Design II: Ecological Urban Design is focused on creating new design experiments and system logics for ecologically sensitive settlements with urban tissues in extreme climates and ecological contexts. It is founded on the logic that the patterns of human inhabitation are determined by the needs of the infrastructure of the ecology – designed, grown and developed as integrated natural and cultural systems, with the ambition to be resilient to change. Projects will be developed for a sensitive biome affected by climate change that functions both as a place of food production and a place of inhabitation for people. The design will integrate topographical and hydrological conditions with patterns and clusters of dense and/or distributed urban blocks and associated productive landscapes that have their own intricate networks.

Each Team will develop their Design Strategy in response to an initial research of the dynamic parameters that act on the site – for example wind and temperature gradients, variations in river flow, tide levels, storm surge water height, –saline to fresh, wet to dry, surface to depth, solid to liquid, with their temporal parameters – daily, seasonal, monthly and longer term. Strategies for operating on those gradients will be proposed.

Initial Design Experiments will be conducted to test generative algorithms in the context of the ecological gradients and parameters, and to explore variations and combinations with quantification of their capacities and performance. The developed Design Proposal will demonstrate the dynamics of adaptive changes over time of the proposed integrated productive landscape, the qualities and quantities of its urban morphologies and its ecological context.