservation supports smart growth goals by bolstering local economies, preserving critical environmental areas, improving our communities quality of life, and guiding new growth into existing communities.
  
• Provide a Variety of Transportation Choices- Providing people with more choices in housing, shopping, communities, and transportation is a key aim of smart growth.
  
• Strengthen and Direct Development Towards Existing Communities- Smart growth directs development towards existing communities already served by infrastructure, seeking to utilize the resources that existing neighborhoods offer, and conserve open space and irreplaceable natural resources on the urban fringe.
• Take Advantage of Compact Building Design- Smart growth provides a means for communities to incorporate more compact building design as an alternative to conventional, land consumptive development.
  

Overview of Issue Areas

In addition to the many resource areas (bibliographies, documents, etc.) in the Smart Growth Network website, specific topics of smart growth are organized into 7 issue areas that each contain overviews and on-line resources. (Click on the issue area name to go to that page)

• Community Quality of Life- Smart growth offers a framework to build community and help create and preserve a sense of place. It does this through housing and transportation choices, urban green spaces, recreational and cultural attractions, and policies and incentives that promote mixed-use neighborhoods.
• Design- Smart growth creates communities that offer health, social, economic, and environmental benefits for all. It achieves this by promoting resource-efficient building and community designs, green building practices, low-impact development, and mixed-use and walkable neighborhoods.
  
• Economics- Smart growth encourages community-based small business investment and development, adds to the variety of local employment opportunities, and helps attract new businesses and industries. More efficient government services are key to this, as are public and private investments that focus on quality of life improvements.
• Environment- Many of our current environmental challenges — air and water pollution, global warming, habitat fragmentation and conversion — are due in part to the way we have built our neighborhoods, communities, and metropolitan areas during the past half-century.
• Health- Smart growth reduces health threats from air and water pollution and indoor air contaminants through resource-efficient building design and offering transportation options such as mass transit, bike lanes, and pedestrian walkways. These engage residents and workers in a more active, healthy lifestyle.
• Housing- Smart growth promotes housing options for diverse lifestyles and socio-economic levels. It does this through mixed-use, affordable housing and compact development that revitalizes neighborhoods and provides an alternative to automobile-dependent communities.
• Transportation- Smart growth protects public health and environmental quality, conserves energy, and improves the quality of life in communities by promoting new transportation choices and transit-oriented development.

For more information on Smart Growth: Smart Growth in a Changing World by Jonathan Barnett, F. Kaid Benfield, Paul Farmer, Shelley Poticha, Robert Yaro, and Armando Carbonell, or visit SmartGrowth.org

Urban design

Urban design concerns the arrangement, appearance and functionality of towns and cities, and in particular the shaping and uses of safe public space. It has traditionally been regarded as a disciplinary subset of urban planning, landscape architecture, or architecture and in more recent times has been linked to emergent disciplines such as landscape urbanism. However, with its increasing prominence in the activities of these disciplines, it is better conceptualized as a design practice that operates at the intersection of all three, and requires a good understanding of a range of others besides, such as urban economics, political economy and social theory.
Urban design theory deals primarily with the design and management of public space (i.e. the 'public environment', 'public realm' or 'public domain'), and the way public places are experienced and used. Public space includes the totality of spaces used freely on a day-to-day basis by the general public, such as streets, plazas, parks and public infrastructure. Some aspects of privately owned spaces, such as building facades or domestic gardens, also contribute to public space and are therefore also considered by Urban design theory. Important writers on, and advocates for, urban design theory include Christopher Alexander, Michael E. Arth, Edmund Bacon, Peter Calthorpe, Gordon Cullen, Andres Duany, Jane Jacobs, Jan Gehl, Kevin Lynch, Roger Montgomery, Aldo Rossi, Colin Rowe, Robert Venturi, William H. Whyte, Bill Hillier, and Elizabeth Plater-Zyberk.
While the two fields are closely related, 'urban design' differs from 'urban planning' in its focus on physical improvement of the public environment, whereas the latter tends, in practice, to focus on the management of private development through planning schemes and other statutory development controls.
Public spaces are frequently subject to overlapping management responsibilities of multiple public agencies or authorities and the interests of nearby property owners, as well as the requirements of multiple and sometimes competing users. The design, construction and management of public spaces therefore typically demands consultation and negotiation across a variety of spheres. Urban designers rarely have the degree of artistic liberty or control sometimes offered in design professions such as architecture. It also typically requires interdisciplinary input with balanced representation of multiple fields including engineering, ecology, local history, and transport planning.
Much urban design work is undertaken by urban planners, landscape architects and architects but there are professionals who identify themselves specifically as urban designers. Many architecture, landscape and planning programs incorporate urban design theory and design subjects into their curricula and there are an increasing number of university programs offering degrees in urban design, usually at post-graduate level.
Urban design considers:

• Urban structure – How a place is put together and how its parts relate to each other
• Urban typology, density and sustainability - spatial types and morphologies related to intensity of use, consumption of resources and production and maintenance of viable communities
• Accessibility – Providing for ease, safety and choice when moving to and through places

• Legibility and wayfinding – Helping people to find their way around and understand how a place works
• Animation – Designing places to stimulate public activity
• Function and fit – Shaping places to support their varied intended uses
• Complementary mixed uses – Locating activities to allow constructive interaction between them
• Character and meaning – Recognizing and valuing the differences between one place and another
• Order and incident – Balancing consistency and variety in the urban environment in the interests of appreciating both
• Continuity and change – Locating people in time and place, including respect for heritage and support for contemporary culture
• Civil society – Making places where people are free to encounter each other as civic equals, an important component in building social capital

Click here for more reading on Urban Design: Urban Design by Alex Krieger and William S. Saunders.

Landscape Architecture

Landscape architecture deals with the design of outdoor as well as public spaces to achieve environmental, aesthetic, and behavioral outcomes. Landscape Architecture takes into consideration the social, ecological, and geological conditions of a space and then carefully accentuates or manipulates the space into a design that causes a desired outcome with those in or around the space. The scope of the profession includes urban design, site planning, City or urban planning, environmental restoration, parks and recreation planning; green infrastructure planning and provision, all at varying scales of design, planning and management. A practitioner in the field of landscape architecture is called a landscape architect.

What Landscape architects do? (Source: ASLA.org)

Landscape architecture encompasses the analysis, design, management, planning, and stewardship of the natural and built environments. Types of projects include:

• Academic campuses
• Conservation
• Corporate and commercial
• Gardens and arboreta
• Historic preservation and restoration
• Hospitality and resorts
• Institutional
• Interior landscapes
• Land planning
• Landscape art and earth sculpture
• Monuments
• Parks and recreation
• Reclamation
• Residential
• Security design
• Streetscapes and public spaces
• Therapeutic gardens
• Transportation corridors and facilities
• Urban design
• Water resources.

Landscape architects have advanced education and professional training and are licensed in Landscape Architecture in 49 states of the 50 states.

For an extensive history on Landscape Architecture and its cultural and architectural background: Landscape Design: A Cultural and Architectural History by Elizabeth Barlow Rogers.

Sustainability

Sustainability, in a broad sense, is the capacity to endure. It can be defined in biological terms as the ability of an ecosystem to maintain ecological processes, functions, biodiversity and productivity into the future.

With that being said; “nearly 80 percent of U.S. residents live in urban environments and such areas are continuing to grow. How and where urban development occurs can affect ecosystem quality and services, habitat protection, water resources, energy consumption, and indoor and outdoor air quality.”

The U.S. National Environmental Policy Act of 1969 declared as its goal a national policy to "create and maintain conditions under which [humans] and nature can exist in productive harmony, and fulfill the social, economic and other requirements of present and future generations of Americans."

Sustainability is being pushed so we can develop ways to reduce use of natural resources and improve indoor environments while reducing emissions from buildings of greenhouse gases and other harmful pollutants.

One of the leaders in this movement is the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). They have developed programs and resources for helping states and local communities promote urban sustainability by supporting smart growth projects, green building and infrastructure design, energy efficiency in homes and commercial buildings, and development of sustainability metrics for urban development.

Many companies are now pursuing the goal of sustainability realizing that protecting the environment makes good business sense. Many EPA programs have anticipated and contributed to advancing sustainability concepts, some of the most prominent of these programs are: EnergyStar and WaterSense.

There are many different ways in we each of us can contribute to living a more sustainable lifestyle. Here are some EPA sites with suggestions and tips on how you can contribute to sustainability in your roles as a consumer and citizen, and as a steward of the environment:

• Adopt Your Watershed
• Drive Wise
• Energy Star
• Green Communities
• Healthy Lawn, Healthy Environment (PDF)
• Conserve Water and Use It Effectively
• Produce Less Waste by the 3 Rs - Reduce, Reuse, Recycle
• Sustainable Landscaping (PDF)

For more information about how you can help make a sustainable community: Toward Sustainable Communities: Resources for Citizens and Their Governments by Mark Roseland.

Green Building

A sustainable building, or green building is an outcome of a design philosophy which focuses on increasing the efficiency of resource use — energy, water, and materials — while reducing building impacts on human health and the environment during the building's lifecycle, through better siting, design, construction, operation, maintenance, and removal. Though green building is interpreted in many different ways, a common view is that they should be designed and operated to reduce the overall impact of the built environment on human health and the natural environment by:

• Efficiently using energy, water, and other resources
• Protecting occupant health and improving employee productivity
• Reducing waste, pollution and environmental degradation

A similar concept to green building is natural building, which is usually on a smaller scale and tends to focus on the use of natural materials that are available locally. Other related topics include sustainable design, green architecture, and energy efficient buildings.
Green building brings together a vast array of practices and techniques to reduce and ultimately eliminate the impacts of buildings on the environment and human health. It often emphasizes taking advantage of renewable resources, e.g., using sunlight through passive solar, active solar, and photovoltaic techniques and using plants and trees through green roofs, rain gardens, and for reduction of rainwater run-off. Many other techniques, such as using packed gravel or permeable concrete instead of conventional concrete or asphalt to enhance replenishment of ground water, are used as well. Effective green buildings are more than just a random collection of environmental friendly technologies, however. They require careful, systemic attention to the full life cycle impacts of the resources embodied in the building and to the resource consumption and pollution emissions over the building's complete life cycle. Before focusing on materials and techniques, some believe that the first priority for green building is to reduce the building's demand on resources and energy, and recognize the direct relationship between a building's size and its demands.
On the aesthetic side of green architecture or sustainable design is the philosophy of designing a building that is in harmony with the natural features and resources surrounding the site. There are several key steps in designing sustainable buildings: specify 'green' building materials from local sources, reduce loads, optimize systems, and generate on-site renewable energy.

Materials

Building materials typically considered to be 'green' include rapidly renewable plant materials like bamboo (because bamboo grows quickly) and straw, lumber from forests certified to be sustainably managed, ecology blocks, dimension stone, recycled stone, recycled metal, and other products that are non-toxic, reusable, renewable, and/or recyclable (e.g. Trass, Linoleum, sheep wool, panels made from paper flakes, compressed earth block, adobe, baked earth, rammed earth, clay, vermiculite, flax linen, sisal, seagrass, cork, expanded clay grains, coconut, wood fibre plates, calcium sand stone, concrete (high and ultra high performance, roman self-healing concrete, etc.) The EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) also suggests using recycled industrial goods, such as coal combustion products, foundry sand, and demolition debris in construction projects Polyurethane heavily reduces carbon emissions as well. Polyurethane blocks are being used instead of CMTs by companies like American Insulock. Polyurethane blocks provide more speed, less cost, and they are environmentally friendly.
Building materials should be extracted and manufactured locally to the building site to minimize the energy embedded in their transportation as well.
For more information about Green Building: Green Building A to Z: Understanding the Language of Green Building by Jeffy Yudelson.

Botanical Gardens

Botanical gardens primarily have been created to monitor, categorize, and document growth, and habits for scientific purposes. Botanists and horticulturalists tend and maintain the garden's vast library and herbarium of plants and plant material. Botanical gardens often also serve to entertain and educate the public, upon whom many depend for funding. Not all botanical gardens are open to the public: for example the Chelsea Physic Garden. According to the Botanic Gardens Conservation International, "Botanic gardens are institutions holding documented collections of living plants for the purposes of scientific research, conservation, display and education."

Starting in the 18th century, European botanical gardens sent plant-collecting expeditions to various parts of the world and published their findings. Voyages of exploration routinely included botanists for this purpose. Subsequent scientific work studied how these exotic plants might be adapted to grow in the garden's locale, how to classify them, and how to propagate rare or endangered species. The Royal Botanic Gardens in Kew, near London, has continuously published journals and more recently catalogues and databases since this time.

For more reading on botanical gardens: Great Botanic Gardens of the World by Sara Oldfield.

National Gardening Association

The National Gardening Association (NGA), founded in 1973, is a nonprofit leader in plant-based education. The NGA provides any with materials engineered to develop an appreciation for the benefits of gardening to a society.

The National Gardening Association's thought is that "plants have the power to change our lives. They enable the simple and therapeutic pleasure of working in one’s own garden. They play a basic role in providing clean air and serve as a nutritious basis for healthy living. And they are uniquely effective teaching tools." The National Gardening Association has been working for over 30 years to sustain and renew the connection between people, plants, and the environment through the principles taught in gardening.

The NGA's programs and initiatives seek to highlight the opportunities for plant-based education in schools, communities, and personal backyards throughout the United States. They strive to serve as a connection from people to gardening in five core fields:

• Plant-based Education
• Health and Wellness
• Environmental Stewardship
• Community Development
• Responsible Home Gardening

National Gardening Association's Core Fields of Emphasis

• Plant-Based Education
• Health and Wellness
• Community Development
• Home Gardening

General Programs and Activities of the NGA

• Adopt a School Garden® Program
• Curriculum Guides & Resources
• Gardening with Kids Resource Catalog
• Grants & Awards Programs
• Industry & Corporate Partners
• Media Outreach
• Research Services & Support
• Teacher Professional Development
• Vermont Garden Park

Web Sites

• Visit www.garden.org (National Gardening Association's site)or www.kidsgardening.org for a full appreciation of our virtual garden community.
  

For more reading on Gardening with Children: Roots, Shoots, Buckets & Boots: Gardening Together with Children. By Sharon Lovejoy.

Allotment Garden

Allotment gardens are a type of community garden, however allotment gardens are highly concentrated in one place that can span up to several hundreds of land parcels. These parcels are assigned to individuals or families, and each parcel is cultivated individually, whereas, most community gardens are tended collectively by a group of people.

In allotment gardens a parcel for an individual size can range any where between 200 and 400 square meters, and most plots include sheds for tools and shelters. The land for allotment gardens is leased from the owner (whether they be private, public, or government,) to the individual(s), providing the land be used strictly for gardening. Gardeners pay a small membership fee to the associated owner, and like in all community gardens must abide by the rules governing use of the property.

Allotment gardens are most widely found throughout Europe and the Philippines and can be found often on the outer rim of larger cities and towns.

Purpose of Allotment Gardens:

"The Office International du Coin de Terre et des Jardins Familiaux, a Luxembourg-based organization representing three million European allotment gardeners since 1926, describes the socio-cultural and economic functions of allotment gardens as follows:"

• for the community a better quality of urban life through the reduction of noise, the binding of dust, the establishment of open green spaces in densely populated areas;
• for the environment the conservation of biotopes and the creation of linked biotopes;
• for families a meaningful leisure activity and the personal experience of sowing, growing, cultivating and harvesting healthy vegetables amidst high-rise buildings and the concrete jungle;
• for children and adolescents a place to play, communicate and to discover nature and its wonders;
• for working people relaxation from the stress of work;
• for the unemployed the feeling of being useful and not excluded as well as a supply of fresh vegetables at minimum cost;
• for immigrant families a possibility of communication and better integration in their host country;
• for disabled persons a place enabling them to participate in social life, to establish contacts and overcome loneliness;
• for senior citizens a place of communication with persons having the same interests as well as an opportunity of self-fulfillment during the period of retirement.