URBAN SUSTAINABILITY

Tatjana Medvedev

Tatjana Medvedev

Dec 17, 2023 · 7 min read

Urban sustainability and urban design towards good city design. The Urban Design process should incorporate a larger awareness of sustainable elements and processes. This research considers how strategies in city design overseas can have practical applications in the Australian context, emphasising the economical use of space and preservation of natural resources.

Al Gore "Our Choice" TedTalk
Al Gore “Our Choice” TedTalk

Towards good city design

Environmental urbanism is a well-known and long-forgotten technique combining past experiences and natural environmental characteristics of each location and its micro-climate.

The study points to several practical examples of understanding climatic influencers, such as wind, undulated terrain, physical structures, properties of building materials, and many more. The tangible benefits of such design are manipulating natural resources to service human needs.

Relevant application of environmental knowledge and evolved practical experience could offer a more excellent quality of life for its inhabitants.

Such strategies have only randomly appeared in a few copies of European buildings here in Australia. However, this research believes that previous attempts have been hamstrung from the outset by poor research, rushed population increase, and the absence of a practical holistic approach.

Conclusion

The research addresses these obstacles directly and, in doing so, proposes a ‘second chance’ for the importation of urban sustainability strategies used overseas. Asking for legislative change necessary to facilitate it offers an agenda that learns from past mistakes to present an optimistic vision for the future.

URBAN SUSTAINABILITY

For centuries, houses have been designed and built by trial and error, with new designs perpetually improving on previous ones.

From times of building ancient cities and before good design books were printed, the developer would import a talented tradesman – an artist who knew “the secret”.

After those triumphant times of grand designs and glorious structures in the very intensive growth and progress of civilization, housing underwent a very complex changing process in the last few centuries worldwide.

First-built human settlements were in complete correspondence with nature, which was the primary condition for their sustainable existence. Small villages, as the dominant type of human settlements, centuries and centuries after, where built by the dominant characteristics of their natural surroundings.

Even the big towns of the ancient period, such as Athens, Alexandria, and Rome, and settlements of Incas and Mayan civilizations, were built by the well-known environmental awareness in those times.

In the last few centuries, the industrial revolution and population growth produced a new type of settlements in a hurry, which were less and less corresponding with their ecological surroundings. This trend is still ongoing worldwide, although contemporary science, architecture and town planning theories make serious efforts to promote a sustainable type of housing and dwelling.

“If building greenhouses is good, then building green housing developments is even better. Combining sustainable design with densely planned neighbourhoods gives you future-friendly city living. Considering the worldwide breakneck speed of urban growth, dense, green housing complexes may be the only way to shelter everyone without compromising the planet.

Green building gets cheaper as builders scale up their developments; a one thousand-unit complex has a marginal cost increase above traditional construction, and a thousand-unit complex can incur no additional unit cost.

These numbers tell us that if builders are united, they will achieve a much higher star rating for their homes and fast-track their permit process if they work together on volume developments.

Australia’s situation, particularly in a few of the biggest cities like Melbourne and Sydney, is highly critical today.

The existing historical heritage of housing in the first circle around the central areas, built on small land parcels more than a hundred years ago, with tiny, one-story houses in the ecological context, is a terrible example.

Settlements built in the second half of the last century have somewhat better urban arrangements but, unfortunately, are not well executed in correspondence with today’s well-known ecological parameters.

Our effort begins to remind ourselves which ecological parameters dominate creating new settlements today.

The primary ecological and climate influencers, in order of least applied in Australia, are:

  1. Geothermal properties
  2. Spatial configuration and orientation
  3. Microclimate and unique wind rose- wind pattern.
  4. Electromagnetism and bioenergy.
  5. Seasonal temperature amplitude.
  6. Vegetation, surface water and local bio-climate.
  7. Global sprawl building density and proximity.
  8. Building density as a direct influencer of mental health and community awareness.
  9. Solar aspects and insolation.

By their effects on the single house or whole settlement, we must adjust our town planning, urban design and architectural knowledge to plan and build our new developments as ecologically sustainable complexes or organisms that should perform to much higher standards of living and health.

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