Biomimetic Strategies for Sustainable Resilient Cities: Review across Scales and City Systems

Abstract

Biomimicry applications in different domains, from material science to technology, have proven to be promising in inspiring innovative solutions for present-day challenges. However, biomimetic applications in the built environment face several barriers including the absence of biological knowledge of architects and planners and the lack of an adequate common means to transfer biomimetic concepts into strategies applicable in the urban context. This review aims to create a multidimensional relational database of biomimetic strategies from successful precedent case studies in the built environment across different city systems and on different application scales. To achieve this, a thorough systematic search of the literature was implemented to map relevant biomimetic case studies, which are analyzed to extract biomimetic strategies that proved to be applicable and successful in an urban context. These strategies are then classified and documented in a relational database. This will provide a guide for architects and planners on how to transfer biomimetic strategies to strategies applicable in the urban context, thus bridging the gap of their lack of biological knowledge. The resulting matrix of strategies provides potential strategies across most of the different city systems and scales with few exceptions. This gap will be covered in a future work, currently in progress, to expand the database to include all city systems and scales.

Keywords

• biomimicry
• sustainability
• built environment
• energy efficiency
• resource efficiency