Prof. Dr. Adrienne Grêt-Regamey | Landscape Planning and Urban Systems

NewUrbES – Co-creating new urban living space for biodiversity and ecosystem services

The transdisciplinary research project «NewUrbES – Co-creating new urban leaving space for biodiversity and ecosystem services» propose a paradigm shift in urban design and planning towards transforming cities into ecosystems, wherein buildings act as living organisms seamlessly integrated with their surrounding environments. The building envelopes, including facades and roofs, become a continuous medium linking the inside and outside of the building into a more-than-human urban living space, as novel habitats for humans and non-human species.

However, developing such more-than-human urban living space calls for radical changes in urban design and planning. Achieving this paradigm shift necessitates inter- and transdisciplinary collaboration spanning design, ecology, material science, and planning. The main goal of NewUrbES is to co-create more-than-human urban living spaces supporting high biodiversity and ecosystem services by leveraging empirical and experimental approaches supported by digital technologies. In particular, we aim to understand how ecological design, materiality, and planning boundary conditions can be expanded to secure, foster, restore, and create more-than-human urban living spaces.

Project Leaders

Adrienne Grêt-Regamey, Planning of Landscape and Urban Systems (PLUS), Institute for Spatial and Landscape Planning (IRL), ETH Zürich
Maria Conen, Departement Architektur, ETH Zürich
Guillaume Habert, Institut für Bau- und Infrastrukturmanagement, ETH Zürich
Dr. Matthias Vollmer, PLUS & LVML, ETH Zürich
Christoph Küffer Schumacher, Institut für Landschaft und Freiraum, ILF Ost – Ostschweizer Fachhochschule