Abstract Body

A New Urban Model, based on the principle of replicated fractal patterning can be used to integrate high density urban living with the biophilic experience of forest bathing. Mapping the patterns of resources – as stocks, flows and yields – provides a foundation by which to order the hierarchy of daylight access, cross ventilation, and free harvest from the sun, wind and precipitation, to discover the fit of these factors to the benefit of an urban population.

This design approach reaches beyond the binary choice of isolating built form from nature and instead posits the urban form as an integral ecology of non-living and living systems; which most importantly is scalable from the individual, to the urban block, to the district, to the full city form.

The modulation of that integral ecology, using fractal patterning, enables the ‘making’ of urban form as an expression of growth; much in the spirit of the lessons of nature, wherein underlying patterns of order frame the reaching for, the responding to, and/or the accommodating of, the complex emergence of pioneer and succession systems of habitation – not only those of nature but also those of human population.

Nature teachers that the key element of all growth is the cell and that form is an expressive result.

Our cities can borrow from that lesson, and, as is shown in the New Urban Model can place all occupancy in close reach to nature; wherein Healthy Urbanism measures the mutual health of our communities of population and our communities of ecology – as patterns of fractal integration.