Urban landscape sustainability and resilience: the promise and challenges of integrating ecology with urban planning and design

The twenty-first century global population will be increasingly urban-focusing the sustainability challenge on cities and raising new challenges to address urban resilience capacity. Landscape ecologists are poised to contribute to this challenge in a transdisciplinary mode in which science and research are integrated with planning policies and design applications. Five strategies to build resilience capacity and transdisciplinary collaboration are proposed: biodiversity; urban ecological networks and connectivity; multifunctionality; redundancy and modularization, adaptive design. Key research questions for landscape ecologists, planners and designers are posed to advance the development of knowledge in an adaptive mode.