314 Ecological Restoration and Design
materials. It is often indifferent to place, people and time. The goal is to make
monumental, novel and photogenic buildings and landscapes that express mostly
the ego and power of the designer and owner. In contrast, the making of healing
places signals a larger allegiance to place that means, in turn, a commitment to the
health of other places. Place-making is an art and science disciplined by locality,
culture and ecology requiring detailed knowledge of local materials, weather,
topography and the nature of particular places and a creative dialogue between
past, present and future possibilities. It is slow work in the same sense that caring
and careful have a different clock speed than carelessness. Place-making uses local
resources thereby buffering local communities from the ups and downs of the
global economy, unemployment and resource shortages (Sutton, 2001, p200).
Practised as a healing art, architects, for example, would design buildings and
communities that do not compromise the health of people and places, drawing on
the accumulated wisdom of placed cultures and vernacular skills. They would aim
to design buildings that heal what ails us at deeper levels. At larger scales the chal-
lenge is to extend healing to urban ecologies. Half of humankind now lives in
urban areas, a number that will rise in coming decades to perhaps 80 per cent. Cit-
ies built in the industrial model and to accommodate the automobile are widely
recognized as human, ecological and, increasingly, economic disasters. Given a
choice, people leave such places in droves. But we have good examples of cities as
diverse as Copenhagen, Chattanooga and Curitiba that have taken charge of their
futures to create livable, vital and prosperous urban places – what Peter Hall and
Colin Ward (1998) have called ‘sociable cities’. In order to do that, however,
designers must see their work as fitting in a larger human and ecological tapestry.
As a healing art, ecological design aims toward harmony which is the proper
relation of parts to the whole. As health professionals is there a design equivalent
to the Hippocratic Oath in medicine that has informed medical ethics for two mil-
lennia? Are there things that designers should not design? What would it mean for
designers to ‘do no harm’?
Looking ahead, the challenge to the design professions is to join ecology and
design in order to create buildings, communities, cities, landscapes, farms, indus-
tries and entire economies that accrue natural capital and are powered by current
sunlight – perhaps, one day, having no net ecological footprint. The standard is
that of the healthy, regenerative ecosystem. In the years ahead we will discover a
great deal that is new and rediscover the value of vernacular traditions such as front
porches, village squares, urban parks, corner pubs, bicycles, pedestrian-scaled com-
munities, small and winding streets, local stores, riparian corridors, urban farms
and wild areas, and well-used landscapes.
Design practised as a healing art is not a panacea for the egregious sins of the
industrial age. However well-designed, a world of 7 to 10 billion human beings
with unlimited material aspirations will sooner than later overwhelm the carrying
capacity of natural systems as well as our own management abilities. There is
already considerable evidence that humans now exceed the carrying capacity of
Earth. Further, ecological design is not synonymous with building; often the best