Next Generation of Landscape Architecture Leaders Focus on Climate, Equity, and Technology
“Our fellows have shown courage, written books, founded mission-driven non-profits, created new coalitions, and disseminated new tools,” said Cindy Sanders, FASLA, CEO of OLIN, in her introduction of the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) Fellowship for Innovation and Leadership program at Arena Stage in Washington, D.C.
Sanders highlighted the results of a five-year assessment of the LAF fellowship program and its efforts to grow the next generation of diverse landscape architecture leaders. The assessment shows that past fellows are shaping the future of the built environment in key public, non-profit, and private sector roles.
And she introduced the latest class of six fellows, who focused on climate, equity, technology, and storytelling:
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Chris Hardy, ASLA, senior associate at Sasaki, used his fellowship to significantly advance the Carbon Conscience tool he has been developing over the past few years. The web-based tool is meant to help landscape architects, planners, urban designers, and architects make better land-use decisions in early design phases when the opportunity to reduce climate impacts is greatest.
Carbon Conscience is also designed to work in tandem with the Pathfinder tool, created by LAF Fellow Pamela Conrad, ASLA, as part of Climate Positive Design. Once the parameters of a site have been established, Pathfinder enables landscape architects to improve their designs and materials choices to reach a climate positive state faster.
Hardy examined more than 300 studies to develop robust evidence to support a fully revamped version of Carbon Conscience, which will launch in July 2023. He found that “landscape architecture projects can be just as carbon intensive as architecture projects per square foot.” He wondered whether the only climate responsible approach is to stop building new projects altogether. “Are new projects worth the climate cost?”
After months of research, he believes decarbonizing landscape architecture projects will be “very hard,” but not impossible. He called for a shift away from the carbon-intensive designs of the past. To reduce emissions, landscape architects need to take a “less is more” approach; use local and natural materials; and increase space in their projects for ecological restoration, which can boost carbon sequestration. He cited Sasaki’s 600-acre mega-project in Athens Greece — the Ellinikon Metropolitan Park — as a model for how to apply Carbon Conscience, make smart design decisions, and significantly improve carbon performance upfront. “There are exciting design opportunities — this is not just carbon accounting.”
Landscape architect Erin Kelly, ASLA, based in Detroit, Michigan, sees enormous potential in using vacant land in cities for carbon sequestration. Her goal is to connect vacant lands with the growing global offset marketplace, which offered 155 million offsets in 2022 that earned $543 million. And she sees opportunities for landscape architects to work with carbon developers to improve offset projects.
Carbon offsets are purchased by organizations to reduce their climate impacts. One offset credit equals one ton of greenhouse gas emissions. Offsets are verified by third-party verification companies and then listed on carbon registries. Like other projects, there are carbon developers, who purchase or lease land to grow trees or protect natural carbon sinks, like wetlands. Projects are monitored, usually over a 25 to 100 year period. But there is no one price for an offset, and “the quality varies,” Kelly said.
There is a need for new approaches to offsets that generates more direct income for communities and incentivizes landscape health by factoring in biodiversity. Sequestering carbon in cities like Detroit provides an opportunity for urban communities to benefit, but to date urban offset programs like City Forest Credits have been limited and need to be scaled up.
She estimates that 31 million people in the U.S. now live in vacant land communities. Using machine learning and satellites, Kelly is developing a national atlas of vacant land ripe for redevelopment as offsets by city governments, community groups, and companies. “Landscape architects haven’t been involved in setting up these offerings,” but can tell “compelling stories” and influence how they are developed. Locally-managed, small-scale offsets can provide greater financial benefits and community health and environmental co-benefits.
Robert Levinthal, a PhD student at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania (UPenn), is focused on Mega-Eco Projects, or very large-scale nature-based solutions. Hundreds of these projects, like the Great Green Wall in Sub-Saharan Africa, are in development at different scales around the world. They are meant to combat desertification, protect biodiversity and connect habitat, and preserve and restore watersheds. They may be in urban or rural areas.
Unfortunately, few landscape architects are involved in these projects. For Levinthal, this means the project leaders are “missing critical insights,” as landscape architects can help ensure these massive projects balance the needs of humans and non-human species. Landscape architects can plan and design the connections between large-scale natural systems and communities.
In Senegal, Levinthal explored the implications of the Great Green Wall himself. Initially proposed in the 1950s, the plan envisions a 50-kilometer-wide belt of trees from the east to west coasts in Sub-Saharan Africa as an anti-desertification measure that will prevent the Sahara Desert from further expanding south. The African Union, which supports the initiative, has scaled down the effort but it still remains ambitious — with the goal of restoring 100 million hectares of land and storing 250 million tons of greenhouse gas emissions by 2030. But Levinthal noted that out of $14 billion spent on the Great Green Wall to date, just $20 million has reached Senegal. And desertification is happening outside the Great Green Wall area.
Levinthal sees the need to better connect green belt planning with community master planning and eco-tourism development. Senegal, like other Sub-Saharan African countries, is “sadly missing landscape architects and urban designers” who can weave parks, community spaces, recreational areas, and transportation systems into ecological restoration efforts.
And pastoralists remain deeply underserved. He called for a renewed focus on regional and land-use planning among landscape architects and deeper partnerships with indigenous peoples. To learn more, look out for an upcoming symposium at UPenn, October 13-14, 2023.
In part 2, meet three more fellows, who focused on technology, equity, and storytelling:
“Artificial intelligence (AI) will bolster, break, and transform the process of landscape architecture,” said Phillip Fernberg, a designer and PhD student at Utah State University. Many kinds of artificial intelligence have been developed over past decades. But what has recently caught our collective attention is ChatGPT, an “artificial general intelligence.” He said ChatGPT “isn’t as magical as you may think” — it’s machine learning from patterns of data. But it shows the range of transformative and disruptive technologies to come.
AI will bolster landscape architects’ work by making it far easier to find images of different species of trees and plants. It will also help landscape architects and community groups better analyze landscapes, particularly at the large scale, and advance efforts on climate change, biodiversity, and equity.
But it will also break landscape architects’ conception of their role and value as designers. AI tools have already demonstrated they can create renderings that look nearly human made. This raises questions for landscape architects, like: “What is it that I really do?”
Fernberg thinks renderings won’t become fully AI-driven, but designers’ jobs will be rethought to better integrate with AI. He said a host of privacy, ethical, and intellectual property issues will also need to be addressed.
Ultimately, AI will transform how landscape architects work, changing the data, models, and processes used by designers. He called for landscape architects and ASLA to catch up to where architects and planners are. These professions have formed networks and working groups and developed research to explore the implications of AI. “Landscape architects need to imbue their value system in these tools.”
For Daniel Winterbottom, FASLA, professor of landscape architecture at the University of Washington, access to gardens and nature in prisons helps inmates heal from abuse, trauma, and addiction and prepare for a healthier life after their incarceration.
Worldwide, there are currently 10.3 million people imprisoned. Approximately 25 percent of those people — 2.2 million — are incarcerated in the U.S. In America, prison is “oppressively bleak” and “designed to be demoralizing.” Prison practices are also rooted in a history of racism and social injustices. These environments are typically “austere and efficient.” Most often, there is very little access to nature.
In contrast, many European countries have “open prisons” that provide inmates access to wild nature. Inmates have responsibilities tending gardens and earn trust that prepares them to be responsible citizens post-incarceration.
Through a series of powerful recorded interviews, Winterbottom found that inmates involved in garden programs experienced a range of benefits. They experienced reduced stress and conflict. They harmed themselves and others less and cared for themselves and others more. “Working on the garden helped them work on themselves. Outer gardening led to inner gardening — weeding and pruning their defects and shortcomings,” one interviewee said. Correctional officers, which also suffer from high rates of PTSD and suicide, saw benefits.
Winterbottom sees the need for a national policy to enable restorative prison gardens, but acknowledged it will require long-term advocacy to achieve. He pointed to “pockets of change” in California, Maryland, Pennsylvania, and Washington. He urged landscape architects to partner with prisons to develop gardens, volunteer or teach in prisons, mentor formerly incarcerated people, and advocate for reform.
“Landscape architects deal with massive social and environmental problems but we are nearly absent in popular culture. We need new vehicles to bring people in,” said Joseph James, ASLA, founder of Eponymous Practice. One promising vehicle is graphic novels, which are “the fastest growing section of the library.” These visual books are increasingly popular because they are “really approachable and accessible for struggling readers.”
Building on his love of comics, James spent his fellowship drawing and writing his own graphic novel focused on the power of place. He said places become meaningful for people when they are tied to memories and emotions. And he wanted to convey how landscape architects purposefully design places for people to connect to.
His graphic novel features teenagers who had transformed a park into a magical world, a place of adventure, with ruins and a wizard. They learn their beloved landscape is being threatened by a renovation, but then with the help of a neighborhood landscape architect become involved in the redesign process. They learn how landscape architects plan and design communities.
James is also developing a companion teacher’s guide for the graphic novel, with recommendations on how to use the book to teach earth and life sciences and design thinking. He argues that “place-based storytelling” is one of the best ways to reach young people and introduce them to landscape architecture.
And he called on landscape architects to develop strong relationships with K-12 schools and use hands-on drawing exercises in classes. His graphic novel is rooted in his work with teachers and students in Boston at the Boston Green Academy and explorations of Franklin Park.
Part 1 and Part 2 of this article were originally published on The Dirt.
