Sustainability through biomimicry: Urban solutions inspired by nature

Abstract

Biomimicry means the imitation of life. The term arises from the combination of the Greek roots bios, life, with mimikos, imitation [1]. Biomimicry is a new science and design discipline that studies nature’s models and then emulates these forms, process, systems, and strategies to solve the problems of our time. The core idea is that nature is creative and sustainable by necessity and it can be used as an ecological standard to judge the sustainability of our innovations. After 3.8 billion years of evolution and bottom-up design brilliance, Nature has the key to solve many of the problems we are grappling with because it has learned what works and what lasts. This research is about the scientific understanding of the concept of "life" in urban space and its main purpose is to explain the underlying order that is present in self-organized structures. Until now architecture has been especially interested in models of pure rationally; informal cities were without any interest. Today this perspective is changing as we look more deeply into Nature. We realize that more our built environment functions like the natural world, more sustainable it is. Therefore, this paper intends to speculate about the existence of patterns of self-organization in nature and in cities. The methodology adopted is the process of abduction or hypothesis [2], which is a kind of scientific inference not purely abstract or inductive. It is above all a process that involves an aesthetic and holistic vision of the world which allows applying a certain knowledge domain into another different domain. It is a mere suggestion of something that can be explained by the assumption that there are some general rules which govern the entire universe.