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Featured Nature-based Solutions, a Pathway for Climate Change Adaptation and Mitigation: The New Metropolitan Territorial Plan 2021 of Milan, Italy towards a Reconciliation of Humans and Nature View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Israa Hanafi Mahmoud
In recent years, Nature-based Solutions (NBS) have up taken an important pathway within cities to unwind the effects of climate change. Since then, relevant research revealed that different mechanisms to implement NBS in the urban planning are needed to include diverse stakeholders in the processes of sustainable urban planning towards a reconciliation between humans and nature. Within these mechanisms, shared governance is used to collectively decide on specific pathways that cities can use towards adopting NBS in their spatial measures for climate change adaptation and mitigation on one hand. On the other hand, the intrinsic values from nature as a major stakeholder in the process are to be reconsidered. In this research, the development of the Metropolitan Territorial Plan (PTM 2021) of the city of Milan is discussed; specifically, the use of the NBS in the newly approved regulatory plan towards mitigating the current effects of climate change within the current strategic planning of Milan 2030. The PTM2021 discusses risks and vulnerabilities that may be tackled by nature as a priority such as sustainable land use and territorial equity. The established Pathway of shared governance within the PTM2021 is consistent with the guidelines expressed by the PGT2030 to increase and preserve the Natural Capital of the city within urban areas. Main NBS interventions from PTM2021 do look at mitigation of hydrological risks; as well as greening interventions that amplify the ecological networks of Milan. Hence, this research scope investigates the possible reconciliation of both humans and nature within the PTM2021.
Process Network Diagramming: A Human Ecology Approach to Environmental Design View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session George Elvin
Architecture is an intervention in an existing network of ecological processes. Since the mid-20th Century, humans have become the most influential force affecting those processes. How can we reconcile the human and so-called natural forces and processes that entwine to shape a site? By studying extreme environments such as Death Valley (the hottest place on Earth) and Mt. Wai'ale'ale (the wettest place on Earth), the author has developed a strategy for understanding, analyzing and integrating the human and "natural" processes that shape a site. Process Network Diagramming is a method that enables those untrained in ecology (which includes nearly all architects and engineers) to create an ecosystem inventory through direct observation of a site, and then begin to understand the process and relationships between processes that shape that site. The information and insights gained from this method can lead to designs and buildings that become positive interventions in their ecosystem, incorporating nature's lessons in resilience and regeneration from direct observation and analysis of the site and ecosystem.
Nature as Construction Material : Temporal and Technical Ecology View Digital Media
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session Ophelia Mantz
Considering structural systems, relational events, and temporal cycles as observed in living organisms has always been a source for human inspiration. Nature, seen as an open-ended system, offers the opportunity to learn from both its results and its processes. The construction of new paradigms inspired on nature is the common thread that weaves together the study’s main argument: nature as construction material for new models of thought and organization within the fields of architecture and the city.
