Colloquium: Ecology for Land & City
“Ecology for Land & City: Exploring the Confluences of Landscape, Road and Urban Ecology”
Harvard Graduate School of Design
Cambridge, MA
Free and open to the public
In a bare twenty-five years, landscape ecology, road ecology, and urban ecology have sprung from synergies between ecological science and society’s activities on land. Each field builds its body of theory, models, and principles. Each generates new solutions to slow, even reverse, the cascading land-and-city degradation around us. Each moves arm-in-arm with sister experts, including landscape architects, foresters, urban planners, conservationists, transportation engineers/planners, wildlife managers, hydrologists and architects.
The time has arrived to explore and highlight linkages among the three dynamic fields, both to discover new important patterns and principles, and to catalyze useful applications for a vibrant future. This is the colloquium challenge. Imagine, for instance: viable ecological designs for outer-suburb/sprawl areas; improving or replacing the patch-corridor-matrix model; an optimal arrangement of urban greenspaces for flooding/heat/wildlife/recreation; an ecologically and socio-economically designed regional transportation system; useful equations for flows/movements across land mosaics; spatially optimal flows benefiting both city and ring-around-the-city; an ecologically robust mesh of geomorphic and built patterns; sustainable adaptation for combined urbanization and climate change; and big-picture solutions concurrently addressing many of society’s core goals. Giant needs, many confluences, ripe opportunities.
Landscape, road, and urban ecology synergies promise new visions, as well as novel applications for land and city. This colloquium should open up a cornucopia of ideas, patterns, principles and projected solutions that energize everyone.
Convened by Jane Hutton and Richard T.T. Forman, Harvard Graduate School of Design, in Recognition of the Retirement of Richard T.T. Forman