Designing Ecologies: Integrating Green Infrastructure into Sustainable Housing Development

In new suburban development, native trees, meadows, groves, hedgerows, woodland and forest patches on a site need not only to be preserved as green infrastructure, but also integrated into community planning as ecological infrastructure for sustainability concerns. This book, reflecting on contemporary urbanism theory and practice, suggests a new approach, as informed by scale thinking of the site’s ecology, for sustainable urban development. The approach is tested using a housing development project in a hedgerow-dominated suburban landscape in the Southeast United States. It is demonstrated that green infrastructure, in various forms, can be integrated in urban and landscape planning as ecological infrastructure and landscape interfaces to direct land use planning, and provide innovative ways in which such vernacular landscapes can be preserved and integrated into urban development without losing their contextual inspiration. At larger scale, the global environmental crisis challenging human well-being can only be addressed if the lessons learned from a small eco-town are to be scaled up and applied to an eco-society at large based on the same ecological design principles.