Toward Urban Self-Sufficiency in the Galapagos Islands

Abstract

The challenge of accommodating a growing human population on these ecologically distinctive islands seems intractable. Conventional approaches to building form, urban design, and planning controls are trivial and ineffective. Recent platitudinous approaches to more sensitive settlements on the islands are demonstrably irrelevant, the results ineffectual. Thus we have sought an alternative framing of the challenge to model a response. The CAS approach, engaged by the Galapagos Science Center in its work on the ecosystem and economy of the islands, offers this alternative (Wesley F, Carpenter SR, Brock WA, Holling CS, Gunderson LH (2002) Why systems of people and nature are not just social and ecological systems. In: Gunderson LH, Holling CS (eds) Panarchy. Island Press, Washington, DC, pp 103–119). In this chapter we report the outcomes of an exercise conducted in the context of a design studio in which propositions for possible future urban development were explored informed by CAS theory. The Holling cycle of adaptive change is used as a model to examine urban interventions to describe a transition to sustainable urban form. The cycle is then embedded into a panarchy model to contextualize the urban change in the larger environment and inform it with human action through the development of local knowledge.