Future City

Delft University of Technology, Faculty of Technology, Policy and ManagementIn her research and teaching Ellen van Bueren, PhD, focuses on decision-making in complex, multi-actor institutional settings, public and private. Being firmly rooted in two scientific communities, focusing on urban sustainability and on public administration, Ellen is able to combine insights from both worlds in her work on the governance of urban sustainability. She is associate editor of the Dutch Journal of Public Administration (Bestuurskunde) and of the international journal Smart and Sustainable Built Environment. In collaboration with colleagues from other disciplines and departments, including Architecture, Civil Engineering, and the Delft Climate Institute, Ellen focuses on governance related questions with regards to the improvement of urban systems. Ellen is involved in multiple national and international research initiatives and collaborations, in Europe, Asia and the US. She has published her work in journals as Environment and Planning, Building, Research and Information, and the Journal of Public Administration, Research and Theory. She is principal editor of the text book Sustainable Urban Environments: an Ecosystem Approach (2012).

Senior Research Fellow, School of Civil Engineering & Geosciences, Newcastle University – Newcastle, UKDr. Richard Dawson has a background in risk management and analysis of engineering and environmental systems. He has previously worked at Bristol University (UK) and as a visiting researcher at the Disaster Prevention Research Institute at Kyoto University (Japan). In 2004 he was awarded the Robert Alfred Carr prize by the Institution of Civil Engineers in recognition of his work. A civil engineer, Richard is interested in developing methods which enable engineers and spatial planners in cities both to reduce their vulnerability to climate change and to improve their efficiency in terms of energy use, waste etc. Much of this work is focused through his role in the Tyndall Centre Cities Programme which is developing an integrated assessment capacity to understand more about the systemic effects of climate change on cities. This initiative is already generating new insights into long term changes to vulnerability to climate impacts and greenhouse gas emissions from urban areas, and, through model-based assessments, exploring the effectiveness of alternative strategic approaches to mitigation and adaptation. Additional work on uncertainty analysis and decision-making, and on coupling social simulation techniques with work on engineering risk analysis, is helping engineers and planners to make more informed choices about the resilience of their decisions to climate change, and giving insights into the social-technical interface that defines the urban environment.Richard has published widely including in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, Proceedings of the Institution of Civil Engineers, Climatic Change and Natural Hazards.

Patrick Devine-Wright is a Reader at the Manchester Architecture Research Centre, University of Manchester. With a background in environmental and social psychology, his main research interests lie in public engagement and acceptance of sustainable technologies, motivation for pro-environmental behaviour and place theory. He leads the ‘Beyond Nimbyism’ research project funded under the UK Research Councils’ Energy Programme, and is co-investigator in projects funded under programmes managed by ESRC (Sustainable Technologies) and EPSRC (Supergen and Sustainable Urban Environment). He is a Lead Expert advising the UK Government’s Foresight report on Sustainable Energy and the Built Environment, a member of the International Science Panel on Renewable Energy, has sat on the National Advisory Group steering the Community Renewables Initiative since 2001, and is a board member for the journal Local Environment. He is a chartered psychologist and graduate member of the British Psychological Society.

Full Professor of Ecology, Department of Sciences for Man, Environment and Nature, Campus Sogesta, Urbino University – ItalyAuthor of the best-selling Principles and Methods in Landscape Ecology, now in its second edition, Almo Farina’s work encompasses cognitive ecology, landscape ecology and the interactions between ecology and society, exploring how the spread of urban areas across natural systems forces ecologists, planners and policy makers to find solutions to maintain the carrying capacity of land and the availability of resources for people. His work demonstrates how complexity created by the combination of natural and human-oriented processes requires new ontological and epistemological approaches to understand the relationship between cognition and ecological function, spawning new areas of enquiry within eco-semiotics. According to this premise, the landscape becomes the semiotic interface between the ‘private’ world of each individual and the surrounding environment. Focusing on understanding the mechanisms that drive such relationships, his work can greatly contribute to developing more robust approaches to sustainable environmental management. Moving beyond this epistemological landmark means investigating the processes of human societies – their ontogenesis and development – adopting proactive scenarios. These issues will be discussed at length in his forthcoming book (in progress) Ecology, Cognition and Landscape: linking natural and social systems.

Associate Professor, Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning at the University of Melbourne, AustraliaRay Green has degrees from the Universities of Connecticut (BSc), Arizona (MLArch) and the Queensland University of Technology (PhD) and has previously worked with the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI). Before focusing on research, he spent many years in professional landscape architectural and planning practice, where he focused primarily on tourism, urban open space and housing development projects in the United States, Mexico, various South East Asian countries and Australia. He is a member of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and the Environmental Design Research Association (EDRA).Ray’s research focuses broadly on how communities perceive environmental change, particularly in the context of landscapes undergoing rapid transformation and where development threatens fragile environments. The aim of this research is both to advance theoretical understanding in the area of landscape perception and to use this knowledge to guide landscape design and planning decision-making. This approach has led him in exploring community perceptions of change in coastal towns along Australia’s Great Ocean Road; tourism development in coastal settlements in Thailand; and through the application of GIS and virtual reality methods, Australian rural community in response to future land-use scenarios in the context of changing economic, aesthetic, agricultural and tourism conditions.Ray is co-author of The Green City: Sustainable Homes, Sustainable Suburbs (2005) and lead editor and co-author of a research monograph, Design for Change (1985), which explores planning and environmental design strategies for restoring areas damaged by bushfires. His forthcoming book, Coastal Towns in Transition: Local Perceptions of Landscape Change, documents his research on community perceptions of environmental change in Australian coastal towns. His work has also appeared in various academic and professional journals and presented at numerous international conferences. Professor Robert Vale is an architect, writer and researcher in the field of sustainable design. He is currently Professorial Research Fellow at the School of Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and holds a number of other academic and research positions. In 1975 he wrote, with Brenda Vale, The Autonomous House. The book has been translated into five languages and is widely recognized as a basic text in the field of green building.Through the 1980s the Vales designed a number of very low energy commercial buildings in England, notably the superinsulated Woodhouse Medical Centre in Sheffield, which received the UK’s first Green Building of the Year Award in 1993. In 1990 they wrote Green Architecture which has been published in the USA and Germany as well as in the UK.In the early 1990s the Vales completed the first autonomous house in the United Kingdom in the historic town of Southwell. Their book The New Autonomous House documents the design and construction of this house, which is warmed and powered by the sun, produces its drinking water from rain, composts its effluent, and is consistent with its historic context. It was the first grid-connected solar house in the UK. In 1994 they were elected to the Global 500 Roll of Honour of the United Nations in recognition of outstanding practical achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment. They then designed the Hockerton Housing Project, five one-storey zero-emission earth sheltered houses. This was the first zero-emission development in the UK. The Hockerton Housing Project was awarded the Eurosolar European Prize 2001 and won the ‘Residential’ section of the UK National Energy Efficiency Awards in December 2006.Since emigrating to New Zealand eleven years ago the Vales developed the National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) for the Australian government. This system for rating the environmental impact of buildings is the first to be based on measured performance rather than on modeling, and it covers in detail the impact of transport as it relates to a building’s location and use. The Vales’ latest book which deals with the realities of sustainable living will be published by Thames and Hudson of London and New York in March 2009.

Glenn is a Senior Landscape Ecologist, United States Geological Survey, Patuxent Wildlife Research Center, Laurel, MD, USA. He also serves as Editor-In-Chief of the journal Urban Ecosystems, is a member of the UNESCO Man and the Biosphere Working Group on Biosphere Reserve Concept and Urban Issues, and has been a Co-Organizer, Melbourne Urban Ecology Workshop: Comparative Ecology of Cities and Towns, Melbourne, Co-Organizer, UN MAB/EuroMab workshop on wetlands and urban landscapes, Czech Republic. Glenn also serves on the Board of the Society of Wetland Scientists and the Board of Editors of the journal Landscape Ecology.His research program addresses multivariate hypothesis testing of the impact of multiple stressors (including land use and global change) on terrestrial and wetland systems. A common theme that runs throughout his research is a desire to understand the role of biotic and abiotic processes influencing ecosystem behavior and the regional and landscape implications of spatial heterogeneity on plant community organization and structure. His recent work includes the development of decision support tools for natural resource managers. These tools directly translate and summarize the results of research findings into models that mangers can use to aid in the natural resource decision process.His research has appeared in Conservation Biology, Landscape Ecology, Wetlands, BioScience, Plant Ecology, Journal of Ecology, Ecosystems, Oikos, and other journals.

Department of Applied Landscape Ecology, Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) – Leipzig, GermanyDagmar Haase studied Geography, Biology and Geology at the Halle-Wittenberg University and Sociology at the Leipzig University in Germany. From 1996 to 1999 she was PhD student at the University of Leipzig, Department of Geography, where she focused her research on modelling and monitoring water and matter fluxes in disturbed and landscape systems. In 1999 she finished her PhD thesis on disturbed urban floodplain forests. Dagmar has been a member of the scientific staff of Leipzig’s Centre for Environmental Research (UFZ) since 2000, becoming, in 2003, co-ordinator of research on urban modeling and monitoring in the centre’s Department of Applied Landscape Ecology. Her research focuses largely on spatially explicit modeling, household driven land use changes and urban shrinkage. Additional research activities examine the environmental effects of urban land use change – including flood impact and risk assessment, and the recreational and habitat functions of urban greenery. Dr. Haase is acting as co-ordinator on a number of EU integrated projects, including the sustainability impact assessment of PLUREL, a large European research-practice co-operation project on rural-urban regions; FLOODsite – working on urban flood risk assessment; and NeWater, which focuses on conceptual and system dynamics modeling and qualitative mapping to mitigate urban flood issues of the Tisza River Basin Case Study. Dagmar has published widely, including in Environmental Modeling and Software, Plant Nutrition and Soil Science, Natural Hazards, Ecology and Society, Nature and Culture and Advances in Geosciences. Her book, Dynamics of Urban Regions: From theory-driven data analysis to quantitative models is currently in press.

Mike Jenks is Professor Emeritus, Department of Architecture at Oxford Brookes University The Founding Director of the Oxford Institute for Sustainable Development (OISD) Mike Jenks’ research focuses on the compact city and sustainable urban form, urban intensification, design guidance, housing and housing layout. His expertise has been in considerable demand worldwide, most recently advising various bodies in Japan, Taiwan and Thailand. His research has been funded by organisations such as the EU, the UK Research Councils (EPSRC), and various central government departments, the Building Research Establishment, Leverhulme Trust Fund and Housing Research Foundation. He was the Principal Investigator leading the CityForm: the Sustainable Urban form Consortium, funded by the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) (see www.city-form.org). Most recently he is acting as an expert Independent Evaluator to assess a large project Building Sustainable Communities (also known as UrbanBuzz). His future work will involve the setting up of CityForm India, and potential international research collaborations on Eco-Urbanity.His publications include, (co-edited with E. Burton, K. Williams and R. Burgess), an influential trilogy of books: The Compact City: A Sustainable Urban Form? (1996); Achieving Sustainable Urban Form (2000); Compact Cities: Sustainable Urban Forms for Developing Countries (2000), all with Spon Press, and a more recent book with N. Dempsey, Future Forms and Design for Sustainable Cities (2005), Architectural Press. His latest books include World Cities and Urban Form: Fragmented, Polycentric, Sustainable? (2008, Routledge; with D.Kozak and P.Takkanon), and The Dimensions of the Sustainable City (with C.Jones) which is due to be published late in 2008 by Springer.

Prof. Cecil Konijnendijk is a Professor in the Faculty of Forestry, and Program Director for the Bachelor of Urban Forestry. He studies, teaches and advises on the role of trees and green space in our cities and towns. His particular interests include green space governance (including community involvement), people-nature relationships and cultural ecosystem services, and urban forestry and urban greening. Professor Konijnendijk's research has taken him across the globe where he has worked in close dialogue with decision-makers and practitioners. Before coming to UBC, he worked at Wageningen University (Netherlands), the European Forest Institute (Finland), the University of Copenhagen (Denmark), the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (Sweden), and the University of Hong Kong (Hong Kong, China). His research and teaching at UBC focus on urban forest governance, legislation and administration. Cecil is a member of the Board of Directors of the International Society of Arboriculture, and a visiting professor at the Chinese Academy of Forestry and two Chinese universities.

Professor of Landscape Architecture, University of Michigan – Ann Arbor, MI.A Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, Joan was named Landscape Ecology Scholar by the International Association of Landscape Ecology in 2007 and Distinguished Practitioner of Landscape Ecology in the US in 1998. Recently, she has served as New Zealand Institute of Landscape Architects Fellow, 2006; Beatrix C. Farrand Visiting Distinguished Professor, University of California, Berkeley, 2003; and Miegunyah Distinguished Fellow, University of Melbourne, Australia, 2001. Her work across the spectrum of human-dominated landscapes offers strategies for basing ecological design on strong science, interdisciplinary collaboration, and thoughtful engagement with policy. Her recent work applies this approach to brownfields, vacant property, exurban sprawl, and agricultural landscapes. Her research investigating public acceptance and cultural sustainability of environmentally beneficial landscape change has received numerous awards and has appeared in Conservation Biology, Journal of Soil and Water Conservation, Landscape Ecology, Landscape Journal, Landscape and Urban Planning, Places, Wetlands, and elsewhere including her books: Placing Nature (1997, Island Press), and From the Corn Belt to the Gulf (2007, Resources for the Future Press).

Chair for Strategic Landscape Planning and Management, Technical University of Munich, GermanyStephan Pauleit received a Master in Landscape Architecture and Landscape Planning at Munich Technical University and has held positions as research associate and lecturer at Munich Technical University, Wye College and Manchester University. He was professor in Landscape Planning at the University of Copenhagen from 2004-2009. Since then, he is Professor in Strategic Landscape Planning and Management at the Technical University of Munich.An expert in urban landscape planning and landscape ecology, his research interests are broad, ranging from strategies for green infrastructure planning at city and city regional level to urban forestry and planting design. He also has a special interest in adaptation strategies to climate change in the urban environment. Recent research includes the European FP6 Integrated Project 'PLUREL - Peri-urban Land Use Relationships' (www.plurel.net), FP7 'CLUVA - Climate Change and Urban Vulnerability in Africa' and 'URBES - Urbanization, Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services'. He has broad experience in international research and consultancy, including urban greening projects in China.He has published widely, his recent research appearing in, for example, the Journal of the Built Environment, Land Use Policy, Town Planning Review, Urban Forestry and Urban Greening and the Journal of Landscape and Urban Planning, as well as in several books.

Distinguished Senior Scientist, Cary Institute of Ecosystem Studies – Milbrook, NYSteward T. A. Pickett received his B.S. from the University of Kentucky in 1972 and his Ph.D, specializing in plant ecology, in 1977 from the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. He served on the faculty of Rutgers University until 1987, where he taught ecology and environmental science, and he continues to train graduate students through the Graduate Program in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at Rutgers, and at the Universities of Connecticut, and Maryland, Baltimore County. From 1984-1986, he was Director of the Hutcheson Memorial Forest Center, a unit of Rutgers devoted to conservation of New Jersey's last upland primary forest, to ecological research, and to public education. His research interests encompass both conceptual and empirical studies of the role of spatial heterogeneity and temporal dynamics in the function of ecological systems, including vegetation dynamics and natural disturbance, and the dynamics of ecological landscapes. His interest in the role of heterogeneity in ecological systems has led to his serving as the Director of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, one of two urban Long-Term Ecological Research sites supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation. In this capacity, he has developed and promoted interdisciplinary linkages between ecology and other disciplines and professions, including hydrology, social sciences, economics, atmospheric sciences, and urban design.He has served on the boards and committees of several international societies, including the Ecological Society of America as its inaugural Vice President for Science, the Council of the International Association for Vegetation Science, the Science Advisory Board of the National Center for Ecological Synthesis and Analysis, and the Biology Advisory Committee of the National Science Foundation. He served as a member of the National Design Committee for the National Ecological Observatory Network, as a member of the Board on Environmental Studies and Toxicology of the National Research Council, and as a board member of Defenders of Wildlife. He is currently serving on the board of the American Institute of Biological Sciences, and has contributed to the Long-Term Ecological Research Network strategic planning process through service on the Science Task Force Advisory Committee. He has helped to organise a number of key symposia and workshops, and has served on the inaugural boards of the Journal of Vegetation Science and Community Ecology. His work has appeared in a wide range of journals, while his books (as co-editor and author) include the classic, The Ecology of Patch Dynamics and Natural Disturbance (1985, with P.S. White), Ecological Heterogeneity (1991, with J. Kolasa), and Humans As Components of Ecosystems (1993 with M.J. McDonnell). An ecological perspective on philosophy of science, Ecological Understanding (with C. Jones and J. Kolasa), originally appeared in 1994, with a second edition in 2007. He has also edited The Ecological Basis of Conservation: Heterogeneity, Ecosystems, and Biodiversity (with R.S. Ostfeld, M. Shachak, and G.E. Likens in 1997), Biodiversity in Drylands: Toward a Unified Framework (with M. Shachak, J.R. Gosz, and A. Perevolotsky in 2005), and Designing Patch Dynamics, edited with B.P. McGrath, V. Marshall, M.L. Cadenasso, J.M. Grove, R. Plunz, and J. Towers in 2007. With Baltimore colleagues, he is completing two new books, one on the linked social and ecological patchiness in urban ecosystems, and the other on the linkage of ecology and urban design.

Professor Robert Vale is an architect, writer and researcher in the field of sustainable design. He is currently Professorial Research Fellow at the School of Architecture, Victoria University of Wellington, New Zealand, and holds a number of other academic and research positions. In 1975 he wrote, with Brenda Vale, The Autonomous House. The book has been translated into five languages and is widely recognized as a basic text in the field of green building.Through the 1980s the Vales designed a number of very low energy commercial buildings in England, notably the superinsulated Woodhouse Medical Centre in Sheffield, which received the UK’s first Green Building of the Year Award in 1993. In 1990 they wrote Green Architecture which has been published in the USA and Germany as well as in the UK.In the early 1990s the Vales completed the first autonomous house in the United Kingdom in the historic town of Southwell. Their book The New Autonomous House documents the design and construction of this house, which is warmed and powered by the sun, produces its drinking water from rain, composts its effluent, and is consistent with its historic context. It was the first grid-connected solar house in the UK. In 1994 they were elected to the Global 500 Roll of Honour of the United Nations in recognition of outstanding practical achievements in the protection and improvement of the environment. They then designed the Hockerton Housing Project, five one-storey zero-emission earth sheltered houses. This was the first zero-emission development in the UK. The Hockerton Housing Project was awarded the Eurosolar European Prize 2001 and won the ‘Residential’ section of the UK National Energy Efficiency Awards in December 2006.Since emigrating to New Zealand eleven years ago the Vales developed the National Australian Built Environment Rating System (NABERS) for the Australian government. This system for rating the environmental impact of buildings is the first to be based on measured performance rather than on modeling, and it covers in detail the impact of transport as it relates to a building’s location and use. The Vales’ latest book which deals with the realities of sustainable living will be published by Thames and Hudson of London and New York in March 2009.

Llewelyn, Davies, and Yeang, London, U.K.Distinguished Endowed Plym Professor of ArchitectureDr. Yeang, AA Dip. PhD. (Cantab), APAM, FSIA, RIBA, ARAIA, Hon. FAIA, Hon. FRIAS, FRSA, is an internationally renowned architect specializing in the design of ‘green’ architecture, or ecologically responsive large buildings and master plans. He has offices in Kuala Lumpur, London, and Beijing, and associate offices in Singapore, Australia, and Germany. He completed his architectural education at the well-known AA (Architectural Association) School in London. Subsequently, he received his doctorate in architecture at Cambridge University in the United Kingdom. His firms’ particular expertise is in the design of high-quality large buildings that are ecologically "sustainable." In this field, Dr. Yeang has pioneered a new genre of tall buildings, referred to as the "bioclimatic skyscraper." His research has led to a number of patents pending. He has designed more than a dozen high-rise towers and over 200 projects worldwide. They include, the 24 storey IBM Plaza, the 29 story Central Plaza, the 21 story Menara UMNO Tower, and the 15 story Menara Mesiniaga (which received the prestigious Aga Khan Award), all in Malaysia, and the 40-story Elephant and Castle Eco Tower in London.His firm in Kuala Lumpur, T.R. Hamzah & Yeang International, recently completed the National Library in Singapore, which was awarded a Green Platinum Prize, the highest for a green and sustainable building, by the government of Singapore. The firm has received several other international awards including the Prinz Claus Award and the Royal Australian Institute of Architects International Award. Dr. Yeang has authored numerous key books and articles on skyscrapers and on ecological design, including Designing With Nature (1995), The Green Skyscraper: The Basis for Designing Sustainable Intensive Buildings (2000). His latest book, Ecodesign: Instruction Manual, was published by Academy-Wiley (London) in 2005.Dr. Yeang has served on the Council of the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA), as President of the Malaysian Institute of Architects, and as Chairman of ARCASIA (Architects Regional Council Asia). He is also an Honorary Fellow of the American Institute of Architects.For more information about the work of Dr. Kenneth Yeang visit the websites: http://www.trhamzahyeang.com and: http://www.llewelyn-davies-ltd.com/This biography is printed with permission from David Chasco, Director of the School of Architecture at the University of Illinois at Urbana Champaign. The material on which the text is based can be found at http://www.arch.uiuc.edu/events/lectures/fa2006/10_11_06/ and is paraphrased from the booklet, Ken Yeang, Plym Distinguished Professor in Architecture, University of Illinois, 2006, On Green Design, edited by David Chasco, Botond Bognar and John Stallmeyer.