Landslide: A New Urban Ecology

Panel: Crisis Narrative of Landscape: Future Inherent

The paper will address how the Australian landscape continually forces its way back into the built environment. It will attempt to examine how a new urban ecology can be nurtured, an ecology that does not define separate spaces for nature in addition to the built environment, but one that embraces these wild ecosystems as part of its own workings. In Australia these dynamic forces have come to include the now increasing cycles of fire, flood and extreme weather conditions. Similarly, the already vital flora and fauna within our cities need to be preserved and not eradicated. By utilising new technologies, can buildings exist in harmony with rising floodwaters, and architecture be in sync with the annual bushfires or migratory patterns of birds? The paper will examine how future urban design can incorporate the wild and the untamed, making cities open to adaptation, time and contingency. The current urban condition bears witness to a future where the acts of human design, be they via architecture or infrastructure, often contribute further to resource depletion and pollution. Similarly, the push towards carbon neutral skyscrapers and eco-friendly architecture often fails to constructively cultivate environmental conditions that are already present. In the blurry haze of utopia and dystopia, should the crisis not be averted, but adapted for a new futurology?

Land­slide: A New Urban Ecol­ogy