Wednesday is harvesting day on the rooftop garden at St Canice’s Church in Sydney’s Kings Cross. Tending the garden’s array of vegetables, flowers and herbs are groups of mental-health patients from a nearby hospital.
The simple act of being out in the open air and in contact with nature acts like therapy, project coordinator Rob Caslick says.
To prove the point, he invited a research team from the hospital to monitor the patients’ progress.
“It’s only once a week in a garden, but people report feeling much more positive. The clinicians were really surprised just how much people opened up to them while they were gardening,” says Caslick, who runs a soup kitchen in the same building.
The benefits of contact with nature — technically known as biophilia — are becoming increasingly well-documented.
One well-known study showed how hospital patients with a view of trees from their ward window recovered more quickly than those without such a view.
Yet since Edward Wilson popularized the term biophilia — literally, “love of life or living systems” — in the early 1980s, uptake of the idea in Australia has been piecemeal.
“True biophilic design really plays with all your five senses, which is why it can be so powerful, but it’s still not a topic or a terminology that is very well known or discussed,” says Caroline Pidcock, a Sydney-based architect and leading proponent of nature-inspired design.
There are signs that this could be beginning to change.
Take Defence Housing Australia (DHA). Hardly a hippy house-builder, DHA manages a US$10.6 billion property portfolio. Even so, its new 152-apartment complex in the suburb of Alexandria is to be equipped with a “pocket park” and barbecue spaces, rooftop gardens, chicken runs and even an apiary — you know: for bees.
DHA’s Arkadia development, which is under construction, is inspired by the belief that “functional seasonal landscapes” will generate a sense of community and enhanced well-being.
With so much nature on their doorstep, its future service personnel residents will feel compelled to “step outside and interact with one another.”
So the government enterprise’s marketing blurb promises at any rate.
Another new development with similar blue-sky and green-wall ambitions is Sydney’s One Central Park.
Described as a “bouquet to the city,” the development’s two residential towers are topped with terrace gardens and shrouded from top to bottom in green foliage.
Attractive though biophilic design might be, it has to make business sense if it stands any chance of going mainstream.
Frasers Property Australia, one of the developers of the One Central Park project, seems persuaded.
The property giant is ploughing millions of US dollars into a biophilically inspired 22 hectare mixed retail-residential development in Melbourne’s East Burwood suburb.
The project incorporates ecological features put forward as part of a design competition run by Australia’s Living Futures Institute.
The winning suggestions carry with them a compelling business rationale, says Pidcock, who sits on the institute’s board.
“Frasers will get much higher rents because the people coming to this shopping center will — because it’s going to be beautiful and biophilically designed — probably spend more time there,” he said.
Omniya el-Baghdadi at the Queensland University of Technology agrees that a sound business case for biophilia is necessary, but is under no illusion about the challenges of winning over big business. This is from someone who devoted an entire doctorate to the subject.
El-Baghdadi’s research draws on insights from ecological economics, focusing in particular on the “ecosystem services” that nature-based architecture offers, eg, enhanced air quality or natural cooling.
Behavioral economics provides another layer to her argument; notably, the psychological upsides that biophilic design brings.
Persuasive though this all looks on paper, convincing supporters in the hard-nosed world of business remains an uphill battle.
“It’s really hard to change the status quo,” El-Baghdadi said. “We’re creatures of habit, so once we know how to build something we tend to stick to it.”
The failure of neoclassical economics to factor in the less tangible benefits of biophilia represents an even harder nut to crack.
For that reason, landscape design is never given the appreciation it deserves, she says.
Take an urban park. It might encourage city dwellers to take more exercise and socialize more, yet, because such outcomes do not convert easily into dollars and cents, the value of that park is overlooked.
“The economic conversation as it stands today is really quite reductionist. We need to recognize that biology and psychology play a massive role and yet these do not feature in our current decisionmaking processes,” El-Baghdadi said.
However, this battler for biophilia is not without optimism.
She cites the example of construction firm Lendlease Australia, which recently commissioned the Queensland University of Technology to assess the business benefits of “green” infrastructure innovations at a major construction site near Brisbane.
The six-month study is to track factors such as energy savings, individual well-being and other “end-user experiences.”
“A massive construction company like Lendlease could make a huge impact on its industry,” she said.
At St Canice’s, Caslick wishes the researchers every success in bolstering the economic case for biophilia.
Not that it will sway his opinion much.
“I’m the least fluffy person I know, but just seeing the interaction of people around the roof garden, it’s so leveling,” he says. “You can’t really measure it. You’ve just got to try it for yourself.”
Could Asia be on the verge of a new wave of nuclear proliferation? A look back at the early history of the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO), which recently celebrated its 75th anniversary, illuminates some reasons for concern in the Indo-Pacific today. US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin recently described NATO as “the most powerful and successful alliance in history,” but the organization’s early years were not without challenges. At its inception, the signing of the North Atlantic Treaty marked a sea change in American strategic thinking. The United States had been intent on withdrawing from Europe in the years following
My wife and I spent the week in the interior of Taiwan where Shuyuan spent her childhood. In that town there is a street that functions as an open farmer’s market. Walk along that street, as Shuyuan did yesterday, and it is next to impossible to come home empty-handed. Some mangoes that looked vaguely like others we had seen around here ended up on our table. Shuyuan told how she had bought them from a little old farmer woman from the countryside who said the mangoes were from a very old tree she had on her property. The big surprise
The issue of China’s overcapacity has drawn greater global attention recently, with US Secretary of the Treasury Janet Yellen urging Beijing to address its excess production in key industries during her visit to China last week. Meanwhile in Brussels, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen last week said that Europe must have a tough talk with China on its perceived overcapacity and unfair trade practices. The remarks by Yellen and Von der Leyen come as China’s economy is undergoing a painful transition. Beijing is trying to steer the world’s second-largest economy out of a COVID-19 slump, the property crisis and
Ursula K. le Guin in The Ones Who Walked Away from Omelas proposed a thought experiment of a utopian city whose existence depended on one child held captive in a dungeon. When taken to extremes, Le Guin suggests, utilitarian logic violates some of our deepest moral intuitions. Even the greatest social goods — peace, harmony and prosperity — are not worth the sacrifice of an innocent person. Former president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), since leaving office, has lived an odyssey that has brought him to lows like Le Guin’s dungeon. From late 2008 to 2015 he was imprisoned, much of this