ABSTRACT
The greatest ongoing challenge to the planning and the design disciplines is design within human-dominated ecosystems. Since our environment is no longer “naturally” determined – that is, independent of human technology – the design of cities will have to address ecosystem interface and management. In order to achieve both a lower energy future, and to sustain life-supporting biogeochemical processes produced by natural systems, design will be tasked with the delivery of ecological services beyond the conventional programs that generally motivate project development. This entails an expansion in current design thinking, conventionally focused on the production of discrete projects rather than the integral design of community processes and places. The specialization of work in urban design, landscape architecture, architecture, civil engineering, and environmental planning has institutionalized a mutual exclusivity between cities and natural systems, though this outlook is waning. A new consciousness, galvanized by the end of nature as a separate category, compels design vocabularies dedicated to context production – the formation of topological structures or design patterns that define a project through its network of relations. Recombinant design patterns provide new programming approaches to core environmental problems in context-production, collectively yielding an ecology of the city.
