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Creating EcoResponsive Environments: A Framework for Settlement Design by Prachi Rampuria

By July 19, 2024No Comments

Following on from the hugely influential urban design book “Responsive Environments” first published in 1985, Ian Bentley, Soham De, Sue McGlynn and Prachi Rampuria have collaborated to publish a follow up entitled “Ecorepsonsive Environments” which integrates principles for designing for human needs with a deeper understanding of natural systems.  In this blog Prachi Rampuria explains the background, concepts and structure of this timely publication, including the importance of involving end users and local experts in the design and stewardship of places.

EcoResponsive Envrionements (Taylor & Francis, 2024) is available from the RIBA Bookshop and can be ordered from your local bookstore.

“EcoResponsive Environments’ offers both a call to action and a comprehensive yet pragmatic framework for practising the art and science of settlement design, called eco-responsive design.”

Every design task, no matter how small, inevitably addresses some unique situation – that is why design is creative work. To support a nuanced understanding of the site and its unique characteristics, our book ‘EcoResponsive Environments’ argues that the design process must encourage – where possible – the involvement and effective integration of the practical knowledge of end users, as local experts, in the design decisions we make and the long-term stewardship of places. To do so effectively in practice, we must adopt a structured design approach and process rooted in a deep understanding of how places work and function, starting from the development of the design brief.

“The design process must encourage – where possible – the involvement and effective integration of the practical knowledge of end users, as local experts, in the design decisions we make and the long-term stewardship of places.”

To this end, the book puts forward an understanding of settlements as complex systems. As urban morphologist Anne Vernez-Moudon puts it, ‘urban form is defined by three fundamental physical elements: buildings and their related open spaces, plots or lots, and streets’.1 Through developing these fundamental elements of human construction, the original landscape itself is eventually transformed into a fourth element: the settlement’s ‘natural infrastructure’.

Through this long-running process, settlements across the globe have evolved as complex systems made up of natural infrastructure, public spaces, plots and buildings; each composed from materials and small-scale components.2 These subsystems are nested one within another; not only in space but also – because they inherently change at different rates – in time as well. The landform and water system of the natural infrastructure are the longest-lived of all. Public space systems come next: they may last for thousands of years. Land-ownership plots change faster through subdivision and amalgamation, but still typically last for centuries. Buildings, by comparison, are increasingly ephemeral: contemporary buildings are often redeveloped after only a few decades.

This inherent complexity of settlement-design has increased over time, through the ever-increasing design possibilities afforded through successive agricultural, industrial and digital revolutions. These have faced designers with increasingly complex challenges which, in the context of globalisation, often have to be made in unfamiliar cultural and ecological settings. Overall, this ever-increasing complexity creates endemic problems of information overload. To cope with this, any particular designer is driven to take a specialised focus.

The relative autonomy of settlements’ key subsystems – natural infrastructure, streets, plots and buildings – presents obvious opportunities for this necessary professional specialisation. The overall field of settlement design has therefore gradually evolved – particularly since industrialisation and globalisation – into a range of specialised professional disciplines; each focusing on one particular semi-autonomous subsystem: landscape architects for the natural infrastructure, urban designers for layouts, architects for buildings, transport planners and traffic engineers for highwaays and transit and so on. Only users experience the whole built place; rather than abstractions such as professionals’ drawings, computer-generated images or spreadsheets. The real-world experience of these ‘local experts’ offers valuable potential to incorporate in a more integrated design approach, but it is all too often excluded from current design processes.

To help turn tables around,  ‘EcoResponsive Environments’ offers both a call to action and a comprehensive yet pragmatic framework for practising the art and science of settlement design, called ecoresponsive design. Bridging the gap between theory and generic policy on the one hand, and design for specific places and sites on the other, the book is aimed not only at the professionals involved in planning, designing and developing these places, but also the wider range of communities interested in creating better spaces for our everyday lives.

Since the relative autonomy of the four basic subsystems and their related design disciplines is inherent to the settlement process, we organise the chapters around them. Chapter 1 starts at the largest scale; developing parameters for creating a natural infrastructure by drawing out maximum affordances from the site’s natural capital. Chapters 2, 3 and 4 then weave in the public space network, link in the plot structure and integrate the buildings. Lastly, Chapter 5 explores the final stage of our ecoresponsive design process; focusing on tuning the atmosphere5 – detailing physical components and their implications for sensory experience.

Between them, these five chapters develop key parameters for engaging all the experts involved in settlement-design – professionals and end-users alike – together with a process for using these ideas in design practice. Successful practice needs broad support from everyone involved in the design process. To achieve this support in practice, our design process has to be backed up by evidence; but evidence alone is not enough, as environmental communications specialist George Marshall explains: ‘People may read information in the form of data and figures, but their beliefs about it are held entirely in the form of stories’. This is because ‘stories perform a fundamental cognitive function: they are the means by which the Emotional Brain makes sense of the information collected by the Rational Brain’.3 This means that we need a compelling story to help us replace existing design conventions with new ideas: ‘Facts have no power to correct or dislodge a powerful story … The only thing that can displace a story is a story’.4

Chapter by chapter, our story builds up a collaborative vision of EcoResponsive design: a vehicle for all fields of design expertise and end users to work together in navigating the Anthropocene’s currents of risk and opportunity.

Prachi Rampuria

Co-founding Director, Co-author

EcoResponsive Environments

www.ecoresponsiveenvironments.com

About the design practice:

EcoResponsive Environments – a brand that emerged from a book – is an award-winning urban design and architectural practice based in London. Our mission is singular: to design environments for health and wellbeing, for today and tomorrow. Founded in 2019, our aim is to address the overarching issue of the Anthropocene age by designing environments that are responsive to fundamental human needs while preserving the planet’s natural ecosystems. We call this eco-responsive design.

For more information on our book please visit the link here.

References:

  1. Vernez-Moudon, A. (1997) ‘Urban morphology as an emerging interdisciplinary field’, Urban Morphology, 1; pp. 3–10.
  2. For a comprehensive discussion of complex systems and their multi-scale characteristics, without technical jargon and with some reference to cities, see West, G. (2017) Scale: The universal laws of life and death in organisms, cities and companies. London: Weidenfeld and Nicholson.
  3. Monbiot, G. (2017) A new politics for an age of crisis. London: Verso.
  4. Marshall, G. (2014) Don’t even think about it: Why our brains are wired to ignore climate change. New York: Bloomsbury.
  5. ‘Atmosphere’: we use this term throughout the book. For discussion, see, Bohme, G. (2018) The aesthetics of atmospheres. Abingdon and New York: Routledge; McCarter, R. and Pallasmaa, J. (2013) Architecture as experience. London: Phaidon; and Perez-Gomez, A. (2016) Attunement: Architectural meaning after the crisis of modern science. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.