ABSTRACT
In developing countries, where much of the predicted growth will occur, the design of these newly created urban areas is currently unlikely to reflect ecological concerns. The importance of ensuring that ‘human ecology’ is fully considered alongside other ecological considerations in the design of the built environment for reasons of social, ethnic, and gender equality and harmony, has also been emphasized. The lack of a single set of motivations and goals for urban designers as regards ecological issues provides significant scope for tension, ambivalence, disagreement, and even antagonism in the design process. Advances in the ecological approach to landscape design have occurred partly because of the steadily increasing general awareness of ecological issues and crises since the mid-nineteenth century. Mid-nineteenth-century ecologists generally framed humankind as the environmental aggressor and enemy of all things ‘natural’ and of what was then viewed as the ‘balance of nature’.
