ABSTRACT
Nearly half of the global population lives in urban areas, which will be increasingly urban-focusing the sustainability challenge on the city and raising awareness about urban biodiversity and re-interaction with nature. For the common goal of encouraging broad-based public participation for biodiversity conservation, there is need for design professionals forging new collaborations in a transdisciplinary model in which research projects are integrated with design applications and strategic planning. This paper examines the urban ecology in the southern Chinese urban area and provides a green infrastructure (GI) design with decision-support toolkits to determine whether and how design can contribute to its sustainable future viability. The research was conducted through long-term and extensive fieldwork, and through cooperation with the ornithological research institute and related organizations, two distinct approaches to sustainability are identified: an innovative, modular, and multi-functional GI design, and the multidisciplinary cooperation practice with a series of decision-making toolkits around the design of the GI. This paper also shows how to promote the relationship between residents, urban creatures, and the ecological landscape. Through collaborative design practices, demographic characteristics were quantified, which strongly influenced our design results and suggested that quantitative indicators should be introduced in the practice of multidisciplinary collaboration to explore the sustainable relationship between various subjects in the urban environment.
