Module VII: Landscape Ecology
Scope of the Research
Working Hypothesis
The FCL Module VII research project will address the vital question of the design and management of tropical watersheds within dense urban agglomerations by seeking to define a more sustainable restructuring of river profiles in response to prediction models. This approach will consider the evolution and shaping of riparian neighborhoods adjacent to rivers by bringing contemporary landscape architectural methods closer in line with the ecological requirements of tropical watershed management. So far, no study has investigated the relationship between changes in existing landscape patterns and their effect on hydrological ecosystem services at the southern periphery of Jakarta in Indonesia, a place prone to recurrent and highly violent floods. The absence of prior study on the river in a megalopolis of over 25 million inhabitants is both a rare opportunity and a challenge for the FCL team. The location along the Ciliwung River has been selected as a pilot project that will lead to an in depth investigation resulting in various rules and scenarios for medium scale watersheds in Southeast Asia against the background of massive uncontrolled urban growth. The city of Jakarta still has no sewage system to speak of and this condition affects the natural waterways tremendously. The objective of this project is to integrate cultural and economic considerations within an adaptive system of large-scale landscape structures in view of creating a resilient environmental corridor system capable also of yielding more protection and fruition for the inhabitants. The research will seek to adjust the specific ecological requirements of the Ciliwung River watershed with respect to the urban condition and hydrological scale involved. In this optic, landscape architectural research will modulate its response to both ecological and urban needs to couple its development strategies with the specific physical and hydrological potential adding considerable value to the given locations. The research intends to bridge the realm of fundamental scientific research in applied terrestrial and hydrological ecology with empirical and heuristic methods of landscape architectural and urban design. This will require the use of strong tools of 3D GIS landscape modeling and visualization combined to hydrological ecosystems modeling developed in collaboration with the FCL Simulation Platform.
Within a stretch of 40 km of river valley, in an environment that has been seriously altered by anthropic pressure and that is relatively data poor, the approach to large-scale landscape architecture planning and engineering methods will seek to develop preventative as well as proactive modes of intervention. Three key sites will be chosen to focus on the interaction between watershed dynamics, river corridor, urban riverfront systems and the surrounding agricultural, leisure and urban landscapes. The study will model hydrological peak event simulations and will derive various scenarios from local conditions. The gradual build-up of local scientific knowledge will contribute significantly to the integration of dynamic natural elements such as water, fauna and vegetation within the overall urban framework of the city’s periphery in areas that have been deprived of such knowledge until now. In correlation with a broader hydrological reference region, both engineering and landscape ecology will monitor, model and design interacting systems characterized by a sustainable dynamic equilibrium. The research will produce a set of differentiated responses for each location and an understanding of how landscape architecture, ecology and hydrology can interact positively together for a better and more sustainable living environment. The goal of this research is to effectively contribute towards a more sustainable ecological imprint for each of the three neighborhoods under study. This may serve as a first stepping-stone towards the regeneration of the entire Ciliwung River corridor within the megalopolis of Jakarta. In addition, the resilience of existing natural system configurations as well as that of proposed designed solutions will be tested in the light of land use and climate change and increased population pressure on the peripheral urban regions. Ultimately the research intends to initiate remedial methods for tropical landscape architecture that would be capable of contributing significantly to the challenge of flood and erosion control, as well as improve water quality and biodiversity, while remaining ecologically responsible and respectful of local cultural traditions and dwelling patterns. The fact that the Ciliwung River is not yet governed by legislation and administration and has not yet been the object of a master plan poses a challenge that is of particular interest to the Future Cities laboratory.
Jakarta skyline
State of Research in the Field
Review of existing work
In recent decades, classical studies in landscape and ecology have focused on the preservation of existing natural resources. This particular approach to the environment translated into landscape planning methods at a large scale based on 2D mapping overlays developed by Professor Ian McHarg in the 1960’s, which established the standard in matters of environmental planning and ecology. The ensuing result at the territorial scale was that much was done to preserve and protect valuable ecological zones from urban growth; however, little was accomplished in terms of generating new performative natural environments within growing cities. Although progress has been made in recent years to bring together environmental assessment methods and their corollary palette of ecosystem services, little has been done to induce a proper level of reflection ranging from a policy level to a field operation level. In other words the number of newly created ‘renatured’ landscapes, as compared to existing ‘preserved’ landscapes, has remained desperately low particularly at the periphery of growing cities. Several factors explain this slowness: firstly, the urban pressure at the periphery has never clearly taken natural systems into account nor considered them as anything of particular worth or value, and secondly, the criteria of ‘naturalness’ have, more often than not, been linked only to pristine preserved environments rather than artificially created ones. To conclude, traditional landscape planning has not sufficiently looked at the city and its fringes as a potential reservoir of biotic diversity combined with development. Established scientific cannons of ecology tend to concentrate on existing natural preservation areas to further their research rather than turn their experience towards the greater urban environment in general. For this reason and because of a lack of research in this field the FCL Module VII will seek specifically to work at the interface of ecology and the city.
New research approaches
Over the last decade a number of studies have attempted to bridge the gap between the fields of urban landscape development and applied ecology. These studies differ from previous conventional approaches to environmental planning and landscape preservation in that they allow the urban environment to interact with its immediate natural and rural surroundings, thus defining a new kind of ecological interrelation and footprint. Pioneer work at the T.U. Berlin on Stadtökologie led by Professor Ingo Kowarik has significantly changed our perception and evaluation of urban nature into a positive, albeit altered, repository of contemporary biodiversity.
Most of these new approaches towards the urban environment look at the potential balance of ecological stocks and flows within a city; in other words, some experts believe that the city can contribute positively or at least neutrally to the ecological balance of a region. They justify these claims through precise assessments of a given situation at a given location while maintaining the question of biodiversity and sustainability as the main objective. Based on this method, research on ecosystem services in the Swiss context being presently developed at the ETH has yielded innovative results in terms of environmental strategy and policy making for urban areas. We would like to push this aspect further into the realization of viable landscape development scenarios for the future.
The broader scientific discussion on the role of landscape and ecology in matters of global sustainability with respect to natural environments and cities has also begun to offer new solutions. The detailed analysis of natural environments based on the Bayesian method is of particular relevance in assessing the value and impact of existing natural structures in a spatial-temporal dimension predicting the degree of change that they can undergo. But with respect to the proposal and generation of possible futures for the urban environment, this method is less effective. The Bayesian method can only inform of possible policy orientations: at best, it can help define a field of action, but cannot define the range of the action itself. This is precisely the gap that exists in landscape architecture, between policymaking and applied ecological practice, where various important recommendations stumble on a blatant lack of operational know-how in terms of large-scale landscape implementation. This limits the effective implementation of policy and makes a landscape approach sound utopian. Scenarios resulting from such studies more often than not remain hypothetical objectives and never reach beyond the policy level.
This hiatus between well-researched deductive hydrological and ecological evidence, and poorly instructed operational programming through inductive physical design needs to be palliated. New theoretical research set by ecosystems services has shown how the critical questions of landscape and ecology can shift towards more concrete operational questions of feasibility, sustainability and improved land value in the near future. The question of environmental risks, for instance, poses an important challenge where both the theoretical and operational levels of landscape architecture are implicitly related at an environmental scale.