Biophilic Design: Supporting People and Planet | Oliver Heath | TEDxUCL

Transcriber: P A Reviewer: Mujtaba bakhet Our society's relationship with nature is broken. We've come to believe that we are masters of nature rather than in a symbiotic relationship with it. After all, our beautiful planet can provide us with all the environmental elements needed to survive.

Yet we've designed our cities, our technologies, our food and transport systems, our societies in a way that disconnects us from nature, taking more than we need without putting back. And this is at the heart of the ecological crisis that we're experiencing right now, with our carbon emissions outweighing our carbon capturing. Furthermore, our cities are toxic.

Our health and well-being is being affected by multiple pollutants, be that light, air quality, water or noise pollution. The quality of spaces that we're living in is poor with disconnected communities living in cramped and sterile spaces. We’ve adopted a dangerous approach to design, Where the way spaces look is prioritised over how they make us feel, and we’ve stopped respecting and valuing nature.

And as a result, we've let it reach a crisis point. But all is not lost because I believe, on the plus side, that design has got us into these systems and design can get us out. If only we follow a nature based approach.

Now, I reckon that we already all know the answers. It's kind of inside of us, and I'll explain why later. But for now, I'd like to do a little test.

I’d like you to think of a space where you feel most happy, most calm and most relaxed, and picture that space in your mind. What does it look like? OK.

I'd like you to put your hands up if you see any of the following things and keep them up until the end of the experiment. So in that space where you feel happy, calm and relaxed, do you see a pool of water? Maybe it's the sea, a lake, a river, a waterfall.

Keep your hands up. Maybe you're seeing trees and flowers and grass. Maybe blue sky.

A little fluffy clouds. OK, now just take a little look around. Put your hands right up nice and high.

That’s it. Wow, look at that what a response! Nice.

That has got to be at least 95 percent of you who all share a utopian vision for the spaces that make you feel good and happy. Which is interesting because, you know, by and large, most of us don't live in those spaces. We haven’t chosen them to make them our homes.

So, why is that? Why do we all share this utopian vision? Well, I believe the answer lies in what’s called biophilia, now biophilia means a love of nature - it explains humans’ innate attraction to nature and to natural processes.

It's an idea that was first conceived by the psychoanalyst Erich Fromm when he believed to lead a happy and healthy life, You needed to have a connection with the natural world around us. It was then developed by the biologist, Edward O. Wilson, who took a more evolutionary approach, recognising that human society evolved in close connection to nature, as did the human mind in correlation to it.

The ideas were then picked up by Stephen Kellert, the social ecologist, who created a series of patterns or or features that allow us to bring elements of nature into the built environment. Now, human beings actually existed in very close connection to nature, we evolved in close connections to nature, seeking out landscapes that could help us survive, thrive and flourish. We spent much of our evolutionary time looking out, seeking for diverse natural landscapes.

And yet fast forward to our modern day age and what we're seeing is a rise in urbanisation. By 2050, 68 percent of the global population will be urbanised. Right now, 90 percent of the British population is living in cities, and we spend 90 percent of our lives.

But by contrast, our human forbearers spent ninety nine point nine percent of their time outdoors. Now, the Savannah Theory suggests that as a result of this human evolution spent in and around healthy forms of nature, we have a genetic inheritance that allows us to recognise landscapes that can support life, where we can survive and thrive. And what research shows us is that actually, when we look out over these landscapes that has the ability to reduce heart rates and blood pressure levels to make us feel good again.

So perhaps it's no surprise now that we find ourselves living in these dense, noisy, cramped urban spaces. The stress is on the rise in our urban environments. And in fact, the World Health Organisation has stated that stress anxiety is likely to be the health epidemic of the 21st Century, other than COVID, of course.

They might not have seen that one coming. So how do we translate those ideas of a desire to be in and around lush savannah-like environments? Well, that’s where biophilic design steps in.

So, basically what we want to do is find ways of bringing nature into our built environment, and there are three aspects to biophilic design. The first is what we call a direct connection to nature. It's how we bring in real sensory forms of nature, be that sunlight, fresh air, water, gentle movement, maybe trees and plants and greenery.

The second is what we call an indirect connection to nature. Now this is how we mimic or evoke a feeling of nature using natural materials, colours, textures and patterns, and even technologies. And the third is what we call the human spatial response.

It's how we create spaces that are spatially similar to those that we find beneficial in the natural environment. Spaces that make us feel safe, restored, recuperated, but also spaces that are exciting, stimulating and aspirational. But the question is how much nature do we really need in our modern day lives, and how do we kind of get a sense of that?

Well, we talk about this idea of the Nature Diet Triangle, and essentially what it suggests is that we need to find ways of connecting with nature across a range of scales of spaces across a scale of time, because it’s not enough to simply go on holiday once a year, to have a deep nature immersion, to surround ourselves through the beaches and the mountains and the forests when we go on holiday. We need to find ways to connect across the months, the weeks and the days, but also, across different scales of spaces through our countries, our cities. It’s about how we bring nature into our neighbourhoods, our streets and even into our buildings.

Now, what's so exciting about biophilic design is that it's an evidence based approach, which means it uses 30 years of environmental psychology and research to demonstrate that when we connect with nature in our built environment, it can have amazing outcomes in our buildings. It can actually help to improve the intended outcome of the space, but also to reduce negative costs, and that's across all different building typologies. So in education spaces, when we optimize exposure to natural daylight, the research shows that actually it can increase the speed of learning by between 20 and 26 percent.

It can improve attendance rates by reducing absenteeism. It can improve test scores by between 5 and 14 percent - kind of amazing numbers and even the use of natural materials in classrooms like the use of timber has been shown to reduce student heart rates by 8600 beats per day. In health care spaces, patients who recuperate with views looking on to nature can increase the speed of recuperation by eight point five percent.

And when patients recuperate in natural light, they feel less pain and as a result, need 22 percent less pain care medication. In our workplaces, when elements of nature are present, we see a 15 percent increase in self-reported wellbeing, a six percent increase in productivity, 10 to 25 percent of increase in performance in tests of mental recall and functioning, and a 15 percent reduction in absenteeism. In hospitality spaces, we know that guests want to book rooms with views looking out onto nature spaces first and are prepared to pay twenty three percent more for those rooms.

And amazingly, they’ll actually spend 36 percent more time in spaces and hotel lobbies that are filled with nature. And in our homes, the spaces that are arguably the most important spaces in our lives. We can see an increase in rent, in sales value.

There's a reduction in crime and domestic violence of between seven and eight percent, and an enhanced sense of community. Now you may very well be asking yourself, you know, it’s all very well bringing nature in to make me feel better, But how does nature based design help us tackle the enormity of the Climate Crisis that we’re facing? Well, I believe there are three ways that nature based design can do exactly that.

The first is in the rewilding of our cities. Reintroducing nature into our urban environment can help us mitigate the climate challenges we're already facing. It can help to reduce urban heat island effect - so cool our cities down.

And as a result, reduce the electrical loading needed for air conditioning. It can create sponge cities that can soak up water, and redistribute it and prevent it going down drains, which results in flooding. It can remove carbon dioxide and produce oxygen for us to breathe.

It can improve air quality by removing particulates and toxins from the air. If we use the materials from trees, the timber in our buildings and furniture, we can sequester carbon. And if we enhance biodiversity, it can help us to grow the food to feed our ever-growing cities.

Now, a fantastic example of exactly this is in the urban forest project in Madrid, in Spain. So what they've just unveiled is a plan to plant half a million trees in a 75 kilometer circle around the city of Madrid. The aim is for those trees to, you know, once they mature, to actually soak up one hundred and seventy five thousand tons of CO2 every year, but also, of course, to cool the city down to remove the toxins, improve air quality.

And as well as that, it's also going to be supplying essential spaces for those city inhabitants to get a nature fix, a restorative moment or what we call a little bit of forest bathing. Secondly, we need to revalue nature. Lockdown has made many of us realise just how important time spent out of the four walls of our own home and in nature is to supporting our physical and mental wellbeing.

And the importance of this has motivated us to engage further with nature. Now that may be through the increase in plants in our homes, and you only need to look on Instagram to see how enormous plants are. It also might be about the introduction of greenery on our balconies, getting involved with gardening, growing our own seasonal food, using local materials, but also to support local natural resources in parks and rivers and in beaches.

Now these are the first steps to embracing the planet's interdependent ecological system and motivate people to regenerate it further. And thirdly, the desirability of nature based spaces. Nature based splace - nature based placemaking, other than being quite difficult to say, (audience laughs) actually improves our experience of spaces, places and people in them.

So it's actually helps to create more desirable, exciting cities for us to live in, which is important because inevitably our cities are our future dwelling places and arguably the most sustainable solution to our population increase as they help us to share resources more efficiently, it helps us to connect with the service, sharing and circular economy. And it also helps to enable more activated, enabled communities, communities that can meet and talk and share ideas. And as a result of that, start to innovate.

And that innovation is absolutely important, absolutely essential if we're going to come up with new solutions to meet the many complex problems that we're going to be facing. Embracing nature and natural systems has multiple benefits for people and planet. It creates more biodiverse and resilient cities that are better positioned to tackle the enormous climate challenges we face ahead.

It also creates more - happier, healthier spaces for us to live in with more connected communities. And building on that, deeper connections to nature and natural systems helps us to understand that our health and wellbeing on the planet is intrinsically connected to the health and wellbeing of the nature around us. And as a result, motivates us for the conservation of our wider planetary environment.

In light of the Climate Crisis and the eco anxiety that we’re all facing right now, biophilic design offers a nature first approach that benefits both people and planet. Thank you very much.