Ecological paradigms in planning the liveable city

Abstract

Sustainability is currently the most pressing, complex, and challenging agenda faced by the city. The expanding urban population across the globe has turned its focus from being simple concerns such as global warming or depletion of non-renewable energy into a wider issue of environment, ecology and people. The launching of the concept of sustainable development in 1983 by the World Summit on Environment and Development, I and the issues discussed at the Earth Summit of 1992 convinced every nation why they should consider being ecologically-sustainable. Ecocity, Eco-villages, and Green Architecture are among the concepts that have come to playa vital role in designing new habitats of the urban populations.i Cities are living containers designed to promote good life. Liveability is the most man-oriented scale to measure the quality of life in the city. Since the ecological sustainability is expected to improve the liveability of the city, attempts are made to evolve the correct balance between the nature where the city is located and human action that impinge on the city.' The linking of good city life with ecology gave birth to the idea of Eco-city defined with nature, its resources and their continuity in pristine form without sacrificing the will and strength of an evolving urban life. In the context of promoting nature as a bio-centric entity that controls itself, the Eco-city has become a life-territory, a place defined by its life forms, topography and biota, rather than by any human activities. Today, the concept of Eco-city is over-dependent on the carrying capacity of land, hampering the growth of the human habitat and the evolution of the society. The concept of carrying capacity, having evolved from the agricultural land, places emphasis with materialistic values of natural resources at the expense of qualitative aspects such as culture, society, and as such threatening city's identity and diversity." Furthermore, management of natural resources, use of ecologically-friendly materials, use of renewable energy sources, and such quantitative aspects of ecological sustainability have been well taken care of. Yet, the attention paid on qualitative measures such as city form, lead-buildings, land use, potential growth patterns that necessarily represent the living patterns of an evolving society is more or less negated. As a result, one may observe the degradation of city's container quality as it is becoming sterile and stereotyped, and the society failing to find.its place in the city is forced to inhabit the space rather than dwelling. With awareness of the need to balance the quantitative-bias approach with a qualitative-oriented catalyst for growth, we intend to test the strength of the evolved city culture as a tool in shaping the new paradigm shift that strengthens the liveability of the Eco-city. ~The cultural dimension in city designing notes a critical question in pursuing sustainability. It is a fact-that the culture and cultural activities have been displayed in the city since antiquity thus reinforcing the continuous evolution of the both city and society. As such, a lived city, with its .:»: layers of cultural deposits, attests to a diversifying city culture. Culture is the whole set of values, ideas, meanings, symbols, and organisational rules of a society reflected in its institutions, the ways and means of using the environment and nature to support its social relationships.