Another exciting focus for Benyus is city planning. The Biomimicry Guild—also co-founded by Benyus with Dayna Baumeister—and HOK Architects are now collaborating on urban design. In one masterplan for Lang Fang, China, under development, the idea is to model natural water self-reliance through a retrofitted landscape. Referring to related biomimetic urban plans in World Architecture News, Baumeister stressed that “the built environment is one of the most fertile grounds for biomimicry from a sustainability perspective…our greatest collective impact will come from applying biomimicry to the planning and design of buildings, communities and cities.” This collaboration allowed Benyus, Baumeister, and colleagues to ask a crucial design question: “Shouldn’t our cities do at least as well, in terms of ecosystem services, as the native systems that they replace?”
In that vein, the Biomimicry Guild and HOK partnership created a set of Ecological Performance Standards, metrics which measure “ecosystem services such as carbon fixation, water purification, air cooling, biodiversity maintenance, soil building, erosion control,” explained Baumeister. “The buildings and eco-structures will support themselves and then some, creating more fertile soils, cleaner air and water, and safe passage for native species.” With the use of these standards, we will be able to look back and say, “we have created a human settlement that is functionally indistinguishable from the local ecology.” Benyus told World Architecture News, “making a bio-inspired product is one thing; making a bio-inspired city begins to change the world.”
via dirt.asla.org
