E - ELS: Data-driven Urban Nature [E]

Ecological Biographies of Mid-Sized British Cities: Mapping Landscape Evolution with Open Geospatial Data Cities are ecological formations before they are architectural ones. They occupy terrain that conditioned their founding, they expand by consuming land, and they carry the accumulated consequences of that expansion in their soils, their canopy, their water and their heat. Over the past decades this history has become unusually legible: global environmental datasets, produced by public institutions and freely available, now document urban growth, deforestation, land surface temperature and species occurrence at a resolution that permits close reading of individual cities. The seminar begins from the premise that access to such data is no longer the difficulty. Acquiring, processing and mapping it is a technical competence, taught here from the beginning and requiring no prior experience with GIS. The substantive work lies elsewhere. Environmental datasets do not explain the places they describe; they record symptoms, register some phenomena and remain blind to others, and acquire meaning only when situated within a specific urban history. To interpret them is to decide what they are evidence of. Participants therefore undertake a sustained interpretive exercise: each produces a map portraying the ecological biography of a mid-sized British city, working from a shared analytical framework developed collectively over four workshops. The biography takes the form of a standardised atlas plate accompanied by a written argument — an account of how the city came to occupy its site, what it consumed in growing, and what ecological condition it now inhabits. The intention is not to describe cities, but to construct narratives that the data can be made to support, and to remain precise about the point at which it can no longer do so.