Throughout history, individuals have gathered in groups to share space, habitation, commerce, and culture. Cities and nature have often been viewed as environments in opposition  - historically, as protective aggregations of civil humanity surrounded by a chaotic and threatening natural kingdom, and more recently, as rampant cancers dispersing ever outward into a threatened and diminishing wilderness.  As the next millennium approaches, many of us observe with concern the growing distance between humans who live in cities and elements of the natural world. More and more of our interactions with living plants, animals, and the environment are remote, virtual, or far removed from our daily lives. This increasing distance is both a cause and a consequence of the severe environmental problems we carry forward into the next century. A positive new model must be conceived, integrating the rich human interactivity of dense cities into symbiotic relationships with nature.

One part of the solution to this problem is to foster an understanding and passion for the natural world through direct contact and experience. Ecologists can (and do) contribute to this part of the effort by investigating and documenting ecological phenomena and reporting on the living portions of our planet in forms that are accessible to the general public. Another part of the solution is for architects and urban planners, working with ecologists, to offer the next generation new visions for the integration of nature with the built environments of urban centers.  An important first step is to create accessible, provocative prototypes for these visions.

We convened a workshop to envision and articulate prototypes for new urban models that integrate human settlement and economic production. The workshop, entitled "Eco-agro-urban Visions", brought together representatives from many disciplines: architecture, tropical agriculture, economics, recreation, ethnobotany, criminal justice, and environmental sciences. Our objective was to generate ideas for both practicable prototype structures and visionary city-building constructed in close interaction with plants and natural systems. The workshop was held at the University of Hawaii (UH) School of Architecture, and was co-organized by the school's Construction Process Innovation Lab together with the International Canopy Network.

The workshop was based on two premises: 1) cities and urban centers are inevitable parts of human landscapes; and 2) the distancing of built environments from biota and interactions of the natural world - and the desensitization that that distancing engenders - is harmful to humans, other species, and our biosphere. In her keynote lecture, Nalini Nadkarni (The Evergreen State College and The International Canopy Network) identified societal patterns that indicate proximity to nature is important to human cultures. For example, the association of elements of nature are apparent in religious events and imagery (e.g., forest-like Gothic cathedrals), holidays (Christmas trees, Arbor Day) and cultural events (floral bouquets for performers). Urban planners create spaces for nature (city parks, picnic areas). We populate our personal workspaces and cubicles with images of mountain scenes and furry animals and seashells. Automobile companies market vehicles that are destined for freeway driving by picturing them in advertisements of deserts and mountain landscapes. We associate symbolic pieces of nature with important life passages: the wedding bouquets we give our brides, the flowers the healthy send  the hospitalized, the wreaths with which we festoon our graves and crypts, and the islands of nature we protect as cemeteries themselves in even the most raucous of cities.

The current urban scene has increasingly become a world in which humans have been decoupled from nature. On the one hand, cites are full of people, their machines, their noise, their wastes. Ironically, there are often few real interactions with other life forms in cities, which leads to isolation from other humans and from other species. Prisons represent the most severe endpoint of built environments without nature. The criminal justice system isolates prisoners from plants and animals; the few programs that incorporate plants do so for the raising of vegetables, the most prosaic of contact with plants. That prisons are so devoid of living things speaks to the deep need of nature to human beings - to deny them that access is true punishment. Thus, the need to introduce or re-introduce elements from the natural environment to the built environment of cities is stronger than it has ever been, and ecologists should participate in this process.

At the workshop, presentations and case studies were offered in extremely diverse but interwoven areas (Fig. 1). The workshop fostered strong international participation. Benji Candari, a graduate student at the University of Hawaii School of Architecture, delivered a talk on sustainable technology in small island nations, and emphasized the importance of acknowledging different cultural and ethnic backgrounds in urban design. Cary Bloyd, Director of the Asia-Pacific Sustainable Development Center (APEC), reported on the APEC Energy for Sustainable Communities Program, with observations from case studies in China. Luciano Minerbi (UH Department of Urban and Regional Planning) presented case studies of agriculture-inclusive new town planning in Belgium and France. The latter two talks were excellent case studies to illustrate some general patterns discussed by Rob Knapp (The Evergreen State College), who outlined the need for urban centers to connect to the hinterland via communication and circulatory pathways. Knapp also pointed out that awareness of existing examples of nature in cities - e.g., squirrels, rats, microbes - present a rich but often overlooked source of biodiversity and nature/urban interactions that could be better understood and appreciated by urban-dwelling people.

Social and economic issues were discussed. Teguh Atmoko (Professor of Architecture at the University of Indonesia) described how the current economic crisis has created wasteland areas in the city of Jakarta. He described innovative social programs that promote "urban greenification" and employment; local people raise flowers and horticultural plants in stretches of open land beneath freeways and sell them along roadsides of the city. Craig Carlson (The Evergreen State College) discussed the poetics of prison spaces, emphasizing the near total lack of presence of natural objects, and the need to bring a sense of individualism and humanity to prisoners by giving them contact with living plants and animals.

The workshop location in Honolulu presented an ideal laboratory for discussion and study of a landscape and urban setting in need of positive new models of population and economic growth within a preserved and rehabilitated natural environment. Janet Gillmar (University of Hawaii Landscape Architect) proposed a scenario of having urban-dwellers tend gardens in suburban housing developments to reverse the "desertification" of recently abandoned agricultural land surrounding Honolulu. Carl Evenson (Extension Specialist, UH College of Tropical Agriculture and Human Resources) described planned and ongoing projects that introduce plants within and on top of buildings as elements in the urban watershed ecosystem on Oahu. Pamela Mills-Packo (USDA, Natural Resources Conservation Agency) discussed resource conservation in urban ecosystems in the context of near-city agriculture.

In a second keynote talk, Kenneth Yeang (Architect, T.R. Hamzah & Yeang, Malaysia) spoke on bioclimatic architecture and future cities. He illustrated the integration of plants, sunlight, wind, air, and other natural elements into large skyscrapers and commercial buildings that he has designed in southeast Asia, and emphasized the need to make these ventures economically as well as ecologically sustainable.
Input from the students at the University of Hawaii School of Architecture was an important component of the workshop. Students who had been focused on this topic for a studio program presented models and multi-media presentations of works-in-progress as a springboard for discussion and planning. On the final day of the conference, students organized a "charrette" (a short-term architectural studio/design exercise), which resulted in a set of models and plans for structures that incorporate nature and the built environment, drawing upon the materials presented at the workshop.

The outcomes of the workshop included the production of materials and proposals for funding to disseminate the results of the workshop (via the www and publications), induction of a core interdisciplinary team to carry these ideas further; and a set of contacts with other experts, projects, and funding sources. The workshop served to recognize the important links between humans and nature that evolved before urban settings dominated the human landscape, but which we have carried with us, often in symbolic ways. Although most ecologists are attracted to the study of ecology in pristine natural areas in forest reserves and field stations, they have a role in these efforts by contributing to our understanding of appropriate models in nature and by providing expertise on which elements might be successfully nurtured in urban centers.

More information can be found at the Eco-Agro-Urban Visions website: http://sundial.arch.hawaii.edu/cpi/workshop.html
 

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