Nature’s architects build ecosystems with acute sensitivity to their surroundings. Without fail they build potential disaster scenarios into their plans, taking a pro-active, as opposed to a reactive approach and carefully tailoring the scale of their efforts to the probability of the event to hand. Nature doesn’t work in silos, it thinks big, indeed so big that there is even a species of bacteria that thrives on the effects of an asteroid impact, including impacts with the destruction capacity of several atomic bombs. When disaster does strike, nature is prepared and unleashes highly efficient recovery protocols, such as savannahs in fire-prone regions that initiate a re-growth strategy the moment an inferno has passed. Nature is resourceful and opportunistic in the extreme – it simply doesn’t miss a trick. When there’s a potential resource to hand it finds a use for it and it’s this canny, savvy approach to design that has enabled life on Earth to develop from somewhat humble origins into the awe-inspiringly diverse, ultra sophisticated, über efficient and breathtakingly beautiful biodiversity we see about us. The Bionic City is a nod to Nature’s R&D Lab, which at four billion years old is a great deal more advanced than our own.