Biophilia beyond the Building: Applying the Tools of Urban Biodiversity Planning to Create Biophilic Cities

The benefits of nature exposure: The need for research that better informs implementation

Concern about humanity's detachment from nature has spawned a global push to increase the availability of green spaces within cities. One impetus for this movement is a growing collection of studies documenting an association between improved human well-being and exposure to nature. The challenge lies in translating this research into pragmatic recommendations for cities. The usefulness of the existing research portfolio is diminished by the limitations of prevailing research designs. For example, most nature exposure studies (>80%) are observational. The rare randomized manipulative experiments tend to be indoors or virtual and rely on nature exposures on the order of ten to fifteen minutes. "Nature" and "biodiversity" are commonly invoked together as benefiting human well-being despite little evidence that biodiversity has particular importance for human psychological and emotional health. The most glaring gap in nature exposure research is the neglect of differences among cultures and ethnic groups with respect to the nature they prefer. In the few cases where researchers looked for differences among groups, they often found heterogeneous responses. Finally, few studies have compared greening interventions to other possible efforts to improve urban life. Thus, the utopian city of the future might be resplendent with urban parks on every block, but it is not clear whether those parks should offer basketball and pickleball courts, or small woodlands with a cornucopia of birds. We advocate for the next generation of nature exposure research that better informs the envisioning of our future sustainable cities with enhanced and equitable access to nature.

Biophilic smart cities: the role of nature and technology in enhancing urban resilience

The purpose of the study is to identify the main indicators and aspects for applying biophilic and smart solutions in city planning and design to achieve urban resilience. This research investigates the main definitions, elements, and attributes for biophilic design and smart city planning that help in developing resilience strategies for healthier urban environments. This study follows a methodology that comprises two approaches; first a concise review definition and principles of urban resilience. Then investigating the notions of biophilic and smart approaches to achieve healthier urban environments. Second, an analytical approach that proposes a framework for applying biophilic and smart city indicators to achieve urban resilience. The proposed framework highlights the achieved adaptive capacities for resilient cities due to adopting biophilic and smart solutions. The research results highlight a proposed relationship between principles of urban resilience, biophilic city indicators, and smart city indicators.

Large Cities Fall Behind in “Neighborhood Biodiversity”

Urbanization is a major driver of global species loss. While cities with suitable habitats and conservation policies may support locally-high biodiversity levels, we suspected that the complexity of managing very large cities might counteract the advantage of large geographic area, and these cities may be less effective at biodiversity conservation. To answer this, we examined the relationship between the number of native indicator wildlife species (mean and maximum) in 112 cities across three metropolitan areas in California (Los Angeles, San Diego, and San Jose), with metrics related to scale and environmental variables. We found that indicator species richness is positively related to area, income (the luxury effect), and pervious cover—including trees, shrubs, and grasses. Despite having a high maximum number of indicator species within their boundaries, the largest cities in our study, Los Angeles, San Jose, and San Diego, do a relatively poor job compared with smaller cities at distributing native biodiversity throughout neighborhoods, as measured by their mean species richness. Such variation in “neighborhood biodiversity” may exacerbate existing inequities in residents' access to nature. Using Los Angeles County as a case study, we compared biodiversity management within the County's 88 cities of various sizes and characteristics. We ranked General Plan wording in terms of references to biodiversity and conservation and created a management metric. We found that municipalities of various sizes that had high management scores generally had high indicator species richness. This suggests that robust policies may be able to overcome the challenges posed by city size and population.