How to put nature into our neighbourhoods: application of Low Impact Urban Design and Development (LIUDD) principles, with a biodiversity focus, for New Zealand developers and homeowners

Abstract

Low Impact Urban Design and Development (LIUDD) is a sustainable living concept. Urban sustainability and health are achieved through effective management of stormwater, waste, energy, transport and ecosystem services. The greening of cities by planting ecologically with local species is also a vital part of the overall well-being of ecosystems and citizens. Biodiversity (Box 2) or nature heritage contributes to enduring sense of place or identity – a key element of nationhood. This manual is for the town dweller, developer, landscape designer and planner – and provides practical applications from nearly a decade of LIUDD research across New Zealand. It summarises and links to information regarding the physical and built environment, but its focal point is nature heritage and overcoming attrition and critical loss. LIUDD implements principles of landscape, urban and catchment ecology and design in action. These principles and associated methods are summarised in Appendix 1. Specified links throughout the manual emphasise the integrated nature of LIUDD. Here we concentrate on methods that specifically involve vegetation planning, protection, restoration, planting and maintenance. Follow-up manuals in this series will focus on other methods in Appendix 1. LIUDD emphasises ‘going with the flow’ or modelling urban catchments on natural river systems by installing treatment trains (Section 2.1) - from green roofs to detention ponds. Energy and carbon efficiency is now a ‘convenient truth’. Cost-effective design and development works with nature – creating community environments that respect, conserve, and enhance natural processes and achieve landscape legibility by retaining landforms and remnant vegetation, and using plant signatures to profile biodiversity. By creating stepping stones or green corridors of favourable habitat we encourage native birds back into cities. Harmsworth (2004) expresses in the following a tangata whenua perspective, integral to LIUDD philosophy: The challenge in the future is to develop forward thinking strategies that encourage people towards more sustainable forms of development, to move away from: short term piecemeal planning, highly consumptive waste behaviour, high and increasing demands on energy use, rising infrastructure costs, rising transport demands, greater demands on land and building space, increasing urban human health problems, decreasing environmental quality, neglect of cultural issues and factors, the domination of artificial human environments over natural systems, the decreasing role the natural environment plays in the lives of urban populations, and a lack of awareness and understanding of the significance of natural ecosystems and ecosystem services within urban environments, especially for human well-being. For biodiversity to be culturally relevant, and therefore wanted, it must be visible and readable (Meurk & Swaffield 2000, Louv 2006). Thus city-dwellers must see nature where they live if the highly threatened habitats and species of lowlands and coasts (quite different to the largely protected mountain nature) are to become identified with, and thereby secure. We hope here to demonstrate the surprising potential of, and methods for, enhancing natural biodiversity in urban environments. Natural heritage may then rightly share the stage with valid cultural layers. So, here is how you can try something new and make a difference.