Urban Ecosystem Building Block

URBAN ECOSYSTEM BUILDING BLOCK (n.)

a cement componenet of biological capacity.

(v.)

to dismantle systematic environmental exclusion and disseminate knowledge and benefits of urban nature.

image provided by Vox - RJ Sangosti

The use of urban nature as a tool of gentrification and discrimination is systemic within dense developments, relating closely with spiked property value, social class divisions, and displacement of minority populations.

“Mid-to-late-nineteenth-century elites’ anxieties and neuroses about urbanization and immigration were thus transfigured into an idealization of the anti-urban. While nature’s uplift was theoretically available to all, in reality, only the wealthy had the opportunity to access it. Communing with nature then bestowed the upper classes with superior qualities that conveniently justified their privilege.”

CONTEXT

Melissa Checker. The Sustainability Myth : Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice, Justice, New York University Press, 2020.

Throughout urban development, cities actively draw societal lines that define “good” and “bad:” rich and poor, man and woman, white and black, and such. Intentional and unintentional designs describe citizen behavior towards one another, in which stigmas and stereotypes are embedded into the environment and influential to people. For centuries, cities cultivate their own capital of social standard, carried through the celebration of some people at the expense of others. City design is a catalyst of systemic actions of segregation and social division, of which its techniques evolve throughout history.

There are also times where urban nature, characterized as public space, represents revolution and activism. The same spaces that were seen as escapism from industrial mess were the same spaces that hosted protests and public movements. Activist movements, like the New York Green Guerrillas of the 1970s, focus on reclaiming urban nature to the gentrified communities, vitalizing accessibility of greenery to those socially, economically, and environmentally vulnerable.

“In areas where arson, neglect and financial hardship had left a glut of vacant lots and valueless property, community members invested sweat equity and created their own gardens. Most of these were in Hispanic and African American neighborhoods, where white flight, planned shrinkage, and other policies had devalued properties in neighborhoods of color and made property ownership untenable.”

Today, promotion of urban nature is blanketed under sustainable development and community revitalization, in which large-scale green projects aim to bring attraction and business to the area. These green projects in upper-end cityscapes take different forms, from large parks to vegetated infrastructure, and they contribute to a city’s trend of gentrification and repression of lower-class neighborhoods, usually of minority populations.

And in actuality, the “greenness” of these projects are a visage, as the word only resembles the marketing of the project, not its actual purpose.

TAKE THE HIGH LINE GREEN INFRASTRUCTURE PROJECT OF NEW YORK.

image provided by Friends of the High Line - Iwan Baan

“The High Line is a mark of success for real estate developers and New York’s tourism industry, but it has failed its surrounding residents. Since the opening of the High Line, major corporations, including Facebook, Salesforce, Twitter, and Google, have all opened offices in Chelsea (Haag, 2020). This influx of business creates a reinforced cycle of gentrification whereby new residents of the Chelsea area demand more goods and services tailored to their lifestyle... While the High Line did not invent gentrification, nor did the project bring it to the Chelsea neighborhood, it certainly exacerbated its effects.”

Katie Jo Black, Mallory Richards. “Eco-gentrification “Eco-gentrification and who benefits from urban green amenities: NYC’s high Line,”Landscape Line,”Landscape and Urban Planning, Planning, Vol. 204

AS FOR GREEN BUILDING IN ARCHITECTURE.

“Living walls can help bring nature to urban canyons.

However, contemporary living walls are cost prohibitive and made of materials with shorter life spans than their buildings. High cost often restricts their use to luxury applications promoting ecological symbolism rather than impactful propagation of urban nature.” image provided by Pixabay - Engin_Akyurt

Benjamin Riley, François de Larrard, Valéry Malécot, Isabelle Dubois-Brugger, Hervé Lequay, Gilles Lecomte. “Living “Living concrete: Democratizing living walls,”Science walls,”Science of The Total Environment, Environment, Vol. 673

Living walls and roofs, under the So what does this mean for urban pretenses of corporate decoration, nature in gentrified minority high-end urban nature, or modern communities? What kind of nature art installations, are commodities is deemed healthy, clean, or good? of basic human needs. Urban What kind of nature is unsettling, nature is beneficial to human and lost, or bad? Today is the optimal environmental health, and the creation opportunity to evaluate cityscapes and of expensive, high-maintenance gradually dismantle dividing design. As vegetated infrastructure measures greenwashing and elitist sustainable quality of biophilia with price, accommodations obscure the lens of insinuating that a healthy environment environmental justice, a new material must be owned, entitled, controlled, is needed to clarify sustainable and associated with economic development as an achievement of prosperity. environmental and social health.

RESEARCH INITIATIVE THE GOALS OF THIS RESEARCH IS TO DEVELOP A MATERIAL THAT CAN ACCOMODATE AN “URBAN ECOSYSTEM” AS A NETWORK, INSTILL A “GREEN RESPONSIBILITY” AS A DUTY, AND TO DISSEMINATE “BIOPHILIC INTERACTION” AS A HEALER. “URBAN ECOSYSTEM” AS A NETWORK. (n.)

innovation, evaluation of accessibility, and social sustainability for the future resiliency.

“BIOPHILIC INTERACTION” AS A HEALER. (v.)

The bond between the landscapes of urban development and its native habitat. A method of envisioning a symbiotic relationship between human and nature. The material component directs towards environmental sustainability in an efficient, cost-effective, and passive approach. The invention of a hybridized urban fabric is capable of hosting urban agroecology, biodiversity, and biophilic integration into future generations through exposure, interaction, and education.

The Environmental Lens. Fosters foundation for environmental resilience within a densely human-populated and polluted environment. Mitigates heat island effect, absorbs carbon dioxide, reduces urban flooding, insulates buildings when applied to facade design.

The Social Lens. Disseminates knowledge and connection between people and nature; potential collaboration with indigenous activists and farmer families to educate communities of environmental responsibility through urban agroecology, biodiversity, and restoration.

“GREEN RESPONSIBILITY” AS A DUTY. (adj.) The dismantling of the “Green Building” Movement through gestures

of “green infrastructure” -- classism, gentrification, and the exclusivity of basic rights. One of the primary actors of discrimination is the exclusivity of architectural innovation, especially within the “green building” movement. “Green building” contributes to the capitalist, top-down trap of classism, so aligned with it should include “Green Responsibility,” the cusp that shifts green-market into self-awareness of

The active process of integrating and welcoming vegetation into urban cityscapes.

“URBAN ECOSYSTEM BUILDING BLOCKS” AS A TOOL. (n.)

The urban ecosystem component system IS a hybridized urban fabric that evolves along with the cityscape and its people, planting the humbling ideologies of Green Responsibility into future generations and enforcing all scales of biophilic interaction as a basic human right.

The making of urban ecosystem building components are fundamental to a revolution of Green Responsibility, a motive to disrupt the social segregation between controlled and uncontrolled vegetative infrastructure. Parametric design applications and affordability of the urban ecosystem component grants accessibility of environmental and biophilic benefits to any community.

THESIS

image provided by Architizer - morphosis

image provided by DETAIL - Urban Art Projects

RESEARCH PRECEDENTS

image provided by Architect Magazine - Ian Volner

PARAMETRIC PRECAST

Of the many strategies of concrete application, precast concrete is a system of individual, prefabricated concrete modules that are casted with durable, reusable molds and assembled onto a steel skeleton. This system is flexible to parametric applications, in which design iterations and interventions to singular components alter and transform the overall aesthetic. Precast is a time and cost efficient method of achieving a captivating concrete structure, and is a capable foundation for hosting a web of an idea.

Perot Museum

The precedent examples shown are the Perot Museum by morphosis, KAUST Breakwater Beacon by Urban Art Projects, and [Misfit]Fit by Batay-Csorba Architects. Perot and [Misfit]Fit use precast for their facade systems, whereas KAUST consists of a cast-in-place base and a precast shaft. [Misfit]Fit clearly resembles a repetitive pattern, whereas Perot has a spontaneously-generated pattern. However, the design would only need a couple panel iterations to complete the facade.

KAUST Breakwater Beacon

[Misfit]Fit

RESEARCH PRECEDENTS As an effort to “green” cityscapes and an alternative to large parks and waterways, vegetated infrastructure takes the form of green roofs and walls, in which plants are embedded into the building structure. As discussed earlier, vegetated infrastructure is mostly associated with luxury buildings, or city beautification projects. The following examples are the Living Wall of SFMOMA and the Living Roof of California Academy of Sciences.

VEGETATED INFRASTRUCTURE The research conducted in “Living Concrete: Democratizing Living Walls” aims to simplify living wall construction, making it more accessible, versatile, and affordable. Here, the research time successfully hosted healthy plants grown out of concrete blocks. In order to do so, they experimented with pH alterations, concrete formulas, and irrigation methods. This project is a crucial precedent for this upcoming research, as it confirmed the possibility of the urban ecosystem hybridization.

image provided by Habitat Horticulture - David Brenner

image provided by Science of the Total Environment - Fig. 2 Interior Trials

image provided by ArchDaily - Fernando Herrera

RESEARCH PRECEDENTS

CONTROLLED VS. UNCONTROLLED CONTROLLED.

Connotations of vegetated infrastructure can go two ways: controlled and uncontrolled. Controlled vegetated infrastructure infers to designed, intentional occurrences of nature, while uncontrolled represents unexpected or spontaneous growth.

Reactions to these two are similar to the difference between mural art and graffiti art. Murals are often commissioned for a program or purpose, of which a paid artist executes. The art has an assigned place, entitled with protection and admiration from the community. Graffiti art, on the other hand, is performed at the discretion of the artist, in which any surface serves as a canvas. Since graffiti artists liberate themselves of demand and program, their work is seen as unwelcome or unsafe upon communities outside of their culture. The control and placement of mural art is wanted, while the spontaneity and freedom of graffiti is not; in cities, these art signals and their reactions show the division of the gentrifiers and gentrified. The metaphor applies to nature as well, in which planned vegetation is welcome, while unplanned vegetation is not.

image provided by Habitat Horticulture - David Brenner

UNCONTROLLED.

The goal of the urban ecosystem building block is to, intentionally, plant the seed of vegetation and allow it to grow, spread, and flourish along its lifetime. Their cohabitation with society symbolizes Green Responsibility as a movement. image provided by Urban Omnibus - David Seiter

image provided by Colossal - Laura Staugaitis

CONCRETE + SOIL

EXPERIMENTATION

TEXTURE | THE MIX OF NATURAL AND URBAN Depending on the Rockite-Soil ratio, the texture of the samples demonstrate a gradient from smooth to wrinkled-- controlled to uncontrolled. The smooth-control texture implies thought and precision into its pour, while the wrinkle-uncontrol texture would be described as “sloppy, dirty, careless.”

However, in reality, the intention behind the textured experiments required more thought and precision than the smooth. By comparing this gradient of texture to the gradient of implication and work, this transitions into a need of accepting imperfections in this research. In further application of vegetation’s spontaneous growth, users must embrace things that they can not control and focus on the beauty from these imperfections-- the biophilia.

GRADIENT. URBAN TO NATURAL.

CONCRETE + SOIL

SUBSTRATE REPLICATION | HOW TO REDEFINE GROUND? This stage of the research attempted different methods of combining soil and Rockite as a biological substrate. Each experiment considered:

Different layerings of Rockite, soil, and aggregate

Different pH levels of the soil

Different planting techniques These are the three different variations of the same experiment. Each sample is planted with grass seed, cilantro seed, and a succulent stem.

Topsoil Planting Method + Lemon (pH 2) pH Neutralization.

LAYERS: [A] Cement + Rock → [B] Cement + Soil/Rock/Perlite → [C] Cement (<5%) + Rock + Seed + Perlite Dilute lemon into water during cement mix process.

Mud Ball Planting Method + Coffee (pH 5) pH Neutralization.

LAYERS: [A] Cement + Rock → [B] Cement + Soil/Rock/Perlite → [C] Cement (<5%) + Rock + Perlite Between layers [B] and [C], provide indents for mud ball.

Dilute coffee and coffee ground into water during cement mix process.

Topsoil Planting Method + Mud Ball Planting Method + Lemon (pH 2) pH Neutralization + Coffee (pH 5) pH Neutralization.

LAYERS: [A] Cement + Rock → [B] Cement + Soil/Rock/Perlite → [C] Cement (<5%) + Rock + Seed + Perlite Between layers [B] and [C], provide indents for mud ball.

Dilute lemon, coffee, and coffee ground into water during cement mix process.

SEPT 28. DAY OF POUR. OCT 4.

OCT 12.

NOV 2.

PERMEABILITY. WATER BEADS.

STRUCTURAL PARAMETRIC APPLICATION LESSONS LEARNED FROM SUBSTRATE REPLICATION After observing the growth of the Substrate Replications for several weeks, there were both controlled and uncontrolled elements to consider. The intention of control was weak, resulting in structural failure of the samples. This fault caused unforeseen spontaneous growth, from roots escaping through the form to plant growth traveling to destroyed areas. Future experimentations require a greater mix of Rockite and less reliance on aggregate.

ACHIEVING PERMEABILITY Permeability is crucial to the urban ecosystem. In the previous experiments, the forms absorbed water easily due to its lack of structural integrity. To achieve intentional permeability, water beads were preferred for their ability to expand when wet, and shrink when dried. This way, the beads remain large when casted, and then shrink and fall out when cured.

However, these water beads are light, flexible, and slippery. During the casting process, Rockite would push the beads away from the center and float them to the top. To ensure even spacing of the gaps, clay balls were introduced. They provide structure that the beads lack, and they are still slightly permeable. When the beads are casted with the clay, they are less likely to move.

WATER BEADS + SUBSTRATE REPLICATION.

PRODUCTION PROCESS PERMEABILITY. WATER BEADS + CLAY BALLS.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1g7XXtbIMLDCtpoonowuokYQ3ewRG62fV/view?usp=sharing

PARAMETRIC FORMS.

URBAN ECOSYSTEM BUILDING BLOCK The urban ecosystem building block abandons the soil substrate completely in order to preserve structural integrity. However, with the altered pH and permeability, life is capable. When the block is applied in a grander scale, involving parametric aspects, it becomes a fabric of biological intervention.

NOV 2.

OCT 11. DAY OF POUR.

OUTCOME

GREEN RESPONSIBILITY AND BIOPHILIC INTERACTION The urban ecosystem building block is a host of plant life within a casing of cement, growing and spreading vegetation through a controlling framework.

As a concept, the urban ecosystem transcends into a larger conversation about Green Responsibility-- the accountability and recognition of neoliberal green movements and their effects of social and environmental taint. Block by block, the urban ecosystem provides people with biophilic interaction, serving both the community and the built environment. Greatly, as a teaching tool, the block’s ability to empower uncontrollable growth and spontaneity embeds a seed of acceptance into society, allowing for people to see past imperfections of anything and choose to focus on the present values.

CALL TO ACTION In order to bring the urban ecosystem vision into fruition, there are steps needed to fulfill. A Building Code Requirement of mandating a percentage of new building or retrofitting to utilize the urban ecosystem component, or an ecological equivalent capable of hosting plant life and meeting biodiverse standards, would ensure the consistent use of the material. The requirement would start with a low percentage, which would be gently increased over time adjacent to a growing movement of Green Responsibility. The initial material would be an affordable, standardized product of easily-grown vegetation distributed from a government-supported non-profit organization. Over time, increased support, ambition, and knowledge will push the urban ecosystem fabric into productive means of agroecology and habitat restoration.

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BIBLIOGRAPHY

At a Glance | The High Line. https://www.thehighline.org/photos/at-aglance/best-of/?gallery=3854&media_item=2008. Accessed 30 Nov. 2021.

“[Misfit]Fit.” Architect, https://www.architectmagazine.com/projectgallery/misfit-fit_o. Accessed 30 Nov. 2021.

Checker, Melissa. The Sustainability Myth : Environmental Gentrification and the Politics of Justice. New York University Press, 2020, https:// ebookcentral-proquest-com.libproxy.berkeley.edu/lib/berkeley-ebooks/detail. action?docID=6340800.

“Profiles of Spontaneous Urban Plants.” Urban Omnibus, 7 Dec. 2011, https://urbanomnibus.net/2011/12/profiles-of-spontaneous-urban-plants/.

Demsas, Jerusalem. “Why Does TikTok Hate This Affordable Housing Development?” Vox, 10 Sept. 2021, https://www.vox.com/22650806/ gentrification-affordable-housing-low-income-housing.

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