Photosynthetic Cities: Blue and Green Infrastructure for Resilient Urban Systems

While the resilience, health, and biodiversity benefits of green and blue infrastructure are well established, widespread implementation remains hindered by fragmented governance and complex legacy systems. Photosynthetic Cities convenes stakeholders from academia, policy, design, and practice to discuss how we move from empirical data to actionable architectural and urban design decisions across multiple spatial scales.

Future urban models must combine agriculture, decentralized water systems, and urban rewilding to sustain cities within evolving climate, water, and natural disaster contexts. Replacing fragile centralized supply chains with localized, resilient networks can catalyze food production, water capture, and the restoration of local ecosystems within cities. These strategies operate across a continuum: from urban and landscape systems to campus and site-scale interventions, building surfaces including green roofs and green walls, and vegetation integrated directly into indoor environments. Across these scales, green and blue infrastructure can address interconnected challenges of drought resilience, air quality, urban heat, food systems, biodiversity, and human health. This reinforces the interdisciplinary role architects, designers, planners, policymakers, researchers, owners, and developers play in shaping how ecological performance may be delivered through the built environment.

Decades of research, monitoring, policy innovation, and implementation have generated an unprecedented body of evidence to draw upon for future work. Yet broader adoption remains limited by the challenge of transforming this information into integrated knowledge and actionable frameworks that support decision-making throughout the built environment process. Policymakers need evidence of public and urban value; architects and designers need to understand how design choices influence performance; owners and developers need to understand the value of investment; and researchers need clearer pathways to translate and direct research toward implementation. Advancing green and blue infrastructure therefore requires not simply more data, but actionable frameworks that connect scientific evidence, design decisions, performance outcomes, and value across buildings, landscapes, and cities.

Agenda:
3:00-4:30 PM -  Photosynthetic Buildings: Metrics, Performance, + Value
From indoor vegetation to green walls and roofs, examining how design decisions influence environmental performance and how evidence can support implementation.

5:00-6:30 PM - Photosynthetic Cities: Clean Air, Water, Food + Drought Resilience
Built environment impacts at urban and regional systems, examining integrated approaches to climate resilience, ecological performance, and public value.

6:30-7:30 PM - Reception and Special Presentation on the Ecological Living Network Program

Speakers:
Alejandra Acevedo de los Rios, Research Scientist, Yale Center for Ecosystems and Architecture
Helen Chartier, Director of Urban Planning and Design, C40 Cities
Christina Ciardullo, Architect + Research Scientist, Yale Center for Ecosystems and Architecture
Winka Dubbeldam, Assoc. AIA, CEO, SCI-Arc, Founding Partner, Archi-Tectonics
Anna Dyson, Founding Director, Yale Center for Ecosystems and Architecture
Jefferson Ellinger, Architect + Director Design Computation, UNC Charlotte 
Sarah Kornbluth, Field Researcher, American Musem of Natural History 
Martin Krause, Director, Climate Change Division, UNEP
Phoebe Ledins, G. E. Hutchinson Environmental Postdoctoral Associate, Yale Center for Ecosystems and Architecture
Andrea Meza, Deputy Executive Secretary, UNCCD
Andreas Theodoridis, Architect + Assistant Professor, NYIT
Marc Tsurumaki, Principal and Founding Partner, LTL Architects, Chair MArch Columbia University
Hind Wildman, Co-Founder, Director of Communications, Yale Center for Ecosystems and Architecture