I have backed and practiced biophilic design for over a decade. In this time, I’ve seen nature in our urban centers go from a sideline architectural idea to a full-fledged movement. Biophilic urbanism, in particular, seems to be taking the lead in reimagining how we should build and plan our cities. But when we say “biophilic urbanism,” it’s about a lot more than just having more parks or rooftop gardens. Biophilic urbanism, when done well, integrates nature seamlessly into our urban environments, making them healthier and more enjoyable for everyone.
For many years, I have worked on projects that feature biophilic principles. Each one has further convinced me that biophilic urbanism is the answer to crafting resilient, human-centered, sustainable cities. I have seen vacant urban lots become transformed into old-growth forests, the kind of natural spaces where a person could easily get lost. I have consulted on the creation of a green skyscraper, one that doesn’t just shelter human beings but also hosts plants from top to bottom. In those same contexts, I have wrought life-changing improvements in quality of life—more than that, really—the kind of radical improvements that make it impossible to define the urban experience as anything other than a good thing.
Let’s get this right: Biophilic urbanism isn’t simply about carelessly planting trees in cities and deeming it well enough. Instead, it’s about something much more serious and considered, which is incorporating nature into urban society in a way that makes it healthier—both mentally and physically. Of course, this raises the question of whether nature can even exist in an urban environment and, if so, whether it can do so in a way that feels genuinely coherent. Increasingly, architects and urban planners are coming down on the side of yes.
When I think of a residential complex, I am reminded of something Singapore, a world-class leader in biophilic urbanism, has in abundance. We saturated the International Residential Complex in Singapore with biophilia. The local plant species that filled its lush courtyards; the vertical gardens that graced its façade; the green spaces that topped it—you could hardly see, let alone enter, any part of the complex without encountering plants or being in close proximity to them. This was very much by design. Our intent was to convey, as directly as possible, the mental health and energy savings that living with plants is statistically correlated with and that biophilic design is intended to evoke.
Natural places matter in cities. Think of the cities you know best. You might picture vast edifices of concrete, great stretches of asphalt, and lots and lots of people. The urban environment has come to symbolize for many a life of stress and pollution and a life too far removed from nature. It’s not just that we find urban visuals unappealing. Through the ages, city dwellers have known there’s something unhealthy about living without nature in sight. Several studies link urbanity with higher levels of anxiety, actual physical illness, and even a generalized urban malaise.
I have experienced the repeated disassociation from nature. One instance that stands out happened while I worked on a project in the historically industrial neighborhood of the West Loop in Chicago. The developers wanted a standard design—high-rise, glass-clad buildings with little to no outdoor amenity space. After a lot of lobbying, we convinced them to include biophilic design principles. What we were really aiming for, though, was a redesign that featured a park at the center of the development and green spaces throughout it. Ironically, the spaces they told us would be used “if we had to” are now being used fully, and the plants and trees that were part of our redesign are being pointed to as features that are making the development a desirable place to live.
Urban dwellers’ mental health and life satisfaction can profit immensely from nature-based interactions in their work and living spaces. This has been demonstrated by a number of studies, one of which analyzed job satisfaction for 7,000 employees across 29 companies in 10 countries. The breakfast table biophilic design results were that, on average, we were 30% more satisfied with our jobs and well-being just six months after moving into spaces designed with the biophilic principle. Like almost every study in this area, these results are correlational rather than causal.
Technology and biophilic urbanism go hand in hand. They might even be said to have a somewhat symbiotic relationship. We won’t say that one advances without the other, but we certainly can aver that both together portray a not-so-fundamental shift in something that many of us trained in the built-environment fields thought was pretty settled: our need, as seen in the past few decades, to “go green” (we’ll examine what that really means in the chapters to come). Increasing human contact with nature—even in our highly developed urban centers—has become a serious design goal, as has our need to serve the undomesticated aspects of nature that’s so easy for us to forget when we’re surrounded by glass and steel.
One of the coolest projects I worked on in my career came when a Berlin tech hub brought me on to help craft a design that was equal parts green technology and biophilic design. Most of the project’s work concerned the building envelope, which is where form and function most critically intersect in a structure. The architects and I started with a solar panel system that was less than dynamic. Indeed, the system worked well enough; it produced clean energy and had the promise of “living walls” to make that energy “even cleaner.” But it was still a work in progress to make the part of the project concerned with the building’s exterior function better, look better, and walk the talk of a smarter, greener, and more sustainable world.
Biophilic urbanism, at heart, could be said to be dedicated to sustainability. After all, urbanism is a major generator of dire carbon-free climate-change necessity, as it is widespread among the varieties of human artifice. Biophilic urbanism, then, might be said to have a twofold mission in yielding sustainable design. It tries, first, to work on the built human environment in ways that absolutely reduce its harmful impacts on the climate, all the while seeking, incidentally, to make our lives better; and second, it aims to make urban spaces in which we humans can thrive—behaving like a human species that has evolved to “live long, prosper, and adapt.”
A mixed-use building I worked on in Melbourne stands out as something that all too few contemporary edifices manage to combine: sustainability, community engagement, and good design. We incorporated rain gardens that collect and filter stormwater just as we designed “rainsheds” (that’s what we called them) to shelter the plants that need to be sheltered so they can work their magic: transforming the pollutants the stormwater carries into much-needed nutrients for the beautiful, native Australian flora that fills the gardens around the development, in the spaces not occupied by residents.
The future necessitates biophilic urbanism. This urbanism allows people to see themselves as part of nature. For the world’s cities and their inhabitants, it’s an urgent and necessary urbanism to configure because it serves as a partial (but by no means complete) antidote to climate change, rampant overpopulation, resource depletion, and unfathomable urban poverty. Call it an infrastructural payoff, call it a livability dividend: People pay taxes and deserve better than what far too many of the world’s cities currently offer.
I find the movement to rewild urban places like London and New York particularly thrilling. Although they are separated by an ocean, these two cities share the extraordinary reality of having little nature in most of the spaces their inhabitants occupy. That’s because the past century of urban design has, for the most part, prioritized aesthetics, control, and disposability over the kinds of spaces you’d actually want to spend time in. Rewilding and biophilia tend to look wonderful in drawings, but they don’t come with guarantees that native grasses will somehow replace English hand-mowed turf in the parks of these rewilded places.
A rewilding project offers me the chance to do something meaningful with a space described by locals as “neglected” and needing some “love.” The Toronto project is an effort to restore what’s mostly an urban space into a “wild” corridor, not too different from what pioneers of urban rewilding like the American ecologist David Haskell have been promoting. We in the project and many in the community see the chance to not only counter climate change but to improve our collective mental health by having more green space and nature nearby.
In the end, biophilic urbanism is about much more than just appearance or sustainability. It is about forming a close relationship between people and the cities they live in. And why? Because it is the fundamental nature of that relationship that biophilic urbanism seeks to improve. It seeks to attain a path where city health = “aesthetics + sustainability + something more.” And what is that “something more”? “Something more than comparative figurative exercises about space that can carry off the illusion of ‘place,'” my architect friend said. “It comes down to nurturing environments, be they urban, suburban, or rural, in ways that ‘feel’ right, in which space ‘feels’ alive.”
Our cities’ fates rely on the infusion of nature into their designs. Biophilic urbanism is not just a passing fancy; it is the evolution of our urban environments. And I am pleased to be part of that journey.
