Ecological wisdom as an emerging field of scholarly inquiry in urban planning and design

In an increasingly urbanizing world, mitigating the consequences of a concentrated humanity becomes all the more urgent. Urban planners and designers have developed criteria for site selection, have tempered the pace and moderated the type of development, and have guided the arrangement of human activities in order to improve the quality of human settlement. However, these efforts have not always proved adequate, and many similar urbanization problems have been persistently reoccurring. Why do the short term needs or desires of humans often trump the need for minimal ecological damage? We argue that a prevailing dualistic perspective of humans and environment as separate from each other leads to a lack of appreciation for environmental integrity. To address this problem, we turn to ecological wisdom, which calls for recognition of and respect for the complexity of the environment, for actionable solutions. In this paper, we define ecological wisdom as a means of knowing, understanding, and applying ecological information in order to guide urban planning and design professionals. Based on ecological wisdom, urban planners and designers combine willingness and ability to include knowledge from different fields - such as ecology, sociology, and economics - to engage stakeholders in setting long term, beneficial goals. To better achieve this, more scholarly research on the application of ecological wisdom in defining place appreciation is needed, thus averting urban problems by reminding people that the well-being of a place is reflected in the overall quality of life illuminated as human experience. (C) 2016 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.