EcoMasterplanning

In planning for a sustainable future for our planet, it is vital that we achieve a seamless and benign biointegration of all human interventions in the natural environment. Finding green design solutions for our built environment must start from the wider scale of regional and urban planning and must then be carried right through to infrastructural engineering, architecture and industrial design. Masterplanning affords the chance to redress current environmental imbalances and to reduce the consequences of our built systems on the environment, with the greater and of reversing climate change.

Ecomasterplanning presents a groundbreaking integrative and comprehensive approach to masterplanning, illustrated by examples that Ken Yeang – the original pioneer of the ‘green skyscraper’ – has designed in a highly visually driven format, the book examines over 20 of his masterplans from around the world, including those in the Netherlands, china, India, Turkey, Malaysia, Singapore and North America.

This ground-breaking book presents the state-of-the-art approach to masterplanning that is based on environmental principles and provides the basis for the design of masterplans for ecodistricts and ecocities that take into consideration: ecology, sustainable utilities engineering, water management and hydrology, and our human communities and their regulatory systems. Central to the approach is the provision of greenways or ecoinfrastructure as nature's untilties in all the schemes. The ecomasterplanning approach presented here is the culmination of a series of masterplan designs that reflect an experimental developmental process, whereby the design of each builds from the lessons learnt from a previous one. Profusely illustrated, the masterplans in this book, also allude to the author's relentless pursuit of an ecological aesthetic. In Ecomasterplanning, Yeang advocates the systemic biointegration of four infrastructures - the grey as the armature for eco-engineering systems; the blue as the water metabolism of the site and its overall water management; the red being our human spaces, hardscapes and regulatory systems; and the green being 'nature's utilities' - to form a vital ecological infrastructure that is also crucially connected to the ecological systems in the site's hinterland. This 'ecoinfrastructure', as a network of green linking corridors and spaces within a masterplan, not only preserves the natural environment but actively encourages it to thrive. It enables the repairing of ecosystems fragmentation and the creation of a larger habitat for the sharing of resources. This is beneficial not only to many species of flora and fauna, but also to our human communities, tempering the negative impacts of carbon dioxide emissions, noise and air pollution, flooding and urban heat-island effect. Without this ecoinfrastructural nexus within the built environment, any ecocity design that lays claim to being ecological is therefore incomplete - such schemes remain nothing more than clever eco-engineering systems, greened with scattered patches of landscape and roof gardens.

Ken Yeang is an architect-planner, and one of the foremost ecodesigners, theoreticians and thinkers in the field of green design. Yeang is the author of several books on ecological design, including The Skyscraper, Bioclimatically Considered: A Design Primer (1996) and Ecodesign: A Manual for Ecological Design (2006), both published by Wiley-Academy. A principal of Llewelyn Davies Yeang (UK) and its sister firm, Hamzah & Yeang (Malaysia), Yeang is well known for designing deep green masterplans and high-performance buildings that go beyond the usual platinum green ratings, made unique by his signature and developing ecological aesthetic. He received his doctorate from Cambridge University, and is the distinguished Plym Professor at the University of Illinois (Champaign, Urbana) and Adjunct Professor at the Universities of Malaya, Hawaii (at Manoa) and Tongji (Shanghai). He is an Honorary FAIA and has served on the RIBA Council.