Reevaluating Urban Form

I have just begun reading Design for Ecological Democracy by Randy Hester, Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning and Urban Design at UC Berkely and author of several community planning texts.  In a nutshell, the book is about redefining and recreating the American city. This remade city would be ecologically and socially integrated and concerned with local knowledge and community participation.


In the Introduction,Hester critiques current American urban development and design; and points to it as the underlying critical issue that has destroyed the ‘sense of community’ and ecological richness in our cities and has lead to environmental crisis. “City makers continues to design urban areas more and more the same and less and less particular to to the vegetative mosaics,microclimates,air-movement patterns, and hydrologic cycles. We still call resulting urban wildfires,energy shortages and flood damage “natural disasters"(Hester 2).

With the same basic argument of many(many,many) Hester discusses the disconnect from surrounding nature caused by technology,the automobile,poor planning,ect. However while this remains an obvious problem in the developed world, I feel his argument could be a bit more thorough and..recent. He calls for a response of applied ecology and democracy(hence the books title) which  leads to “actions guided by understanding natural processes and social relationships within our locality and larger environmental context”, and there fore a new urban ecology (Hester 4).


He introduces "3 fundamental roots to reformulate better cities":
1. our cities and landscapes must enable us to act where we are now debilitated(which according to Hester is almost everywhere down to our un-anchored soul)
2.) our cities and landscapes must be made to withstand short term shocks to which both are vulnerable.
3.) our cities and landscapes must be alluring rather than simply consumptive or conversely,limiting.


This new thought foundation is encompassed by a "global design process" which is participatory,scientific and adventuresome (Hester 8).


Successful and productive design is::
-inspired by local environmental processes
-ecologically and culturally diverse
-contextually response


to be cont....