Chapter 6: En Route to Nature-integrated Design: Opportunities and Challenges

Scientific evidence shows that the rapid transformation of terrestrial environments by humans accelerates environmental and ecological degradation beyond critical limits. It is therefore necessary to significantly advance sustainable planning and design. To accomplish this a nature-integrated design paradigm is required. First, it is crucial to relinquish the currently prevailing perceived human-nature dichotomy which delimits current nature-based approaches. Second, it is necessary to identify an integrated paradigm that focuses on the interaction of systems and processes that sustain life on Earth. Critical Zone (CZ) research offers such a paradigm by focusing on the heterogeneous, near-surface environment in which complex interactions involving, rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms regulate the natural habitat and determine the availability of life-sustaining resources.This offers a potent inroad for integrating architectures and environments with focus on CZ systems and processes. Furthermore, it is necessary to establish the way in which such an integration can take place. This can be accomplished through a landform approach that focuses on the relation between geodiversity, climate diversity and biodiversity. This chapter outlines this approach and illustrates early results through two exploratory projects.