Towards a Fourth Ecology: Social and Environmental Sustainability with Architecture and Urban Design

Author:
Open Access
Publisher website
Google Scholar
Abstract
The architect has always been interested in the social and cultural dimensions while creating architecture for people to last, with the help of building science and technology. Science could solve some problems, but is yet to solve many of the problems of urbanization in human history. Perhaps many of the problems can only be solved with careful understanding of human behavior, social intercourse, and economics in relation to the urban environments and organizations, and the natural environment simultaneously. There seemed to be a divide between the way an engineer and an architect think and practice in making a building and a piece of architecture, where the former is highly mathematical, and the latter deals with cultural poetics and a whole range of social and technical issues of which the physics of the environment is but one dimension (Bay and Ong 2006). It may appear natural in this age of environmental crisis and rapid urban development in many cities that the current Ecologically Sustaina...