ORGANIC URBANISM
Teaming up with nature
Organic urbanism is a method of city-making based on the gradual building of areas with their residents. That is its first definition.
But it is also, more broadly, a way of making the city with nature, according to nature, for nature: in this view, the city and nature are not separate realities. The natural and the artificial are not foreign worlds that should be kept apart or set against each other: on the contrary, nature can make the city more habitable; and the city, in reality, is also what makes nature habitable.
For what is a city, if not a piece of nature that has become more habitable than another? More habitable thanks to its streets, its buildings, its homes for all, but also its waterways, its parks and its gardens?
And indeed: what is a piece of “wild” nature if not an area inaccessible to humans? Deserted by humans? Or quite simply: spared by humans because, to a very large extent, humans have decided to live grouped together in hamlets, villages and cities?
The density of urban morphology and the richness of living things are two sides of the same process: sparing and sharing. Building and planting. Dwelling and gardening. Constructing and maintaining, one plot after another.
It is this same development process, at once natural and artificial,
✼ that spares nature by forming small towns, hamlets, villages and cities.
✼ and that allows us to live with it, where we have chosen to live and work, when we plant and garden as we come together.

The founding principles
✼ Grouping housing together spares nature: at the scale of an area, densifying one place preserves the soils and habitats of all the others;
✼ Sharing the city enriches it: in the dense urban fabric, the richness of biodiversity stems from the fragmentation of plots, which multiplies gardens, edges and habitats;
✼ Buildings support and protect nature: walls, roofs and façades offer shelter, shade and support that nature does not find elsewhere; they become habitats in their own right;
✼ Nature, too, supports and protects the city: it adorns it, cools it, helps to manage rainwater, and feeds and heals those who live there;
✼ Maintenance is the key: more than the area or the number of trees planted, it is the care, the number and the diversity of active gardeners that will make nature in the city rich and lasting.


Sparing nature
We need housing, business premises and public buildings. And every building has to be built somewhere: on a plot that is already built on, in an already urbanised area, or on a new plot that will eat into land preserved until now.
Densifying what already exists, rather than sprawling, means sparing everything around it:
✼ the farmland that feeds cities;
✼ natural soils, which nothing can restore within a human lifetime;
✼ the large continuous spaces through which wild species move;
✼ forests, meadows and wetlands, which retain water and store carbon.
Densifying one place means protecting all the others. The first way of making the city with nature, for nature, according to nature, is therefore to group housing together in the city in order to spare natural habitats: what ecologists call land sparing.

Sharing the city
It may seem counter-intuitive today, but grouping housing together, its spatial concentration, what is known as urban densification, are not incompatible with increasing the presence of nature in the city.
The second way of making the city with nature is to welcome it into our cities, not in order to drive out humans and their homes, but to live alongside it.
Nature in the city lives in a constrained environment. It needs to be protected, watered, sometimes cared for every day. It flourishes when it is left free, where it is not expected. But also when room is made for it, when it is gardened, pruned, maintained. It needs light, water, shade, and gardeners.
The more gardeners there are, and the more diverse their practices, the better nature in the city will fare. For the richness of nature in the city depends less on the area granted to it than on the fragmentation that divides up the space it is given: a mosaic of a thousand small gardens, all different, is worth more than one large space maintained by a single hand.
Dividing a large plot to build a new home on it does not, therefore, harm nature: it helps to broaden the range of habitats and to welcome additional gardeners who can help it thrive in the city.
Densifying and gardening are two sides of the same action: bringing buildings and nature to coexist closely to create a living environment for us all. This is what ecologists call land sharing.


Micro-gestures that help nature grow in the city
To make the city with nature, for nature, according to nature, we must give everyone back the power to garden it, gesture by gesture:
✼ a large garden shared between several gardeners;
✼ a hedge stretching along a new boundary;
✼ soil opened up here and there at the foot of a wall or a tree;
✼ a façade left to the birds and the climbing plants;
✼ flowering staggered to feed insects all year round,
✼ a patio built and planted to make it pleasant and cool.

Taken one by one, these gestures are tiny. But across a neighbourhood, their accumulation transforms an expanse of sterile, hard-to-maintain lawn into a mosaic of rich habitats, belonging to a thousand gardeners.
This is how nature has always settled in cities. And this is how our single-family neighbourhoods, which today are a kind of green desert, can gradually become richer, one plot, one building, one hedge, one season at a time.

More gardeners means more life
The richness of nature in the city is not measured by the area left to it, but by the number and diversity of those who cultivate it and produce the mosaic of heterogeneous habitats that nature needs. It takes people to look after nature in the city.
A garden resembles the person who tends it: their history, their trade, their tastes, their way of doing things. Two neighbours never plant quite the same things and never tend them in quite the same way.
That is why a thousand small gardens, kept by a thousand different hands, shelter richer nature than one large space maintained by a single hand: where one repeats, the others vary. And each variation offers one more shelter, one more flower, one more season to small wildlife.

When nature and the city acclimatise to each other
We instinctively set buildings and nature against each other: ivy supposedly cracks walls, the city supposedly smothers trees, density supposedly leaves them thirsty. These fears describe accidents, sometimes mistakes, but certainly not an inevitability.
Well combined, buildings and nature can protect each other.

Buildings shelter nature. A wall, a roof, a façade offer fauna and flora what they could not find elsewhere. Birds nest in crevices, bats roost under roofs, plants from rocky habitats settle on façades. The city does not imitate nature: it invents habitats that did not exist and that can host it.

Nature protects buildings in return. On a sound wall, ivy damages nothing: it does the opposite. It blocks the wind in winter, casts shade in summer, keeps rain and pollution at bay. A cloak that protects the wall and keeps it more temperate all year round. The plant does a service to the building that supports it.
What cools a street is shade, that of trees and buildings combined. Built shade does not only protect passers-by: it also protects trees, many of which already suffer from the heat. The trees we plant to shelter us also need sheltering.
Buildings and nature need not compete for space; they can intelligently acclimatise to each other. Organically. But these alliances do not happen by themselves: they have to be designed, built and planted, and maintained. This is how the city shelters nature, and how nature in return gives it far more than coolness.


Multiplying gardens to welcome, feed, heal, delight, cool…
Nature in the city is not just beautiful to look at. A garden, even a small one, provides concrete services to those who live in it and cultivate it.
✼ It feeds: a vegetable garden of a few square metres, tended in detail, yields more than a large plot that is hard to keep up.
✼ It heals: a large Dutch study of nearly 800,000 people has established that having a private garden of at least 50 m² reduces most common illnesses by 15 to 24%.
✼ It delights: watching the seasons go by, a tree blossom, a bird nest: what a garden gives first and foremost is a grounding in the present and a sense of belonging to nature.
✼ It cools, thanks to a well-placed tree, a façade covered in leaves, a patio adorned with a pool and planting…
None of these benefits requires large spaces. They require gardens on a human scale, numerous and cultivated. That is why access to a private garden in the city should no longer be a privilege: given what it provides, putting it within reach of as many people as possible is a public health objective.


Four methods, doubly useful to nature
For some fifteen years, Villes Vivantes has been developing methods for putting organic urbanism into practice across areas. Each of these methods densifies what already exists and, in the same gesture, spares nature outside while helping to enrich it inside:
✼ BIMBY: by sharing large plots in single-family neighbourhoods, we bring additional gardeners to places where lawns are hard to maintain, and we lengthen edges and hedges. And every home built here is a home that does not eat into natural, forest and agricultural land.
✼ BUNTI: adapting, greening, reconfiguring and even transforming the existing building stock through upward extensions, extensions, and the creation of balconies, patios, terraces and town gardens.
✼ BAMBA: designing the plot, the building project and the garden in a single movement, and paving the way for the custom housing development, in which each plot is adapted to its occupants, their practices and their gardening abilities.
✼ BRAMBLE: concentrating housing in the right places means freeing up and preserving, elsewhere, the soils and ecological continuities that wild nature needs.
All these operational models pursue the same goal: in the city, more diversity, more heterogeneity, more intensity and more density. One plot at a time, through tailor-made projects adapted to the needs and aspirations of their future residents.

Evolving nature, an adapting city
A city’s nature is not a stage set installed once and for all: it changes with the climate, and we must change with it. The species we rely on are already living on borrowed time: in London, a study of more than a million trees showed that three out of four might not survive the climate of the end of the century. What we plant today will live in tomorrow’s climate.
No plan fixed in advance can respond to such a drift. Only continuous attention can, made up of trials, errors and adjustments, plot after plot, season after season.
This adjustment is within everyone’s reach. It does not require large gardens but gardeners who are more numerous, more attentive, inventive and free. Their diversity does more than enrich the city: it makes it robust. Nature tended in a thousand different ways becomes more resilient: should a disease strike, a heatwave hit or a species fail, others will take over.


Organic urbanism is neither biomimicry nor a new functionalism painted green
For centuries, we knew how to welcome nature into the city organically, without trying to turn it into a system or make a fuss about it: we planted a tree for its shade, a vine for its fruit, a hedge to enclose a garden. The modern era broke with this obvious practice in two opposite ways.
On the one hand, there is an attempt to imitate nature. So-called organic architecture, and later biomimicry, seek to cover cities with forms that evoke living things: undulating or deconstructed façades, rounded balconies, forest towers. But a building shaped like a tree is not a tree. These images reassure the eye without feeding a single insect or cooling a street: they provide the scenery of nature, rarely nature itself.

On the other hand, there is an attempt to instrumentalise nature. Nature has become a matter of figures serving a function: open-ground ratio, percentage of planted surface, number of trees planted… and air-conditioner equivalents. We quantify, we measure, we define a theoretical usefulness that says nothing about our real capacity to welcome nature and help it thrive in our cities.

Imitating nature, or counting it: in both cases, this means treating it as a finished product, as a form to be reproduced, as a simple device.
Organic urbanism offers a third way. Making the city with nature does not mean drawing forms that resemble it, or lining up figures that measure its performance: it means creating and maintaining the conditions that keep it alive, and entrusting that care to as many people as possible.


The art of holding opposites together
We have been taught to choose: the city or nature, buildings or living things, densification or greening. These are false alternatives, and they cost us dearly in everyday life: by constantly setting the two against each other, we can no longer densify, that is, build where we should in order to spare nature, nor welcome people where we nevertheless need fresh hands to garden.
The result: urban sprawl continues, and the housing crisis is deepening.
Grouping housing and activities together spatially makes it possible to spare habitats outside urban areas. The combined greening and densification of the urban fabric make it possible to organise coexistence: the wall shelters the plant; the plant protects the wall. Built shade protects the tree as much as the passer-by. And it is indeed the same act (dividing a plot, building a home on it) that adds one more resident and one more gardener to the city.
Sparing and sharing. Building and planting. Densifying and gardening. Constructing, dwelling and maintaining, one plot after another.