With urgent urban challenges such as climate adaptation, energy transition, and continued urbanisation, the need for integrating planning and design with urban engineering increases. The implementation of new technological interventions and the utilisation of the natural system is hampered by the lack of an integrated approach which incorporates urban planning and design decisions. Meanwhile, urban sprawl and economic growth increasingly compete for infrastructure and environment, affecting the success or failure of the daily operating systems of cities and regions, and thereby urban competitiveness. The challenge is to fundamentally rethink the urban landscape in light of new technologies – as material and ecological practices. The question is how to renew existing urbanized areas by integrating parameters of the natural system and technological innovations directly into urban development opportunities arising from spatial planning and design. The ecological, climate and urban crisis in especially vulnerable geographies benefit from a new ‘ecosystem participation’ approach. In order to get grip on what this could entail, explorative research has been employed to study critical relations between nature and culture.