Social–ecological urbanism is presented as a design epistemology in which urban form is neither a neutral container nor a purely aesthetic artefact, but a medium through which social and ecological services become spatially available. Its iconic idea is that resilience must be addressed at the microlevel where urban dwellers directly encounter ecological processes, institutions and spatial affordances. The paper’s theoretical contribution is to combine resilience thinking with Space Syntax and urban design, replacing the habitual separation between ecological systems and human settlement with a coupled social–ecological account of urban form. Methodologically, it identifies three media of intervention—form, institutions and discourse—and advances four research frontiers: density and biodiversity thresholds, human and non-human movement, urban retrofitting, and affordance designs capable of reversing ecological illiteracy. Its wider significance lies in moving ecological urbanism from environmental mitigation toward relational design, where spatial configuration becomes a mechanism for distributing encounters, services, capacities and forms of stewardship.
URBANISM MEETS ART