WEES Seminar and workshop – Rens Wijnakker
Rens Wijnakker MSc, Project Leader, FABRICations, Amsterdam
Seminar: City as nature – healthy living for plants, animals and people
Venue: C3033
It is often stated that cities have a higher biodiversity then their surrounding industrial agricultural landscapes. The city can be seen as an ecosystem with a large variety of biotopes. At the same time, there is little room for nature in cities that are densifying rapidly. Recently, several developments have been initiated that include nature inclusive buildings. Is this an answer to create healthy cities for people, animals and plants? Or are these developments green band-aids that hide structural problems? With an urban metabolism approach, FABRICations attempts to apply green and sustainable architecture in a way that it becomes a central node in a larger system, rather than an individual green post-stamp. This talk will discuss how nature, sustainability and architecture can combine to create green buildings and cities.
Workshop: Designing green cities, What kind of nature should be encouraged and how can this be done attractively and within limited maintenance?
Venue: C3040
When designing a ‘green’ city or building, ecologists and architects are faced with certain dilemmas. These include the question of the type of ‘green’, should this facilitate ecosystem services, biodiversity or just nature in general? And what then is considered to be nature? A second issue concerns the balance in creating high biodiversity that is at the same time easy to maintain, robust and attractive. In the workshop Rens Wijnakker will give an introduction into these issues, followed by an interactive discussion with participants.
As preparation for the workshop please read the following:
https://iabr.nl/media/document/original/urban_metabolism_rotterdam.pdf
The workshop for those interested is organized from 13:30 to 15:00 in room C3040, Orion building. Registration is required (space limited to 15), email Nelleke Buitendijk.
The workshop gives attendees the possibility to meet the speaker of the seminar and have a discussion based on recent publications. The workshops are a good possibility to get acquainted with hot topics in science and to learn how to discuss these topics with leading scientists in the field. Furthermore, BSc and MSc students can get 1 ECTS for attending 2 workshops.
WEES background
WEES is an initiative of PhD students and postdocs at Wageningen University to organize a continuing series of stimulating seminars on contemporary topics in evolution and ecology. We aim to bring together different groups at Wageningen University using a variety of systems, but with a common interest in evolutionary and ecological questions. For this series we invite researchers from all over the world who have leading roles in their field. After the talk there will be drinks for an informal discussion. WEES is funded by graduate schools PE&RC, WIMEK, EPS, VLAG, and WIAS.
For more information please visit: www.weeswageningen.nl, Like us on Facebook, or join the Facebook Group for more participation.
Monday, June 17, 2019
Workshop 13:30 Seminar 16:00
WUR – Orion
Bronland 1, Wageningen