Michael Hough, City Form and Natural Process: Toward a New Urban Vernacular (Croom Helm, 1984), 9.

Vladimir Matus, Design for Northern Climates: Cold-Climate Planning and Environmental Design (Van Nostrand Reinhold, 1988), 137.

This article draws extensively on my book City, Climate, and Architecture (Birkhauser, 2022),esp. ch. 6.

See the issue of ARDETH co-edited with Silvia Balzan and Lorenzo Stieger: Energy Landscape, special issue, ARDETH, no. 13 (2025).

Regarding the notion of archaeology, see Michel Foucault, L’Archéologie du savoir (Gallimard, 1969).

Dean Hawkes, ‘The Cambridge School and the Environmental Tradition’, in The Environmental Tradition: Studies in the Architecture of Environment (E & FN Spon, 1996), 113.

Niels Schulz et al., ‘The SynCity Urban Energy System Model’, in Ecological Urbanism, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty (Lars Müller Publishers, 2014), 446.

Michael Watts, ‘Oil City: Petro-landscapes and Sustainable Futures’, in Ecological Urbanism, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty (Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), 450–53.

Watts, ‘Oil City’, 450.

Watts, ‘Oil City’, 450.

Lewis Mumford, ‘Introduction’, in Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (Natural History Press, 1969), vi.

Ian McHarg, Design with Nature (New York: Natural History Press, 1969), 188.

Alvin Boyarsky, ‘Chicago à la Carte: The City as an Energy System’, Architectural Design, December 1970, 632.

Park and his colleagues coined the term ‘urban ecology’ in sociology and other fields. According to Park and Burgess’s theory of urban ecology, cities are environments analogous to those found in nature.

Kevin Lynch, The Image of the City (MIT Press, 1960).

Rem Koolhaas, Delirious New York: A Retroactive Manifesto for Manhattan (Oxford University Press, 1978), 155.

Boyarsky, ‘Chicago à la Carte’, 632.

Boyarsky, ‘Chicago à la Carte’, 603.

Boyarsky, ‘Chicago à la Carte’, 612.

Boyarsky, ‘Chicago à la Carte’, 622.

Boyarsky, ‘Chicago à la Carte’, 612.

Boyarsky, ‘Chicago à la Carte’, 612.

Boyarsky, ‘Chicago à la Carte’, 602.

Within seven years, Reyner Banham published three books on this topic: The Architecture of the Well-Tempered Environment in 1969, Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies in 1971 and Megastructure: Urban Futures of the Recent Past in 1976.

Reyner Banham, Los Angeles: The Architecture of the Four Ecologies (Harper & Row, 1971), 79.

Banham, Los Angeles, ii.

McHarg, Design with Nature, 65.

Jeffrey R S Brownson, ‘Framing the Sun and Buildings as Commons’, Buildings: An Open Access Journal for the Built Environment 3, no. 4 (December 2013): 662.

Thomas Bauwens, Robert Wade and Matthew Burke, ‘The Energy Commons: A Systematic Review, Paradoxes, and Ways Forward’, Energy Research & Social Science 118 (2024): 103776.

‘The literature on urban commons is extremely sparse and no research appears to have been undertaken by landscape designers, urban planners or conservationists into the subject.’ See Ian Laurie, ed., Nature in Cities: The Natural Environment in the Design and Development of Urban Green Space (Wiley, 1979), 232.

Sascha Roesler and Madlen Kobi, eds., The Urban Microclimate as Artefact: Towards an Architectural Theory of Thermal Diversity (Birkhäuser, 2018).

Roesler and Kobi, The Urban Microclimate as Artefact, 235.

McHarg, Design with Nature, 56.

McHarg, Design with Nature, 65.

Michael Hough, City Form and Natural Process (Croom Helm, 1984), 15.

Anne Whiston Spirn, The Granite Garden: Urban Nature and Human Design (Basic Books, 1984), 5.

Arthur A. Ovaska, ‘The City as a Garden, the Garden as a City’, in The Urban Garden: Student projects for the Südliche Friedrichstadt Berlin, ed. O M Ungers, H Kollhof and A Ovaska (Studio Press for Architecture, 1978).

Michael Watts, ‘Oil City’, 451.

Lorenzo Stieger, Vom Hang zur Schräge: Das Hangterrassenhaus in der Schweiz: Aufstieg und Niedergang einer gefeierten Wohnbautypologie (PhD diss., ETH Zurich, 2018), 224.

McHarg, Design with Nature, 64.

McHarg, Design with Nature, 56.

‘If we take David Harvey’s dictum that ‘there is nothing unnatural about New York City’ seriously, this impels interrogating the failure of twentieth-century urban social theory to take account of physical or ecological processes. While late-nineteenth-century urban perspectives were acutely sensitive to the ecological imperatives of urbanization, these considerations disappeared almost completely in the decades that followed (with the exception of a thoroughly ‘de-natured’ Chicago school of urban social ecology). Re-naturing urban theory is, therefore, vital to urban analysis as well as to urban political activism.’ See Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw, ‘Urban Political Ecology, Politicizing the Production of Urban Natures’, in In the Nature of Cities: Urban Political Ecology and the Politics of Urban Metabolism, ed. Nik Heynen, Maria Kaika and Erik Swyngedouw (Routledge, 2006), 2.

Charles Waldheim, ‘Weak Work: Andrea Branzi’s “Weak Metropolis” and the Projective Potential of an “Ecological Urbanism”’, in Ecological Urbanism, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty (Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), 113.

Waldheim, ‘Weak Work’, 114.

The postcard was part of the study Architettura Riflessa.

The project is one of the outstanding examples of Ticino architecture, later grouped together as Tendenza. See Martin Steinmann and Thomas Boga, Tendenzen / Tendencies: Neuere Architektur in Tessin / Recent Architecture in Ticino (gta Verlag, 1975), 33–34.

Margaret Crawford, ‘Productive Urban Environment’, in Ecological Urbanism, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth Doherty (Lars Müller Publishers, 2016), 149.

Kaika and Swyngedouw, ‘Urban Political Ecology’, 2.

Kaika and Swyngedouw, ‘Urban Political Ecology’, 2.

Koolhaas, Delirious New York, 155.

Quoted in Kaika and Swyngedouw, ‘Urban Political Ecology’, 5.

Thomas Parke Hughes, Human-Built World: How to Think about Technology and Culture (University of Chicago Press, 2004).