Ecological Urbanism is the Future for Cities in the GCC

Steven Velegrinis, Design Director for Gensler Middle East’s Cities and Urban Design practice, shares insights into ecological urbanism and highlights the advantages of building cities in harmony with nature.

becoming abundantly clear that we need a different development model to curtail the existing and continued damage being caused by humans and combat climate change.

Given the scale of the population expansion, it is imperative that the growth of cities is appropriately managed, and this is where ecological urbanism can have a significant impact.

For the longest time, we’ve thought about cities as being highly functioning machines, but the reality is that they’re much more like a metabolism or an ecology. When you regard them as such, you must think about flows and systems and how they adapt.

Evolving new models of development

According to the United Nations, the number of people living in cities is expected to increase to an estimated 66% of the world population by 2050. By this time, the global population level would be more than 9 billion, with most growth occurring in less economically developed countries. Compare this to pre-covid 2018, which saw 55% of the world’s population residing in urban areas. Overall, 4.2 billion people lived in urban settlements compared to 3.4 billion in rural areas. In 1950, only onethird (30%) of people worldwide lived in urban settlements.

This surge in urban population levels will put further pressure on already stressed resources and infrastructures, and larger cities will bear the brunt of this strain. As more and more people move to urban areas in search of better economic opportunities, services, and a higher standard of living, our urban spaces must be designed more ecologically.

It cannot be understated how much cities impact the natural world. As the planet becomes more urbanised, it is

Initially conceived of as a concept in the 2010 Book Ecological Urbanism, published by the Harvard Graduate School of Design, it is a notion that could facilitate a paradigm shift in how we design and build our cities. Its central tenant is that cities should be designed and created within – and around – the limitations and potential of existing natural resources.

Simply put, this means that it should be the natural landscape that shapes the growth and evolution of the city, with communities operating in harmony with nature. As an example, green areas will not only exist to beautify spaces. Still, they will also serve as genuine engineering artefacts that serve a purpose – improving air quality or acting to trap, retain, and treat wastewater.

Ecological urbanism aims to create ‘artificial ecosystem’ cities with the same interdependent efficiencies and life-preserving redundancies as natural ecosystems. Furthermore, a properly designed ecological city can turn the current linear pattern of energy-in-oneend and waste-out-the-other into a loop, where generated waste is repurposed and reused in various beneficial ways.

Ecological thinking gives us a model that succeeds in multiple ways. It allows us to think of ways to address climate change and how cities can work better and become more humancentric. We are an essential part of our ecology, and we need to live in symbiosis with the places in which we live. That’s why it’s critical to have a model that considers how we want to live and how our cities work.

Many of our current models for cities have their roots in how the villages came to be developed hundreds if not thousands of years ago; these models are fit for purpose only to a particular scale. Despite these limitations, we’ve continued to adapt current systems from these outdated models rather than evolve new ones, with damaging results.

How we use and think about water and wastewater is a perfect example of this. Before cities, wastewater was a resource – it was only wastewater if you wasted it. But we now connect our homes, apartments, offices, and buildings to pipes and build kilometres of pipelines to locations that treat wastewater. We then build pipelines that come back to the same places and provide the treated water back to us for things like irrigation.

Building such networks is inefficient, expensive, and comes with an enormous cost to our environment.

One solution is to treat wastewater in the location in which we create it. That solves several problems, one of which is the overall infrastructure cost. Several years ago, I was working on a master plan for a project in Qatar, where they didn’t have access to sewage or treated sewage effluent water pipelines. A conventional solution for this project involved building a three-kilometre pipeline from the site to a treatment plant and piping that water back in through another separate threekilometre pipeline.

Instead, we proposed a way of treating the wastewater in the open spaces near the site using reed beds native to the local landscape. This solution required very low energy consumption and was considered an environmentally conscious way of treating wastewater. It also provided multiple benefits, including a 200-million-riyal reduction in cost and an endless supply of irrigation water that was effectively free. Furthermore, the reed beds provided kilometres of green spaces that help to cool and condition the environment.

This project exemplifies the advantages of integrating urban infrastructure with nature rather than keeping them separate. By harmonising these elements, numerous benefits can be realised, highlighting the significance of ecological thinking in city planning.

If we think about the flows of an ecosystem and how we can optimise them, then it becomes a symbiotic type of solution. Given how much we’ve separated everything in our cities and urban environments, we must begin thinking like this. The GCC presents a massive opportunity for an ecological urbanism movement. The giga projects in Saudi Arabia are huge in size and scale and are being developed with nature in mind. The Red Sea Project has taken great pains to minimise its impact on the natural landscape, thanks to initiatives like ecologically designed destinations and being 100% powered by renewable energy.

NEOM is another interesting example, with the giga project’s website describing The Line as a ‘civilisational revolution that puts humans first, providing an unprecedented urban living experience while preserving the surrounding nature’. It adds that the project aims to ‘redefine the concept of urban development and what cities of the future should look like’.

Ecological considerations are clearly at the forefront of this massive project, with renewable energy, smart connectivity, and intelligent design all being brought to bear on the project to revolutionise how people look at cities and urban planning.

In the UAE, we have recently seen an increase in the number of residential projects that have put sustainability at their core. Of course, Dubai Sustainable City, and developments like the Terra Pavilion at Expo City, are other examples of how we can build ecologically.

Thinking of cities as ecologies

We can rectify the issues we’ve created once we consider cities and infrastructure as part of ecology. It’s surprisingly easy to retrofit cities along an ecological urbanism model. I have seen some innovative housing projects in the UAE that use nature-based systems to treat wastewater. However, there’s still plenty more we can do in existing and new cities to resolve the inefficiencies we’re building.

Natural systems can be engineered and hybridised to combine a few different things to deal with the waste that we create. Certain types of bacteria in a soil profile allow a natural system to cope with pollutants and waste, performing better than most mechanised systems, requiring far less energy, chemicals, and mechanical maintenance, which reduces costs over time.

We have an exciting opportunity in the GCC thanks to the many development agendas and plans happening across governments. There are very few places in the world where new cities are being built from scratch and where you’re not locked into using older approaches that don’t prioritise the health of an urban landscape, its residents, and the climate.

We must embrace this and utilise the opportunities available in this region to show that ecological urbanism can succeed, even in environments as harsh and challenging as the GCC.

While our regional landscapes are perceived to need more natural resources, that is not the case. Arid Ecologies are equally crucial to the world’s biodiversity, and we have the advantage of strong, decisive leadership that recognises the need to resolve the challenges we’re facing.

Most importantly, there is the willingness to invest in finding solutions to these challenges and a desire to change how we build and think about cities.

As an urban planner, I know the key is to deal with the primary issues and develop innovative ideas and methodologies to solve today’s and tomorrow’s challenges. As an active participant in developing the master plan for Dubai Expo 2020, I witnessed the remarkable fusion of groundbreaking concepts in ecological urbanism supported by novel tools and databases. This unprecedented integration has enabled us to explore intricate metrics, such as carbon emissions, in ways previously unimagined.

To unlock the full potential of ecological urbanism, we must embrace emerging technologies like Artificial Intelligence and Quantum Computing. These innovative solutions offer the means to address the pressing challenges brought about by the rapid growth of our global population and the relentless expansion of our cities. By harnessing the power of these technologies, we can pave the way for a more sustainable and ecologically conscious future.

About Gensler

Gensler is a global architecture, design and planning firm with 53 locations and over 7,000 professionals networked across Asia, Europe, Australia, the Middle East and the Americas. Founded in 1965, the firm serves more than 4,500 active clients in virtually every industry. Gensler designers strive to make the places people live, work and play more inspiring, resilient and impactful.

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