The Rise of Post Modernism (Urbanism)

The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design by Anne Whiston Sporn 1984

Anne Whiston is an American landscape architect, photographer and author. Her work promotes community-oriented spaces that are functional, sustainable, meaningful, and artful. Spirn is a professor in the Department of Urban Studies and Planning of the MIT School of Architecture and Planning.

The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design talks about how urban issues can be resolved by taking natural factors into accounts. For instance, air flow, water dynamics, geologies as well as plants and animals.

'What every city should look like and what to do about it?' This question arises and we should look into it. Especially architects, landscape architects or designers when it comes to planning a city or designing a building. One of her famous quote, ‘humans’ survival as a species depends upon adapting ourselves and our settlements in new, life-sustaining ways, shaping contexts that acknowledge connections to air, earth, water, life and to each other, and that help us feel and understand these connections, landscapes that are functional sustainable, meaningful, and artful.’ It is important for them to think about how to implement new designs. Determining factors such as site context, nature and environment issues should always be considered rather than just going against the nature. Below are the characteristics of Ecological Urbanism that Anne pointed out:

• Cities are part of the natural world “The realization that nature is ubiquitous, a whole that embraces the city, has powerful implications for how the city is built and maintained, and for the health, safety, and welfare of every resident. Despite their differences, all cities have transformed their environments in a similar fashion.”

• Cities are habitats “It is time to employ one of the greatest human talents, the ability to manipulate the environment, to transform an environment that has become hostile to life itself into a humane habitat which sustains life and nourishes growth, both personal and collective. Design which juxtaposes and contrasts nature’s order and human order prompts the contemplation of what it means to be human.”

• Cities are ecosystems “It furnishes a framework for perceiving the effect of human activities and their interrelationships; facilitates weighing the relative costs and benefits of alternative actions; encompasses all urban organisms, the city’s physical structure, and the processes which flow within it; and appropriate in examining all levels of life, from an urban pond to megalopolis.”

• Urban ecosystems are dynamic and interconnected “A knowledge of the system’s dynamics yields a different appreciation for boundaries in space and time than is normally permitted in day-to-day pursuits and highlights the shortcomings of designing solely within political boundaries and time spans of less than several generations.”

• Every city has a deep structure or enduring context “Natural environment of each city remains an enduring framework within which the human community builds. A city’s natural environment and its urban form, taken together, comprise a record of the interaction between natural processes and human purpose over time. Together, they contribute to each city’s identity.”

• Urban design is a powerful tool of adaptation “Ecosystems differ in their ability to withstand disturbance and assimilate waste. Resilience is a measure of the system’s capacity to absorb change, and some ecosystems are more resilient than others.”

In a conclusion, nature should be integrated in the design of a place, a building or even a city. It is a crucial factor that determines the whole ecosystem, a world that we are living in. While we are building buildings for our own habitats, we are destroying the natural habitat at the same time. What Anne had shared is truly a great reminder on how can we actually adapt the nature to part of building designing.

Prepared by

Lee Wen Horng

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