Cities as Habitat

Cities are complex ecological systems. While human activity has profoundly altered water and air quality, soil health, and other natural systems, unique and abundant ecosystems still emerge and thrive in these urbanized zones. Nurturing urban biodiversity means actively adapting urban landscapes to better support ecological function. This requires new design approaches, shifts in our aesthetic values, and applied methods of long-term care.

As climate change threatens biodiversity, cities can be generators of ecological life, intentionally designed to support native and novel ecosystems across different scales.

Let’s start small, considering the littlest amongst us: insects. Biologist E.O. Wilson famously called insects “the little things that run the world” for their outsized role in supporting larger food webs and life as we know it. Cities can be designed to better support diverse insect life, especially as many species thrive with small pockets of native plantings, appropriate soil substrates, and a “less is more” approach to maintenance.

At a larger scale, neglected spaces within cities can be reimagined as urban habitat. In Houston, over 99% of the coastal prairie that once defined the region has been lost. SCAPE worked to identify a city-wide network of Pocket Prairies, showing the potential for reconnecting ecosystems across urban neighborhoods. The City of Houston becomes an unlikely home for new restoration efforts, with pocket prairie opportunities identified in medians, empty lots, and other urban spaces.

Functional urban habitat rarely conforms to conventional aesthetic preferences. Traditional landscape practices prioritize tidiness and control by clearing away dead materials like leaves, stems, and deadwood. In a thriving ecosystem, these elements provide critical habitat and sustenance for many native species through the winter, calling for a new appreciation of dying, dormant, and dead plant material as part of a new aesthetic.

Many familiar elements of traditional landscapes require a dramatic aesthetic re-think: the American lawn; planting beds with more mulch than plants; trees planted in seas of paving. Definitions of beauty change over time; we constantly look for opportunities to shift aesthetic preferences through small site-based experiments and landscape-scale installations.

At Tom Lee Park in Memphis, a layered planting matrix of intermingled grasses, perennials, shrubs, and trees transforms a former swath of turf into a seasonal landscape shaped by the Mississippi River. Nearly 300 oaks anchor the canopy, and a fruiting understory of pawpaw, sassafras, serviceberry, and witch hazel brings seasonal interest, texture, and bursts of spring flowers to the park. Many of these species were selected as the ‘host plants’ for native insects—meaning that they are one of the only plants on which they feed—with the goal of restoring those populations within the park. Read more about Parks that Welcome.

SCAPE pushes the boundaries of traditional human-centric design into a new ethos of designing for a greater range of non-human species. Can the same ground support a festival at one moment and pollinators at another? Can cities choreograph the use of space between species, where humans and non-humans cohabit in close quarters peacefully and share the public realm?

This careful choreography acknowledges the need for large-scale gathering in a dense urban metropolis, while supporting biodiversity throughout much of the year.

Many designed spaces, however, actively endanger wildlife—especially birds, which can mistake reflective glass for open sky. An estimated 90,000 to 200,000 birds die in New York City each year due to building collisions, easily countered through simple and thoughtful design choices. In collaboration with the NYC Audubon Society and Columbia University, SCAPE led the development of Bird-Safe Building Guidelines, a 55-page framework advocating design strategies that reduce bird mortality. With attention to material, form, and surface, buildings can coexist with the migratory routes and habitat needs of non-human life.

People are not separate from urban ecosystems; they are an essential catalyst and steward of non-human life in cities. Actively studying, cultivating, and stewarding landscapes enables greater ecological function, ensuring the health of species assemblages, their habitats, and the ever-evolving urban environment. For SCAPE, stewardship of these essential urban ecosystems is an act that begins at the earliest stages of the design process and continues with long-term stewardship and maintenance.

Landscapes are living, dynamic systems that reward long-term observation. At Living Breakwaters, completed in 2024 off the southern shore of Staten Island, post-construction monitoring has tracked how marine life is gradually accumulating on the structures. The design team has observed hundreds of live oysters on the breakwaters. Ongoing observation helps the team understand a design’s impact and how living infrastructure improves over time.

Urban life can feel disconnected from natural processes of seasonal change, water flows, and ecosystem adaptation. Thoughtful design and engagement can bring people into an ecosystem, interpreting how a place works and how their own actions affect it. An ecologically–forward cultural shift is essential for a more equitable and resilient future. SCAPE’s engagement work prioritizes ecosystem immersion and interpretation, helping people connect with their local environments and encouraging them to become long-term stewards of their urban habitats.

Safari 7 brings this approach to the daily commute. The project reframes New York City’s 7 subway line as a living transect through urban biodiversity. From Manhattan’s dense core to Flushing, Queens—the nation’s most ethnically diverse county—the 7 train passes through the city’s most diverse range of ecosystems. Through a series of podcasts, maps, and exhibitions, riders become active and engaged citizen-scientists. Read more about Learning Landscapes.

Cities offer diverse opportunities to design for more than just people. But doing so requires an evolution of design and planning practices that foster new patterns of cohabitation and interconnected relationships. This shift in mindset ultimately sustains the deep ecological systems on which urban life depends.