The Landscape Approach

The discipline of landscape architecture finds itself in an opportune position in the era of the Anthropocene—the current geological epoch characterized by global human impact [1]. Through urbanization, industrialization, and agriculture, the imprint of human civilization has fundamentally transformed atmospheric, biochemical, and geological characteristics to such an extent that an entirely new epoch has been coined to describe the planet’s ecological reality [2]. The naming of this age comes with a timely realization that societies have shaped land-water systems in ways that have irreversibly linked humanity’s future to modified natural systems [3]. This coupling of social and ecological systems evolved within an exploitative paradigm where processes that have shaped landscapes for eons are subsumed by development patterns driven by immediate needs. The mounting challenges of climate change and the occasional shocks from natural disasters remind us that this paradigm is no longer viable or sustainable in the long run. Regenerative models and processes that work with powerful natural flows and make room for ecology to enrich non-human life within highly modified landscapes are urgently needed to mitigate the impact of settlements and infrastructures while making them more resilient. Landscape architects have a long legacy of crafting restorative environmental systems and natural experiences within human-dominated mosaics from the scale of the garden, to the city, to urban-rural regions [4]. Landscape architects are therefore uniquely situated to guide development approaches that reconcile human impact with ecological sustainability in the age of the Anthropocene [5,6,7].

However, landscape architecture as a discipline is systemically overshadowed by other disciplines in leading large-scale efforts towards climate resilience and territorial conservation. The environmental and societal issues of our times demands a radical grounding of systems of production, extraction, and consumption to the ecological challenges and opportunities specific to the place. To ensure this connection to place, designers, planners, and landscape architects have to acquire the agency to influence environmental policy, land management regimes, engineered systems, and socio-ecological processes that impact much larger scales than design and planning professionals have been accustomed to. Landscape architects may establish—or rather reclaim—their agency by positioning the landscape approach as a collaborative medium and spatially grounded process that can engage diverse stakeholders and disciplines to guide human interventions at multiple scales. Revisiting the professional history of landscape architecture suggests that the foundation to support this shift is already embedded in the origins of the discipline.

In the North American context, where landscape architecture was first formalized as a profession—even as this event followed more than a century of vernacular landscape design practices across the world—landscape architecture shares a common path with City and Regional Planning [8]. Harvard University established the first professional landscape architecture program in 1900 within the Scientific School. Interestingly, the introductory course was open to all undergraduates within the Scientific School and the Harvard College. While the course was taught by Frederick Law Olmsted, many of the core lectures were given by Nathaniel S. Shaler—professor of geology and Dean of the Scientific School—who offered a rigorous, scientific understanding of natural systems [9]. Landscape architects played a key role in shaping the city planning curriculum within Harvard and eventually established the first city planning professional program in 1923—the Master in Landscape Architecture with Special Reference to City Planning. This event laid the foundations for a scalar divide where site design became the cornerstone of landscape architecture while the planning of urban systems moved into its own professional trajectory [10]. At the onset of this specialization, Spirn points out, landscape architects were not only interested in phenomenological concerns at the site scale, but also tried to address urban growth, sanitation, drainage, and waste-water issues. An example of this is landscape architecture’s legacy of early system thinkers and regional planning advocates, such as Frederick Law Olmsted, Charles Elliot, Warren Manning and John Nolen.

Considering this context, it is fair to argue that in the early 20th century, landscape architects had defined a vocation that was not only interested in the design of site-specific interventions but engaged with the planning of cities and territories. Landscape architects created a bulk of academic work that was adapted into professional applications, policy frameworks, and administrative bodies to sustain the plans that were envisioned [11]. In the latter half of the 20th century, with the suitability analysis method developed by Ian McHarg at the University of Pennsylvania and innovations from the Computer Graphics Lab within the Harvard Graduate School of Design, landscape architects laid the groundwork for Geographic Information Systems (GIS) — a spatially grounded set of technological tools and methodologies that enables planners to strategically work on environmental and development issues at a territorial scale. The limited agency of landscape architecture in urban, regional, and territorial planning today belies the discipline’s strong legacy. The inability of academia and the profession to reconcile the landscape planning scale with site design has contributed to this retreat. However, recent initiatives such as Rebuild by Design in New York or Resilient by Design in the Bay Area offered a glimpse of what is possible when landscape thinking guides multidisciplinary efforts to address regional vulnerability to climate change. The convergence of shocks and stresses in multiple geographies across the globe along with the emergence of new avenues for collaboration have created an opportunity for landscape architects to reclaim their legacy.

Landscape architects and urban planners can tackle some of the most pressing ‘wicked problems’ [12] with allied professionals such as ecologists, economists, engineers, geographers, natural resource managers, and sociologists alongside local communities. This effort requires design-planning professions to develop robust, analytical, and design-driven methods that can operate at multiple scales, and promote landscape-based models to mediate built environments and natural systems [13]. The landscape approach is well positioned to reconcile human settlements and infrastructures — whether they are planned or spontaneous, disruptive or restorative — with the environmental and cultural realities of the place. Multi-sectoral issues of land planning and resilience require interdisciplinary thinking to respond to the environmental constraints and political challenges of the place. The landscape approach can negotiate between scientific and economic models that guide normative approaches to natural resource management and development, with nuanced readings of coupled human and natural systems [14] from environmental social sciences and humanities [15,16]. Landscape, then, becomes the medium over which multiple stakeholders and disciplines negotiate the relationship of natural systems with designed systems to ensure ecological, social, and economic sustainability over time and scale [17].

Sharing a common interest in using the medium of landscape to productively interrogate contemporary issues of the Anthropocene and engage with other disciplines, the International Landscape Collaborative (ILC) was founded in 2017 by a group of landscape architects, urban designers, and planners at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. Having developed a sensitivity towards landscape-based approaches in design and planning through their studies, the group continued to develop this framework through individual career trajectories. The ILC emerged as a way to formalize the development of the landscape approach as a collective effort. The ILC began as a common forum for the core group to share their experiences from research or practice within different academic and professional environments. From this beginning, the ILC aspires to grow as an independent think-tank, international in scope, that offers a platform for researchers and practitioners from landscape architecture, city & regional planning and an expanded set of allied disciplines. By connecting experts from around the world who share experiences from diverse contexts, the ILC intends to deepen the understanding of landscapes and the cultures that co-produce and depend on them. Moreover, the ILC seeks to position the landscape approach as a tool for social and political transformation in contexts where planned infrastructural systems are not yet codified or consolidated. These emerging sites offer productive opportunities to rethink urban form and question dominant spatial or political organizations.