Praxis in Landscape Architecture

As described in a previous post, I sent messages to a variety of landscape architects and recent grads to get feedback on their experiences as influenced by the national economy. The most global (in more ways than one) response I received was from Nick Onody, MLA 2009, who is employed in a multidisciplinary firm in Toronto. The breadth of his comments suggests that I start with his take on professional trends and follow-up in later posts with other people’s stories of personal experience. I think each view can teach us something about what is happening now and how those both “in the field” (currently employed in the profession) and “on the fence” (seeking employment in the profession) see the world. Nick’s view is strongly influenced by landscape urbanism and its spinoffs.

Thank you for the message. I think this is quite an interesting endeavor on your part and timed perfectly at such a critical time in the design professions. The ‘Great Recession’ has led to a variety of trends and forces that have sent the profession in fundamentally different directions. Over the past decade, we have witnessed landscape come into vogue. Sustainability and the rise of LEED. Landscape as ‘scene’ to landscape as urbanism. Terrorism and natural disasters. The rise of megacities and the influx of city migrants globally. Population decline and suburban foreclosures locally. What does this all mean? What has changed and what is to come?

Making sense of the past two decades means contemplating the forces and trends that have drastically shifted the profession of landscape architecture. Historically, landscape architecture was concerned with the spectacle and beauty of landscape; often comparing its design to a scene or picture, frozen in time; terra firma. Over the past decade, we have seen a shift from landscape as ‘scene’ to landscape as urbanism. From New Urbanism to Landscape Urbanism to Green Urbanism and Ecological Urbanism, the rising interest in cities and urbanism has greatly increased landscape architecture’s profile in the cultural milieu. The vision of the pastoral landscape as a natural oasis separate from the city has been abandoned in favor of a landscape that is an artificial construct of nature and a continuous part of the city. Here, the landscape fixed in time has been replaced by the dynamic of landscape – its ability to change over time; terra fluxus. Thinking in these terms has led to an increased awareness and importance of landscape and natural systems, and, most importantly, their ability to structure urban form. Although
interesting theoretically, not much has come from these camps in the way of praxis.

More recently, and throughout the past decade, poverty, war and the incredible rise in natural disasters exposed a critical need to re-tool the profession. From Hurricane Katrina to the floods of Australia, to the recent earthquake(s) and tsunami in Japan, the need for emergency architecture/disaster planning is dramatically increasing with changes in weather patterns and sea level rise. With this also comes population displacement and movement. For the first time in history, more people live in cities than in the outlying areas. The rise of megacities such as Lagos, Shanghai, and Mumbai presents challenges that will shape the profession for decades to come.

Of the top ten megacities in the world, only two are in North America. The remaining eight are developing countries. These developing megacities face extreme challenges. Slums, homelessness, traffic congestion, urban sprawl, gentrification, and environmental issues such as air pollution and water quality. And it is these environmental issues I believe have the greatest potential for the future of our professions. Of top priority – or a “green shoot” – is water, the world’s most vital resource. It is both a resource and a threat. Water is central to every aspect of city life: from basic human sustenance and public health to environmental remediation and overall urban renewal. Water is the most basic and important human necessity. Yet it is not treated as such. In the City of Makkah in Saudi Arabia, for example, water is used once and then flushed into the desert through a series of outflow pipes; un-cleansed and without opportunity for re-use. Not only does this destroy habitat, but it is highly unsustainable. Water (useable) is a finite resource.

This type of problem can be seen throughout the developing world where pollution from dumping of industrial and municipal waste into rivers and streams has destroyed entire ecosystems. Almost every developing city has water issues, whether it is in rivers and streams or polluted drinking water. As landscape architects, we have the capacity to design with and for water. Specifically, through parks and naturalized systems, we have the ability to cleanse stormwater, to naturalize and bio-remediate damaged ecosystems, to cleanse polluted water through ground-breaking processes of bio-remediation, and to instill natural and sustainable design into cities.

Here, I would encourage you and your students to review a project that my firm, Moriyama and Teshima Planners, completed recently after a
10 year process. This year, it won the Aga Khan Award for Architecture, the first landscape architecture project to do so in the history of the award, and it is a prime example of the groundbreaking processes of naturalization and bio-remediation that I have discussed above. Here is the link to the project website: http://www.mtplanners.com/mtpwadiinfo.html. Specifically, I encourage you to download the Wadi Hanifah Restoration Project booklet under the documents section.