Nature by Default: Bioreceptive Design for Architecture and Urban Development

Last November, I traveled to my parents’ house to spend Thanksgiving with family. During dinner, my aunt recounted how terrible a day she had when her son’s iPhone broke. How could he possibly go through an entire day without it?! How could she possibly get through the day without being able to call her son’s personal phone?! I was surprised by how emotional my aunt and cousin became while describing that day.

Between Thanksgiving dinner and dessert, I went looking for my two youngest cousins who had finished eating and left the “kid table” well before those at the “adult table.” I found them sitting side-by-side on the floor of a hallway, nose-to-screen. No wonder it was so quiet. Past family holidays were punctuated with screams of laughter and singing as my younger cousins prepared shows to perform for the adults, or chased each other around the house in their active interpretation of the game hide-and-seek. That holiday I realized the screen-centric world of Black Mirror wasn’t as extreme a view of the future as I’d thought.

As a biodesigner, I’d like to create another alternative view of a future; one that replaces screen time with nature time. When we walk outside in modern cities today, we have to go out of our way to walk through natural environments. Some cities have large parks that provide havens of green space in densely populated places, such as New York. Other cities line the streets with trees and build around bodies of water, such as Seattle. Nevertheless, these experiences of nature are constructed. Unless your parents send you to an outdoor education program or you go hiking through the woods, as a city dweller, you miss out on natural outdoor experiences.

Using tree houses as inspiration, my group and I will show a future in which living with nature becomes the default. Today, sustainable lifestyles require expensive solar-panel installations, rooftop gardens and green walls. We’ll show how bioreceptive design [1] can re-introduce nature to our cities. If the walls of our buildings support ecological habitats the way tree bark does, we could overcome the barriers to nature engagement that negatively affect our health, both physical and mental [2] (see “nature-deficit disorder” and related research). Then, perhaps we could create mycorrhizal networks in cities, integrating these networks that trees use to share nutrients in forests [3] into urban environments. Integrating nature into cities by default would create healthier lifestyles for plants and for people.

 

[1] Cruz, M., & Beckett, R. (2016). Bioreceptive design: a novel approach to biodigital materiality. Architectural Research Quarterly, 20(01), 51-64. doi:10.1017/s1359135516000130

[2] Uhls, Y. T., Michikyan, M., Morris, J., Garcia, D., Small, G. W., Zgourou, E., & Greenfield, P. M. (2014). Five days at outdoor education camp without screens improves preteen skills with nonverbal emotion cues. Computers in Human Behavior, 39, 387-392. doi:10.1016/j.chb.2014.05.036

[3] Bingham, M. A., & Simard, S. W. (2013). Seedling genetics and life history outweigh mycorrhizal network potential to improve conifer regeneration under drought. Forest Ecology and Management, 287, 132-139. doi:10.1016/j.foreco.2012.09.025