- Sustainable City, Appealing City    967 kb by    van Lierop, Marjo & Matthijssen, Jeroen | marjo.vanlierop@sab.nl    Short Outline To make cities both physically and culturally sustainable, the urban landscape needs to be appealing. We propose an ecological aesthetic design language which turns theory into design principles to make designs that both fit to human as to nature. Abstract In today’s society people become less and less connected with ‘nature’. This disconnectedness might be the reason why we have problems with our environment, with climate change as the most serious one. This not only threatens the environment we live in but ultimately also us, humans. That is the reason why the relationship between human and their environment must be reconnected and strengthened. Because nowadays more than half of the world population lives in urban areas, this human engagement with ‘nature’ should specifically take place in cities, where people live their everyday life. Nassauer (1995) recognized that when people find their - urban - landscape attractive and aesthetically appealing then they tend to cherish, maintain, care for and protect it, rendering it “culturally sustainable”. Although more and more concern goes to sustainable development, like we also see in the theme of the ISOCARP congress, aesthetics are often neglected or do not coincide with the concept of sustainability. This is because designers still tend to use a more modernistic and formalistic design language. Yet aesthetics offer a great opportunity to make designs that both fit to human as to nature. In order to design naturally and culturally sustainable cities, designers need a new design language based on ecological aesthetics. The ecological design language has a more holistic approach to design. It includes both cultural and natural processes, temporal and spatial context and sees the – urban – landscape as a system where men are part of. We propose an ecological aesthetic design language which turns existing descriptive theory into prescriptive design principles that are useful for designers. This is of importance since design has become the most powerful tool with which man shapes his environments. Keywords cultural sustainable, ecological aesthetics, design language Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2010: Sustainable City - Developing World   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper