The Eco-Cathedric City: Rethinking the Human–Nature Relation in Urbanism

Abstract

Current planning of urban landscapes is dominated by a human-centric view. This leads to short-term orientation, predictable planning outcomes, and decisions being taken by a small group of humans. Alternatively, a symbiotic human–nature relationship could be a prelude to a balanced future in which sustaining all living organisms prevails. In this article, a novel approach to designing such an urban landscape is presented: the Eco-cathedric City. In this proposition, the design process thrives on high complexity, deep uncertainty, contingent nature–human relations, slow urbanism, and imaginability. It is concluded that three mechanisms should be core to this approach: (eco-)cathedral thinking, considering the impact of current decisions on seven future generations; (eco-)acupuncturist design, which plans for the process by igniting a single small intervention; and (eco-)cracy, in which a variety of actors, human and non-human organisms, co-decide. In a practical sense, the Eco-cathedric City finds its foundation in understanding local ecosystems and using this knowledge to design a self-organizing ecosystem in which regenerative resource management is prioritized, after which social constructs are formed to support this design and to fit human uses within the boundaries of this framework to conclude with an evolving belief system in which reciprocity and symbiocity are the core values.

Reconciling the Mismatch: Creating a Regenerative Framework for Regional Planning

“…Because civic transformations have determined the way of living together for a long time, and will do so in the far future, the depth of the model showed the connection to country as embraced in nearly all traditional and indigenous cultures [71,72], up to 40,000 years back. This was the reason for integrating the timeline in the framework, so that an ongoing civic transformation could emerge from the past to the design for seven future generations [73,74], for more than 175 years (Figure 3). The three key dimensions of the regenesis framework [42] were subsequently connected to this model (Figure 4).…”