A Normative Model for Urban Ecology Practice: Establishing Performance Propositions for Ecological Planning and Design

Abstract

The practice of urban ecology is concerned with how urban environments should function as built cultural-technological systems. In this context, applied urban ecology is essentially a normative activity. A normative approach is consistent with Simon’s (1969) demarcation of the “sciences of the artificial”. Unlike the natural or classical sciences, the “sciences of the artificial”, which include the disciplines of planning, management, design, architecture and engineering, are focused more on how things should be rather than the analysis of how they are. This normative or prescriptive approach to the artifacts and artifactual systems of the cultural-technological world is characteristic of the design professions that deal with the built human environment. This normative versus analytical approach, is illustrated by planning and design. Both are processes that are practiced by synthesizing, reformatting and systematically adapting extant knowledge for the purposes of resolving societal or contextual problems. Normative propositions represent abstract approximations of reality that can only be evaluated in terms of their epistemological usefulness (Morales 1974). Normative performance propositions for ecological design are both valid and useful epistemological tools for urban ecology practice. However, what these normative ecological performance propositions for the built environment should be, remains an outstanding question.