When Ian McHarg published his seminal book Design with Nature in 1967, he emphasized “process as value” urging planners to integrate natural land resources into urban design. Yet today, amid climate change and urban land degradation, the built environment disciplines struggle to act upon this call. Set in Hong Kong, a subtropical city facing climate pressure, the teaching-research project outlined in this paper addresses the necessity to negotiate complexities of urban ecological processes. Developed in concurrence with a Year Three undergraduate landscape architecture studio, the project proposes an extended reality (XR) workflow and representation methodology that allows students and practitioners to both dynamically discuss and co-create urban-ecological processes and designs. Students were tasked to design a large urban park on a site in Hong Kong profoundly transformed by urban development. Following this studio brief, this project employs two case studies – one focused on hydrological dynamics, the other on plant succession – to experiment with XR-based methods that address both site-specific conditions and the temporal dimensions of design proposals.

Urban environments have long been shaped by a conceptual boundary that separates humans from nature, positioning nature as something external to be controlled, excluded, or aestheticized. In architecture, this worldview has materialized through technologies of separation – sealed facades, HVAC systems, and airtight enclosures that engineer the indoors as sanctuaries from the natural world. These spatial logics have not only shaped cities but have influenced cultural attitudes, public health outcomes, and our collective understanding of what it means to be human in a changing climate. Scientific advances like the Human Microbiome Project challenge the paradigm of human exceptionalism, revealing the human body as an ecological community, rather than an individual organism. Instead, biologist Lynn Margulis describes us as holobionts – interconnected networks of microbial and physiological relationships that blur the lines between humanity and ecology. If we are not separate from nature, then the boundaries we construct must be rethought. This paper introduces the holobiont as a design-relevant paradigm that embraces ecological entanglement and environmental heterogeneity, positioning buildings as dynamic participants in a larger web of life.

The question of how cities harbor social and ecological values has become critical for life on land and sea. This urgency has spurred strategies that propose generic solutions. However, these ‘campaigns’ do not reimagine or fundamentally restructure the way cities are designed. Recognizing the need to transform urban settlements toward urban ecologies, the paper reflects on how reconfiguring the urban fabric through the lens of urban landscape ecology can open up speculative and site-specific proposals that entangle all life forms and can help make cities more resilient. Focusing on urban edges as urban ecotones, the paper unpacks why and how to integrate social and ecological values, and the effect this can entail for the future of cities and practices of urban design and planning. A studio assignment at the Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences is used to support the study’s aim. The approach bridges the application of knowledge derived from natural science with ‘designerly’ capacities. The findings showcase ways to approach a layered urban landscape, encouraging creative, reality-based explorations that motivate a certain friction, spawning novel outlooks on design practice.

Urban streets are increasingly acknowledged as more than infrastructural corridors, serving as accessible and pervasive spaces where ecological processes and collective life unfold. In the context of climate change and ecological transition, cities worldwide are experimenting with nature-based street regeneration. Yet current research and practice often prioritize ecological performance metrics, overlooking the nuanced, spatially embedded, and culturally grounded processes through which urban nature evolves. This risk of homogenized solutions is particularly evident in Southern European cities, where layered urban fabrics and historically situated conceptions of nature have long shaped the interface between built form and ecology. This article argues that regenerating streetscapes in such contexts requires more than standardized interventions. Building on a three-year academic research project, it introduces a framework of ten cultural dimensions for culturally rooted nature-based solutions, tested across speculative and practice-based projects. Five operational lines of work are distilled, positioning streets as palimpsestic urban ecologies where ecological performance and cultural narratives converge. By aligning nature-based adaptation strategies with cultural sensitivity and spatial quality, the article advances pathways for resilient streetscape regeneration. 

What if urban nature were not a matter of adding greenery, but a practice of repairing ecologies suppressed by urbanization? The El Segundo Gateway advances this reframing through a project that evolved from a modest 0.22-mile [353.57 m] corridor into a 10.8-acre [4.37 ha.] leftover landscape, commissioned by the City of El Segundo as a streetscape, civic threshold, and hydrological infrastructure. Located between the Chevron Refinery and LAX, the site overlays a former wetland and Tongva seasonal trail fragmented by extractive industry and impermeable surfaces. The project advances an ecology of return, positioning landscape as multispecies infrastructure and cultural memory. A circular pavilion draws on Tongva kish architecture, using a tensile woven structure to buffer sound, heat, and vibration while supporting habitat for the endangered El Segundo blue butterfly and its host plant, seacliff buckwheat (Eriogonum parvifolium). Grounded in regenerative urbanism, Indigenous and Black ecologies, and nature-based infrastructure theory, the Gateway repositions infrastructure as a cultural and ecological instrument of repair. Whose nature is restored? In El Segundo, repair becomes a layered return to species, land, and memory.