Making Urban Nature by Piet Vollaard, Jacques Vink, Niels de Zwarte, 2017

What do Minotaur and Spider-man have in common? A creature with the head of a bull and the body of a man and weirdo with double identity of the spider and a human. They both share a relationship of two organisms living closely together. Even if not imaginable, two differences can coexist in a symbiosis. 

With this story and many other case studies explains Making Urban Nature the coexistence of nature with the city. Authors analyze the best examples of urban ecology and how can be implemented its management policy in the cities. At the end there are ten recommendations for so called Nature-inclusive Design.

Selected example projects are building a symbiosis between urban and natural. How can nature be included in the re-naturalization of industrial brownfield is presented with Latz’s project of the Landscape Park. Presented one by one, some more interesting like the Sport Plaza Mercator. We can better understand how the symbiosis works within different projects; like what is a difference between High Line in New York and the Paris walkway project Promenade Plantee. High Line has after more than ten years significant issues; tourists see it as the high watermark of urban design, the residents accuse it of social failure. And there are more cases in this book, which makes understand nature-inclusive design, from the experiment Filter Factory to Batbridge or community gardening in Prinzessinengarten. Making Urban Nature is not an encompassing reference book, but more a pioneer work how can be designed ecological principles to create sustainable biotopes in the urban environment.

It is time to change, because we don’t own this planet. The right way of dwelling it is already here, and it can be found within the right symbiosis. This book is a pioneer of Nature Inclusive design, which shall become the common way of space making.

Making Urban Nature by Piet Vollaard, Jacques Vink, Niels de Zwarte. Paperback, Text in Dutch and English, 256 pages, 2017, Publisher nai010