Climate & Biodiversity: Climate Action Programme lecture

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"Prometheus in the Forest: the case for strong sustainability principles in TU Delft education and research"

Nico Tillie will talk about  ECOCAMPUS, testing ground for the city of the future. With his colleagues he is working on a framework to document and use indigenous knowledge and practices on landscape use and biodiversity. This framework about global biocultural diversity using landscape based solutions, serves as an approach for the ECOCampus of TU Delft zooming in on system- habitat and species level. The campus is being transformed into a sustainable, nature-inclusive environment that is pleasant for staff and students. The ECOCampus also serves as a testing ground for the city of the future, and how other fields and faculties can add to this overall approach.
For many people, city and nature are mutually exclusive concepts. Nico Tillie believes this is wrong. If we want to meet current and future challenges, we need to design the city much more as an ecosystem.
Last month he gave the yearly  - Van Iterson Lecture in the Hortus Botanicus,.

Nico Tillie is Head of the Urban Ecology Lab at TU Delft and teaches in the section of Landscape Architecture. He is a landscape architect, botanist and expert in plantings. He holds a Ph.D. in Synergetic Urban Landscape Planning from TU Delft and holds two MScs.
He chairs the TU Delft ECOcampus project on greening the campus. He has worked on circularity, urban ecosystems in various cities and on nature-based solutions for climate adaptation and was co-author of the Nature Based Urbanism approach. He is a senior fellow at the University of Toronto Canada and has lectured and conducted workshops all over the world. He worked, among others, for the Royal Botanic Gardens Kew in London, private design offices and for the municipality of Rotterdam on various projects, ranging from urban ecology, to urban energy and water systems, planting plans, as well as the Museum Park design, urban metabolism and city-wide densification and greening plans. He led two successful entries from the city of Rotterdam for the International Architecture Biennale, such as densification + greening and the entry ‘Urban by Nature’ on urban metabolism. He also writes for garden magazines and gives lectures on plantings, botanical field trips and gardens. He is chairman of the Friends of Rotstuin Ber Slangen Foundation in Maastricht and chairman of the scientific council of NL Greenlabel.

Global biodiversity is in a rapid decline, a process accelerated by technological innovations. Sustainability initiatives to counter this trend in technical universities remain small-scale and do not address the broader system of STEM education and research. In ‘Prometheus in the Forest: the case for strong sustainability in TU Delft education and research’, Bob Kreiken, PhD researcher in the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology section, makes the case why we need to rethink the position of technical universities in the biodiversity crisis. The first step involves us climbing back on the shoulders of giants to rediscover nature as a source of inspiration. Thereafter, we need to face the sensitivity of nature to our innovations and the economy that they support. And last, perhaps we need to rethink the human-nature-technology nature relationship that STEM promotes.

Bob Kreiken is a PhD Researcher Biodiversity Data & Equity at the faculty of Technology, Policy and Management at TU Delft. Bob holds a MSc in Forest and Nature Conservation Policy with a background in law and public administration. Before he started his PhD at the Ethics and Philosophy of Technology Section on justice in the exchange of genetic sequence data, he worked as intern and secretary in the Dutch delegation to the Convention on Biological Diversity.