Designing Nature into Cities

This book argues that the future of resilient and liveable cities depends on making ecological systems not a supplement to design, but the scaffolding upon which urban life is built. As the final volume in this trilogy, this book advances the conversation from integrating nature into urbanism to embedding it as a primary design principle. The book explores how communities, engineers, planners, and architects can collaborate to regard streets as climate buffers, rooftops as pollinator habitats, and rivers as civic spaces, where each design choice benefits the ecosystem.

The book explores global case studies where the line between the built and natural environment is deliberately blurred. These examples demonstrate how design can be a tool for ecological recovery, from neighborhoods that use natural plants as a passive cooling system to cities that have completely remade districts around restored watersheds. It explores the technology tools that are allowing designers to forecast long-term ecological implications prior to construction.

Beyond infrastructure, the book explores the governance and cultural frameworks that enable these changes, demonstrating how community stewardship and innovative policymaking can lock in ecological gains over many years. It views nature as an active partner in forming urban futures rather than just an aesthetic effect or source of environmental services. The book presents a vision of urban settings in which every building, roadway, and public area is transformed into a location where nature can coexist peacefully with human activity.

Ali CHESHMEHZANGI is Head of the School of Architecture, Design and Planning and a Professor at The University of Queensland (UQ), Brisbane, Australia. He is among the top 20 global scholars in the urban sustainability research area. He is the Editor-in-Chief of the Urban Sustainability Book Series with Springer Nature. With a career spanning over two decades, he has made significant contributions to the academic and professional communities, with a focus on sustainable and environmentally conscious design. So far, Ali has published over 650 journal papers, articles, conference papers, book chapters, and reports. He has published more than 58 academic books, some of which have received awards at the international, national, provincial, and municipal levels. He also has received international awards and recognition for his research on urban resilience studies and sustainability research, as well as the 2018 Vice-Chancellor’s award for his impactful contribution to higher education. 

Sara ALIDOUST is a Senior Lecturer in Urban Planning at The School of Architecture, Design and Planning at The University of Queensland (UQ), Brisbane, Australia.  Her research centers on the intersections of Urban Planning and Public Health, with a strong emphasis on interdisciplinary collaboration and practical application. Sara delivers transdisciplinary solutions to some of the most compelling challenges of our time, 'housing equity' and 'healthy cities’. Her work stands out through the application of Systems Thinking to complex planning issues and she explores the connections between planning and the physical, mental, and social health of individuals and communities. Her primary focus is on developing resilient cities, capable of maintaining their liveability over time, especially amidst disruptive events and shocks.

Wendy Y. CHEN is a professor in Department of Geography at The University of Hong Kong. She serves as the Editor-in-Chief for Urban Forestry & Urban Greening, a top international journal in the field of urban greening design and management. Her research agenda has focused on key knowledge gaps in evaluating and modelling urban green-blue spaces (GBS) that are reserved, modified, and deployed in urban/peri-urban areas. She is amongst a small group of scholars who have begun to experiment and validate the utilisation of classical non-market approaches in China’s transitional context and facilitate the quantitative assessment of GBS’ contribution to the quality of life. An additional strand of her research is dedicated to investigating GBS dynamics, pertaining to how and why GBS as public environmental goods are physically transformed, economically incorporated, and socially mobilized. Her research helps to integrate socioeconomic dimensions to enrich GBS scholarship, and rethink theories pertaining to GBS demand and supply in the context of extensive urbanization in developing countries and re-urbanization in developed world. She is ranked as a top 1% scholar worldwide by Clarivate Analytics.

Richard FULLER is a leading expert in urban ecology research. He is a Professor at School of the Environment at The University of Queensland (UQ), Brisbane, Australia. He works on pure and applied topics in biodiversity and conservation. Much of his work is interdisciplinary, focusing on the interactions between people and nature, how these can be enhanced, and how these relationships can be shaped to converge on coherent solutions to the biodiversity crisis. His current research topics include the ecology of urban environments, understanding what drives some people to show stronger environmental concern than others, and strategies for designing efficient conservation plans.