Incorporating nature in city designs for sustainability

INCORPORATING the adaptative strategies of nature into the designs of a country's infrastructure could be the answer to developing a city that is in harmony with its natural resources.

Taryn Mead, Biologist from the Biomimicry Guild, United States of America, said that Biomimicry, a new science that studies nature's best ideas and then imitate them in the design of new products, processes and policies, can be a tool in understanding what it means to be a sustainable city.

"Biomimicry is a new way of viewing the natural world, based not on what we can extract from it but what we can learn from it," she told The Brunei Times on the sidelines of yesterday's Bandar Seri Begawan Developmental Master Plan's Visioning Workshop at the Rizqun International Hotel, Gadong.

She explained that there is a lot that humans can learn from other living organisms that have been adapting and evolving on the planet for the past 3.85 billion years.

"Humans have been looking to nature for solutions ever since we evolved. If you think back to the Inuit people living in the snow in North America, they looked at polar bears and saw how polar bears were living under the snow to maintain insulation. So biomimicry has already been practiced for a very long time," said Mead.

A more recent example would be how engineers of the Eastgate building, Zimbabwe emulated the workings of termite mounts in designing the building's passive cooling system. "Termite mounts in Africa have really tall stacks, measuring six to eight feet, sometimes more, and a hole in the ground that draws air cooled by the temperature of the earth," she said, adding that the top of the stack would function as a ventilation for warm air.

"The engineers from Arab then looked at how the termite mound functions and applied it to the building... because of the way this system draws ambient air under the ground for cooling, eliminating the need for heating and cooling systems, it uses only approximately 10 per cent of the operational cost compared to traditional cooling methods," added the biologist.

Mead also spoke of how the Sultanate was already practising biomimicry intuitively as she had already seen houses build on stilts, similar to the adaptation of trees in mangrove forests to accommodate flooding conditions.

"The idea is that, rather than just building a cookie cutter building that you can plot down in any environment, biomimicry teaches us how to be more adapted in a particular place so our designs can be more sustainable because they understand the opportunities and limits of a place," she said.

A future project where she felt biomimicry could be implemented in the Sultanate was the development of a new stormwater management system. She explained that Brunei's current "concrete" stormwater management system is limited in its filtration ability, compared to what can be found in nature.

"It is important that the water leaving the built environment should be of similar cleanliness as found in nature for sustainability purposes... if you want to maintain and be a part of the ecosystem," she said before explaining that she personally felt it was important to ensure the sustainability of the entire human species, that we understand and respect how humans fit in with nature.

"We have to recognise that nature is not out there. It is in us and everything that we do," she said. The Brunei Times