Urban biodiversity and ecological design for sustainable cities

We have been designing urban parks, forests, school yards and riverbanks as urban green infrastructure for 20 years. In order to design these spaces, we used landscape ecological approaches, e.g. vegetation, habitat, land use history, biotope map, cultural landscape. When we design these spaces, it is very important to think about the characteristics of the land or spaces. The characteristics of the land or
spaces are sometimes called “Fūdo” in Japanese and this term is similar to “Ver￾nacular” or “Milieu” but it is still quite difficult to explain this concept expressed by Tetsuro Watsuji (1979). “Fūdo” was discussed as a phenomenon including nature and culture by Watsuji (1979) and Berque (1992). Watsuji recommended that “We could find the phenomenon of “Fūdo” in human life” (e.g. literature, art, religion, custom, and so on). He already mentioned the important issue of landscape ecology and design in 1935. Berque (1992) criticized Watsuji’s discussion accurately with some examples, seasons, culture, nature protection and destruction in Japan with some contradiction. Relph (2008) pointed out “placelessness” remarkably appeared in Japan less than other countries because this country has the experience of places
that was deeply embedded pre-industrialization, and the modern landscape was formed by industrialization and urbanization. Numata (1996) discussed the concept of “landscape”, which means the land and structure of biosphere with human activity and culture, we cannot think about “landscape” without excluding the phenomenon of human life. Morimoto and Shirahata (2007) mentioned that landscape potentially includes the information of nature and culture that is the result of interaction between nature and artificial human activity. Kamada (2000) organized the concept of landscape ecology and it should be analysed from the point of view of people’s recognition of landscape and the interaction between humans and landscape for understanding total landscape. Washitani and Kito (2007) mentioned that the importance of nature restoration and biodiversity has various functions of ecosystem for
stability; therefore, it is very important infrastructure for human beings. Recently, these should be maintained as the “Green infrastructure” (Nakamura 2015). He also mentioned that though forest, river and wetland have various ecological system services, we should preserve their functions for sustainability. Thus, it is a very important issue to preserve biodiversity and landscape as nature natural capital.
When we think about future landscape planning and design, it is important to re-think and plan with characteristics of “Fūdo” (Vernacular landscape) including not only nature but also culture. In this chapter, I would like to focus on some examples of vernacular landscape and discuss ordinary landscape. This chapter, in addition to my former discussion about landscape and vernacularity (Ito 2016), I would like to discuss more about the methodology and issues for landscape design through our practical landscape design.

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