Ecolopes

Urbanisation constitutes a major environmental issue of the 21st century. Urban growth causes degradation of natural ecosystems, rapid species loss, acceleration of climate change, and depletion of resources (Groffman et al. 2017, McDonald et al. 2019). For example, the outbreak of COVID-19 is seen as one consequence of the degradation of natural ecosystems, as it leads to shifts in the composition of animal communities, favouring species that are more likely to transmit diseases (Settele et al. 2020). Within the city itself, densification, the decrease of green open spaces, and a continued reliance on ‘grey’ infrastructure approaches, such as engineered solutions with little consideration of natural processes, result in an increasing separation of people from nature and a decreased access to ecosystem services, i.e., the benefits humans derive from nature (IPBES, Brondizio et al. 2019). These include regulation of climatic conditions and mitigation of extreme events such as heavy rainfall (CBO, 2013), but also the positive effects of direct human contact to nature, such as stress reduction, providing a sense of place, and contact to positive microbiota that reduce risks of allergy and diseases (Peccia et al. 2016, Gilbert & Stephens 2018, Marselle et al. 2019). This disconnect of people from nature decreases the liveability of cities and results in reduced human well-being (Maes et al. 2018). Current approaches to make cities more sustainable and liveable fall short in providing breakthrough solutions. While they aim to reduce the impact of cities on nature, they perpetuate the human-nature dichotomy by maintaining the anthropocentric design of urban environments. Consequently, we are far from achieving a biophilic design that fulfils the inherent human need to affiliate with nature in the design of the built environment (Kellert et al. 2008, Beatley 2011, Söderland 2019).

The architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industry is undergoing significant changes due to shifting sustainability benchmarks, and technological and methodological advances in computer-aided design and construction. This involves information modelling, data- driven design, computer-aided analysis and simulation, and multi-criteria optimization and evaluation (Zhao et al. 2007, Deutsch 2012, Bier & Knight 2014). Increasing focus is placed on processes such as construction management or life-cycle analyses, and architecture-environment interactions (Dover et al. 2018, Ingrao et al. 2018). However, existing approaches still largely focus on humans and grey infrastructure to manage challenges such as building climate or rainwater management, even if the aim is to integrate green and grey infrastructures in the city (Depietri & McPhearson 2017). Nature is still considered to be an attachment to a building, i.e. green facades or green roofs (Pérez and Perini 2018), rather than being an integral solution on a systemic level. Currently there are no systematic approaches in urban planning and architecture for cohabitation of human and non-human life forms (Franklin 2017). 

In ECOLOPES, we propose a radical change for city development: instead of minimizing the negative impact of urbanisation on nature, we aim at urbanisation to be planned and designed such that nature –including humans– can co-evolve within the city. We envisage a radically new integrated ecosystem approach to architecture that focuses equally on humans, plants, animals, and associated organisms such as microbiota. ECOLOPES will provide the core technology that will help to achieve this vision. In ECOLOPES, we transform the envelope into an ecolope, a multi-species living space for four types of inhabitants: humans, plants, animals, and microbiota (Fig. 1). The regenerative city where each building has an ecolope will be characterized by high biodiversity, which will help to combat the outbreak of diseases. Thus, ECOLOPES develops a new integrative vision of the role of architecture and urban planning for nature-based solutions, which revolutionises perspectives on sustainability.

ECOLOPES will modify the building envelope to enable placement and development of soil, growth and immigration of plants, settlement and reproduction of animals, and the build-up of healthy microbiota, through a systematic approach based on computational design and informed by modelling the relationships between building structure, abiotic environment, plants, animals, humans and microbiota (Fig. 2). Relevant data from biology, soil science, botany, animal ecology, microbiology, as well as human behaviour, will be collected. By modelling soil development, and growth and reproduction of plants and animals, ECOLOPES will explore the way in which architecture can provide for an integrated multi-species habitat and contribute to a healthy ecosystem. 

Building structure and soil are initial design elements. Plants will be planted or they will colonise the ecolope over time, animals as well. These organisms will bring their microbiota. The ecolope is dynamic, allowing for ecological succession as well as human management interventions, so that consequences for successional pathways can be projected. ECOLOPES will simulate the design and development of the ecolope, quantifying the benefits the ecolope has for humans and other organisms. ECOLOPES will also assess the response of humans to different design solutions, which will influence the overall design process of the ecolope. The overall goal of ECOLOPES is to provide the technology that enables an iterative design process based on the simulation of the dynamic development of the ecolope, and of its various subsystems and their interactions (Fig. 3).