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ECOLOGICAL URBANISM - SOME FACTS AND ISSUES

Антонина Атанасова

Abstract

Today our cities are facing different challenges (huge increase of urban population, strong trends of migration toward cities and climate changes that affecting urban environment. These challenges require these changes require intelligent decision-making, with a focus on environmental protection. Ecological urbanism is a new concept for urban development and planning that puts a focus on environment in the processes of urban planning in order to create for communities sustainable places and provide intelligent solutions to the multiple social, economic and environmental challenges in the 21st Century city. Ecological urbanism is a good approach in order to build resilience within our cities in response to a multiple problems - rapid urbanization and unpredictable climate change impacts. A city is an organism that constantly experiences the experience of its own transformation and modernization. There are no cities that absolutely stop in their development: even the degradation of urban space is somehow an objective manifestation of reactions to the surrounding reality, and even life in dead and abandoned cities still continues - though, frozen in a certain period of time. The death of a city is just the death of an object, even if it was created and inhabited by people, while the city remains a subject, even for itself. The large scale of industrial and urban construction over the past half century, as well as inadequate attitude to environmental issues, has generated a number of environmental problems associated with air and water pollution, disturbance of land cover and other consequences of industrialization and urbanization. However, most scientists and specialists see a way out of the ecological crisis - the inevitable, seemingly satellite of scientific and technological revolution, not in curtailing social production, but in overcoming the negative consequences of industrialization and urbanization with the help of scientific achievements and a wide range of social and environmental events. It was the ecological situation in large cities and megacities that stimulated awareness of the main limit in the development of mankind - the limited nature of natural resources, or rather, the biosphere resource. It was in the cities, centers of scientific thought and the intellectual elite, that the development and search for solutions to these problems began. Ecological urbanism is a direction in the architecture of the twentieth century, which is characterized by the design of structures that discover new properties of natural materials and naturally fit into the landscape of the urban environment. At the same time, the urban environment itself is considered as a natural landscape that needs to be supplemented with objects of design and architecture. From the point of view of ecological urbanism, it, of course, should not be subjected to radical destruction. In general, urbanization is a progressive process, but it requires constant attention - uncontrolled urbanization disrupts the balance of the natural environment and leads to negative consequences. The solution of the environmental problem in urban areas involves the restructuring of the sectoral structure of industry, strengthening the importance of the sectoral non-productive sphere and improving the conditions of rest of the population. Methods that are used in this article are: ? For synthesis and analysis of information from different literature sources, a method of scientific synthesis is used, through which a selection of the used literature is made. ? In the process of detailed study of the concept of ecological urbanism and different scientific definitions, a descriptive method is used, through which the studied practices and the developed concepts and projects in this field are presented in depth.

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DOI resolver: doi.org/10.5593/sgem2020/6.1/s27.070

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