Patch Atlas
Integrating Design Practices and Ecological Knowledge for Cities as Complex Systems
Published on 14. January 2020
Book
Paperback/Softback
128 pages
978-0-300-23993-5 (ISBN)
Description
A new tool for analyzing urban land cover that integrates design practices and ecological knowledge for understanding cities as complex, patchy, and dynamic systems
This atlas is a unique conceptual tool to describe and analyze cities as complex systems, using a new, hybrid approach to urban land cover classification. As an impetus to bring ecologists and urban designers together, it builds on over a decade of shared knowledge from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study to inspire ecologically motivated design practice.
Rather than separating human-constructed environments from predominantly biological and geological ones, this book integrates built and ecological structures and shows how this integration can contribute to the scholarship of ecology and the practice of design. The atlas displays maps and tables depicting these hybrid land cover classes and the relationships between them; information on how the specific patch arrangements evolved over time; and speculations on how cover might change through design, disturbance, or succession. Interdisciplinary and strikingly illustrated, the atlas is a new way to study, measure, and view cities with a more effective interaction of scientific understanding and design practice.
This atlas is a unique conceptual tool to describe and analyze cities as complex systems, using a new, hybrid approach to urban land cover classification. As an impetus to bring ecologists and urban designers together, it builds on over a decade of shared knowledge from the Baltimore Ecosystem Study to inspire ecologically motivated design practice.
Rather than separating human-constructed environments from predominantly biological and geological ones, this book integrates built and ecological structures and shows how this integration can contribute to the scholarship of ecology and the practice of design. The atlas displays maps and tables depicting these hybrid land cover classes and the relationships between them; information on how the specific patch arrangements evolved over time; and speculations on how cover might change through design, disturbance, or succession. Interdisciplinary and strikingly illustrated, the atlas is a new way to study, measure, and view cities with a more effective interaction of scientific understanding and design practice.
Reviews / Votes
"This brilliant study creates a methodology that enables architects, urban designers, landscape architects and ecologists to share a language that defines urban patches in terms of their dominant ground cover, and then degrees of hybridity in a matrix of cover mixtures."-Grahame Shane, Columbia University"If we are to transition to sustainability in an urban century, we need urban designers to understand ecology, and we need ecologists to understand urban design. This much-needed and timely volume brings together the practice and aesthetic of design with urban ecology to uncover hidden patterns in urban systems. It will help designers and ecologists read the urban landscape with a fresh perspective."-Karen Seto, Yale University, and coauthor of City Unseen: New Visions of an Urban Planet
More details
Language
English
Place of publication
United States
Target group
Professional and scholarly
Product notice
Paperback (trade)
Illustrations
104 color illus.
Dimensions
Height: 254 mm
Width: 178 mm
Thickness: 12 mm
ISBN-13
978-0-300-23993-5 (9780300239935)
Copyright in bibliographic data and cover images is held by Nielsen Book Services Limited or by the publishers or by their respective licensors: all rights reserved.
Schweitzer Classification
Persons
Victoria J. Marshall is president's graduate fellow at the National University of Singapore and founder of Till Design. Mary L. Cadenasso is professor of landscape and urban ecology at the University of California, Davis. Brian P. McGrath is professor of urban design at Parsons School of Design. Steward T. A. Pickett is distinguished senior scientist at the Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies and director emeritus of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study.