Ian McHarg introduced me to the ecological transect. It situated me uniquely in the land to which I had recently arrived as a student from India, 12,000 kilometers (7,500 miles) away. I was not just in Philadelphia; I was on a line drawn from the Appalachian Mountains across the Piedmont Plateau down to the Coastal Plain and the Atlantic Ocean. Having learned about Patrick Geddes’s Valley Section from his work in India in the 1910s, the transect resonated with me. In Geddes’s words, it was “that general slope from mountain to sea which we find everywhere in the world.”¹

The transect, however, not only situated me; it also gave the students of my class, who hailed from five different continents, a common ground. It cultivated an eye for seeing landscape that we could carry wherever we went. For many of us that meant back home.

Each week we set out to a point on the transect — the coal mines near Scranton, the boulder field in the Poconos area, the forests of the Wissahickon, the meadows near Valley Forge, the falls at Manayunk, the bogs and waterways of the Pine Barrens, and the dunes along the Jersey Shore. We dug soil pits, identified vegetation, searched for clues to what lay above and below the Earth’s surface, and in our field notes pieced together the sectional history of the land. In studio, we worked in groups, familiarizing ourselves with particular sites on the transect. Each site was an area of 65 square kilometers (25 square miles), represented by a topographical map on which we called out diverse soils, vegetation, land uses, slopes, and geology. We highlighted the lines of streams, floodplains, wetlands, and aquifers, constructing clear distinctions between features that belonged to land and those that belonged to water. Although the base maps were the same each year, using a scale of 1 centimeter to 60 meters (1 inch to 500 feet), we took particular pride in choosing our palette of colors, which extended into subtle gradients of green, blue, and brown, perhaps in an attempt to dissolve boundaries constituted by the map that did not correspond with our experience on the ground. It was inevitable, however, that the transect on the ground would recede into distant memory as the map took over as the primary site of analysis and design. After all, it allowed the layering of information from multiple disciplines onto the same geographic surface. The map is what we, as students of design and planning, were tasked to respond to. This was our experience in the 501 studio at Penn in 1989, the foundational landscape studio initiated by Ian McHarg and Narendra Juneja in one of its last years.

A decade later it was my turn to teach the foundational landscape studio.² I took students not to the transect of my student days but to a place from which they could construct their own transect. They carried measuring tapes, string, improvised spirit levels, pencils, newsprint, index cards, and charcoal. They did not carry maps to orient themselves, only the blank pages of their sketch books as they began to negotiate an unfamiliar terrain. I urged them to walk not so much to find their way, but to make their way. Some made their way from creek to ridge, others from forest to industrial remnants, yet others from wetlands to infrastructural corridors. Like route surveyors at the head of armies charged with mapping unknown terrains, they triangulated between points, connecting these points with lines of sight and measurement. They learned to be attentive to their selection of points. Some were fixed; others were ephemeral. They also learned to appreciate the lines that connected them, paying particular attention to the line between land and water. This line was fraught with controversy. It was known to shift daily and seasonally; but in a land of settlers, it was also shifted at will. They learned to appreciate wetness everywhere — in the ground, air, plants, rocks, creatures — rather than accept the presence of water as it was indicated on maps. The terrain was not exhausted in a single walk. It was walked differently each time. Once they triangulated, students sketched, sectioned, and photographed with an eye and ear tuned to meter and movement, material and horizon, continuity and rupture. Distinctions and boundaries that they had been cultured to see dissolved, and they began to articulate new relationships and limits.

Students were learning what it took to make a map. They were also learning what it took to construct a transect. It took traversing, traversing being the act of journeying across a terrain with the objective of recording findings as much as imposing a new imagination on place. In this sense, they were already designing while constructing a transect. Design was in the eyes with which they were seeing, the legs with which they were striding, the choices that they were making, the instruments with which they were measuring. They were learning what Geddes and McHarg knew all too well, that landscape and design emerge simultaneously in the act of traversing to construct a transect.

The work on the walls and on student desks drew a smile and characteristic sharp inhale from McHarg every time he walked into my 501 studio, expressing an appreciation for the graphite sections and triangulations being drafted, photographic montages being made, and plaster castings being worked. It was an appreciation that could only come from someone who knew what the transect owed to the traverse.

Today I take students in more advanced studios to places of conflict, poverty, and unfolding tragedy such as Mumbai, Bangalore, the Western Ghats of India, the deserts of Rajasthan, Jerusalem, and Tijuana. These are places on slopes from mountain to sea of their own, slopes that Geddes and McHarg believed to be “everywhere in the world.” But I am acutely conscious, as they would be, that these “transects” are products of traverses by “designers” before us — surveyors, explorers, colonizers, conquerors. Their extraordinary transgressions articulated the landscapes that have become the ordinary in these places, including what is taken for granted as natural and cultural, land and water, urban and rural. In short, they created today’s ground of conflict. Surely the least we can do in the spirit of McHarg and Geddes is to traverse these places again, to venture a new imagination aimed not necessarily at solving problems, but at keeping the transect alive as an agent of change.

Anuradha Mathur, an architect and landscape architect, is a professor in the Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. She is the author, with Dilip da Cunha, of Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain; and Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary. The two coedited Design in the Terrain of Water.

Image: Detail of a drawing for the Delaware Upper Estuary Study created by students at the University of Pennsylvania Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning, Spring 1968. Credit: The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

Notes

¹ Patrick Geddes, “The Valley Plan of Civilization,” Survey 54 (1925): 288–290.

² I taught the 501 studio, the foundational design studio in the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Pennsylvania, from 1994 to 2014, with a few breaks here and there. During this time, I had the opportunity to coteach with Katherine Gleason, Mei Wu, Dennis Playdon, and from 2003 with my partner Dilip da Cunha. I owe much to these colleagues, particularly to Dennis and Dilip, who brought structure, profound insights, and a high level of skill to 501 and taught me what it really meant to traverse.

The publication of Design with Nature forever changed the field of landscape architecture. The book, its ecological point of view, its rational method, and its author also had a significant and positive effect on my own life and career. I first heard of Ian McHarg when architecture classmates from Seattle stayed at my apartment in New York City in 1966. They were traveling to and from the Delmarva Peninsula for a landscape architecture studio at Harvard, where Ian was teaching while on sabbatical from the University of Pennsylvania. I was somewhat taken aback that they were making a plan for an entire peninsula that encompassed large portions of two states.

I first heard McHarg speak in Seattle and met him in March 1971 while teaching with Grant Jones at the University of Washington. He had come to give the John Danz lectures, which consisted largely of excerpts from Design with Nature.¹ The three lectures were titled: “Man, Planetary Disease”; “An Ecological Metaphysic”; and “Design with Nature.” He was spellbinding. His presentation of the problems arising from our ideology, politics, and habits of practice was persuasive. Like many others, I got it. Ian was at loose ends during the day between his evening lectures and social events, so he came over to the school and hung out in our studio. Up close he was charming, warm, and kind to the students, who were preparing a landscape master plan for Bainbridge Island. He was an astute critic and generous to Grant and me. A year later, I went off to Europe to work on a landscape history of southern England and to study the sociology of the public realm of Rome.

By happy coincidence, I joined the Penn faculty in 1974, at a time when the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning had a bumper crop of natural and social scientists in addition to landscape architects, architects, and planners on its faculty. The curriculum was ambitious, wide ranging, and exhausting, but exciting and remarkably productive in its research, teaching, and production of future educators and practitioners who departed to all parts of the globe, spreading the message of Design with Nature. Since then, ecological analysis — the integration of data by overlay techniques, and an interactive matrix-based method for planning and design at a range of scales as advocated by Ian and in our curriculum — has seeped into the working methods of design practices, teaching curricula in academic institutions, and public agencies around the country and the world.

Ian was twenty in 1940, and World War II had begun. His youth was put on hold while he blew up bridges as a commando behind enemy lines. Afterward, he was part of a generation that wanted to fix things, to not make the mistakes of previous generations.

Marxist and Freudian thought, which had been influential in intellectual endeavors for several decades before the war, were displaced by a new perspective: structuralism, which provided meaning and methods in disciplines ranging from linguistics and literature to philosophy and ecology, even economics and design, through the 1950s and 1960s. The intellectual, academic, and professional world of the postwar years was imbued with instrumental systems thinking and a belief that reason and rational methods must be applied regardless of topic and field. McHarg used his graduate study at Harvard to give himself a crash course in science, sociology, and urban planning theory. He was determined to develop a landscape planning method and practice that was objective, not subjective; that was as rational and replicable as the hard sciences, not intuitive and willful — “not like the design of ladies’ hats,” as he would bellow. Step by step he developed the curriculum at Penn with the aid of research money that allowed him and his colleagues to consider the problem of human habitation and the most fundamental issues of community planning and design at a scale from neighborhood to physiographic region.

In concert with a number of natural scientists who had become public figures, McHarg used national television to advocate for environmental planning. There is no question that his rhetoric, performance, and publications had considerable influence on the creation and early years of the Environmental Protection Agency and the Clean Water and Clean Air Acts of the Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon administrations in the United States. The problems he raised and attempted to address — issues related to health, safety, settlement, resources, ecology, and resilience — are still the most important problems we face, and seem even clearer and more desperate today than when he was at his most strident.

Occasionally people ask me what the department was like, or suggest to me that they think McHarg was unsympathetic to design. It is simply not true. Others have speculated that Bob Hanna, Carol Franklin, other design practitioners, and I were something of a design antidote to the so-called method. In fact, with Ian’s support and conviction we were trying to demonstrate that science and ecology were not antithetical to design, but underpinned it when well done — that we were actually part of the follow-through.

He sought to clarify this in a book extending his ideas to human ecology, but the planned “Design for Man” volume never happened, in part because of the intractable difficulties inherent in social science. In the final analysis, landscape architecture is not a science. Like architecture, it is a useful art, one that employs the findings and knowledge of science along with knowledge of art, craft, design, and construction to address human needs in social environments. We knew that, and we discussed ad nauseam how our students at a certain point had to strap all of their analysis to their backs like a parachute and jump, hoping for a soft landing, not a crash. It informed their choices as ethical professionals, regarding costs, safety, health, and environmental outcomes. McHarg’s ideas were for guidance and to be used as a checklist for responsibility, not a set of rules to limit imagination, and as a constraint on foolishness and ignorance, not
on creation.

Interestingly, I found that the overlay method of examination, comparison, and interaction between various factors and topics — natural, social, historical, theoretical — could be as stimulating and useful in building up and creating a scheme through additive considerations as it was in digging through history and natural factors to produce suitability matrices. In over two dozen projects with Peter Eisenman, I explored using overlays of information in a forward-projecting manner in an effort to find alternative design structures, formal and artistic solutions to complex planning and design problems. Examples of my built and unbuilt work range from the Wexner Center at The Ohio State University and Rebstock Park in Frankfurt, Germany, to the City of Culture at Santiago de Compostela in Spain. After many somewhat experimental projects, I also came to find natural processes and ecology to be powerful metaphors that have been enormously helpful and inspirational in my work. Several of my most recent projects have derived from careful considerations and analysis of ecological history to produce both an understanding of a place and situation and complex and responsive physical designs. The recently completed University of Washington north campus residential community in Seattle, Apple Park in Cupertino, California, and OLIN’s current and ongoing Los Angeles River Master Plan and its pilot projects exemplify this approach.

In the past two decades a number of critiques have been leveled at McHarg and Design with Nature that are misplaced and often as ill-informed as the denigration of Frederick Law Olmsted and his parks by a recent generation of professionals. Most of the criticism of McHarg, however, has focused on the means, methods, and data in the work, arguing that they are outdated and simplistic. There is some truth in this, for structural systems of thought are inherently political and moralistic; they inevitably raise ethical issues, whether in science, the humanities, or the professions. Debates within the department and in his own office over planning and design often centered on social rather than biological issues, particularly fears of determinism derived from particular methods of responding to data, the data themselves, the costs and benefits resulting from the relative weight assigned to various factors, and the role of imagination, politics, and choice in human decisions. Unquestionably, the technologies used for remote sensing, mapping, and digital processes and computation have become more sophisticated. In the social sciences, likewise, quantitative methods have evolved, as have concerns for complex and vexed human relationships, economics, and all manner of groups not considered fifty years ago. Nevertheless, Ian’s fundamental insight and approach, despite his method — imperfect as all forms of research inevitably are — frames landscape and regional planning today. For all the developments in geographic information systems, no one has shown that he was working on the wrong problems, or that those problems are not still vitally important. As well, his critics have underestimated Ian’s responsibility for creating the professional context in which landscape architects and planners now operate; today’s practitioners are focused on similar concerns and are using the technology that he promoted and encouraged.

Ian was a force who changed our perspective forever, but also a deeply human and contradictory person. Difficult as he could be at times, he was extremely loyal and devoted to friends and family and fiercely proud and protective of his faculty, quarreling and making up with them socially and privately, in reviews and in faculty meetings — all in an endless effort to improve our work, our lives, and the planet. One of my fondest memories is of him standing atop a log, backlit in the blazing sun, wearing pajama bottoms and holding a cigarette in one hand and a hose in the other, watering the giant kitchen garden on his farm in Marshallton, Chester County, Pennsylvania. Sheep, pigs, and Highland cattle wandered about in the background as he drenched the nature, and that only through ecological understanding and constructive action could we save ourselves and have a good life.

Laurie Olin is one of the most renowned landscape architects practicing today. From vision to realization, he has guided many of OLIN’s signature projects, including the Washington Monument grounds in Washington, DC, Bryant Park in New York City, and the Getty Center in Los Angeles. He is emeritus professor of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania and former chair of the Department of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University.

Notes

¹ Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Natural History Press, 1969).

The projects featured in this article are excerpted from Design with Nature Now. They were selected for the book because each in some way narrows the gap between theory and practice and opens up a wider horizon for the future of landscape architecture.

Arriving at the full set of 25 projects for the book involved a long, collaborative process. We began by asking colleagues from around the world to nominate projects that they thought best exemplified and extended McHarg’s design philosophy and method. The nomination process resulted in a list of over 80 projects, and after much discussion, we agreed on the final 25.

The projects are organized into five themes: Big Wilds, Rising Tides, Fresh Waters, Toxic Lands, and Urban Futures, each of which is represented here. Although these themes cover a lot of territory, it will be obvious to readers that the collection does not represent all the types of work the professions of planning and landscape architecture do. We have included projects that engage large complex sites and pressing socioecological issues, and that variously translate into reality what could be referred to as a McHargian ethos of stewardship.

It must be said, however, that some projects show the limitations of the discipline’s ability to effect change at the scale that is needed; the projects improve the social and ecological function locally, but may also be part and parcel of development patterns and infrastructural projects that are environmentally degrading at other scales. We wish the full collection comprised a greater diversity of projects from a greater diversity of places. Much as the collection identifies gaps in the thematic areas engaged by contemporary practice, so too there are glaring gaps in the geography of contemporary practice. In short, the project selection is imperfect, but we have found, and hope the reader will also find, that the collection is a good place to begin.

Big Wilds: Malpai Borderlands, Arizona and New Mexico, USA

In the boot of New Mexico and the southeastern tip of Arizona along the U.S.–Mexico border, there is a 3,238-square-kilometer (1,250-square-mile) plot of land, almost entirely unbroken by highways or subdivisions. The Malpai Borderlands harbors an estimated 4,000 species of plants, 104 species of mammals, 327 species of birds, 136 species of reptiles and amphibians, and the greatest diversity of bee species in the world. In this biodiverse landscape, 53 percent of the area is privately owned and 47 percent is public — a split that has led to tensions among government agencies, cattle ranchers, and environmentalists.

What sets the Malpai Borderlands apart from other stories of conflict in conservation is how these tensions have largely been overcome in order to conserve the landscape’s biological and cultural identity. Fewer than one hundred families use this expansive land to graze their livestock. Despite being long loathed by environmentalists, these cattle ranching families have led the charge to keep the land from subdivision and development.

In the early 1990s, the suppression of wildfire caused the land to revert to shrubland dominated by the invasive mesquite tree. This brushlike tree is bad for grazing and highly flammable, serving as added fuel for forest fires, which can further denude the land. Fire has historically kept the brush at bay, and when a fire broke out on July 2, 1991, ranchers pleaded with the local authorities to let it burn. They did not listen. In response, ranchers committed to stewardship of the landscape formed the Malpai Borderlands Group, which has succeeded in protecting almost 80,000 acres from development.

The success of the Malpai Borderlands Group can be credited both to their reliance on science to help manage the Malpai and to their commitment to educating others about how grazing and conservation can coexist. The first scientist on the board, Ray Turner, specialized in comparative photography, a type of ecological study that traces old photographs to their origin and takes a new picture in the same location. The floral species in the photographs are then compared in order to paint a picture of the area’s ecological change. Turner and subsequent scientists have concluded, controversially, that a certain level of ranching can contribute to preserving the land’s biodiversity.

Project credits: The Malpai Borderlands Group is a nonprofit organization comprising land owners whose mission is to manage the ecosystem of nearly 404,685 hectares (1 million acres) of relatively unfragmented landscape. See www.malpaiborderlandsgroup.org/.

Rising Tides: 2050 — An Energetic Odyssey, North Sea, The Netherlands 

2050 — An Energetic Odyssey, an immersive installation consisting primarily of a thirteen-minute video with maps, diagrams, and drawing, asks the question: What would it look like if the Netherlands and its neighbors were to switch to renewable energy production at a large enough scale to meet the Paris 2015 carbon emissions goals? 2050 — An Energetic Odyssey (the Odyssey) is not a plan; it is a narrative that recasts the landscape architect as provocateur. It uses techniques of data visualization to make complicated issues understandable to a broad, policy-oriented constituency.

The Odyssey envisions 25,000 wind turbines with a net coverage of 57,000 square kilometers (22,000 square miles) that would enable 75 percent of the North Sea countries’ current energy to be converted to renewable energy by 2050. Most of these turbines would be clustered on wind farms off the coastline of the North Sea countries. There is, however, one notable exception: a proposed cluster of wind farms on Dogger Bank, an ecologically vital sandbank submerged more than 50 meters (approximately 55 yards) below the water’s surface in the middle of the North Sea. To produce the necessary energy, a construction island and massive cluster of wind farms would need to be placed on Dogger Bank.

Therefore, the proposed construction method would minimize impacts on sea mammal navigation and avoid conflict with the migratory pathways of birds. The zone closest to the coast, which birds use for orientation, would be left untouched wherever possible, and wind turbines could be temporarily taken out of operation if sensors detected birds approaching. In addition, the wind farm locations could be combined with new marine reserves. Finally, the visual impact of the windfarms would be mitigated by siting the farms more than 19 kilometers (12 miles) out from the coast so that the Earth’s curvature would reduce visibility.

Project credits: Commissioned by the International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam (IABR) in the context of IABR — 2016 — THE NEXT ECONOMY. Concept: Maarten Hajer and Dirk Sijmons. Realized by: Tungstenpro, H+N+S Landscape Architects, and Ecofys in partnership with the Ministry of Economic Affairs of the Kingdom of The Netherlands, Shell, Port of Rotterdam, and Van Oord.

Fresh Waters: Weishan Wetland Park, Jining, China

The first phase of the Weishan Wetland Park in the town of Jining in China’s Shandong Province was completed in 2013. The impetus for this 39-square-kilometer (15-square-mile) park was the adjacent development of a new urban center just south of the existing city of Weishan, near the southeastern edge of the expansive Nansi Lake (also called Weishan Lake). This new southern town will eventually have 50,000 residents in an area that was previously agricultural. The Weishan Wetland Park will filter polluted water from the future development, and it is hoped that it will be the centerpiece of a larger program of nature-based tourism in the region. The proximity to Nansi Lake, one of the country’s largest and most polluted lakes, makes the park’s purification function especially important, as the lake is a part of China’s ambitious, though ecologically and socially disruptive, South-North Water Diversion Project, which redirects fresh water from the Yangtze River in the south to the more arid Yellow River basin in the north.

The master plan is structured around the creation of five zones: core protection, natural restoration, limited human activity, development, and a village community. Various types of wetland were restored or created from scratch, with the intention of attracting diverse species of waterfowl and enticing tourists to the park. There is some access to the park by vehicle, but much of the sightseeing can be done only on elevated pedestrian walkways built with local recycled wood and steel.

Although the water filtration and purification techniques used are not novel in the field of landscape architecture, their scale and integration into the new town mark a significant shift in thinking about water, both within the Shandong Province and in China as a whole. As of 2015, 1.3 million hectares (3.2 million acres) of new wetland park had been created and 130,000 hectares (321,000 acres) of wetland had been restored throughout the province.

China is in the process of rethinking its water infrastructure in the face of rapid urbanization and climate change. The national government’s renowned “sponge cities” initiative in 2015 funded the development of ponds, filtration pools, and permeable roads and public spaces in sixteen cities to improve flood and drought resilience.

Project credits: Client/Owner: Wei Shan Wetland Investment Co. Ltd. Photography: AECOM. AECOM team: Qindong Liang, Lian Tao, Yan Hu, Heng Ju, Yi Lee, Jin Zhou, Enrique Mateo, Xiaodan Daisy Liu, JiRong Gu, Li Zoe Zhang, YinYan Wang, Yan Lucy Jin, Kun Wu, Qijie Huang, Jing Wang, Ming Jiang, Danhua Zhang, Junjun Xu, Shouling Chen, Gufeng Zhao, Benjamin Fisher, FanYe Wang, Shuiming Rao, Changxia Li, Donald Johnson, Agnes Soh. Contractor: Shanghai Machinery Complete Equipment (Group) Co., Ltd. Wetland consultant: Shandong Environmental Protection Science Design and Research Institute. Sculpture consultant: UAP.

Toxic Lands: Freshkills Park, New York, USA

The general public’s negative view of marshland as wasteland in the 1940s helped determine the location of landfills throughout New York City. Fresh Kills landfill is one example. It was opened in 1948 as a temporary landfill on Staten Island on the banks of the Fresh Kills estuary. Robert Moses, a key figure in the city’s planning, promoted the landfill at Fresh Kills, hoping to later reclaim its marshland for real estate development and to build an expressway connecting Staten Island to New Jersey and Brooklyn.

Despite strong opposition, the Fresh Kills landfill remained, becoming permanent in 1953. At its peak in the 1980s, the landfill received up to 29,000 tons of refuse daily, and averaged 2.8 million tons annually over its lifespan. Over time, its four garbage mounds grew from a few feet above sea level to 69 meters (225 feet) tall. Until its closure in 2001, Fresh Kills reigned as the largest landfill in the world.

From 2003 to 2006, the design firm James Corner Field Operations and its consultants worked to create a master plan for the site. Capping a landfill and converting it to public open space is hardly a new practice, but creating a viable ecology in such a hostile location requires innovation and experimentation. First the landfill was capped and the infrastructure for methane extraction was set in place. Then, since importing good topsoil to cover the vast landfill (which was nearly three times the size of Central Park) was not feasible, the designers developed methods of in situ soil development through a highly curated process of plant succession. Various planting strategies have been tried, monitored, and adjusted.

The creation of Freshkills Park is a work in progress and is not expected to be completed until 2036. Once built, the new park will enlarge the existing 1,214-hectare (3,000-acre) Staten Island Greenbelt and connect it to the William T. David Wildlife Refuge, offering the community a full range of recreational activities.

Project credits: Project lead, landscape architecture, urban design: James Corner Field Operations. Consultant team: AKRF; Applied Ecological Services; Arup; Biohabitats, Inc.; BKSK Architects; Brandston Partnership Inc.; Jacobs (previously CH2M Hill); Daniel Frankfurt; Faithful + Gould; Geosyntec; HAKS; Hamilton, Rabinovize & Alschuler; Langan; L’Observatoire International; Philip Habit and Associates; Project Projects; Rogers Surveying; Sage & Coombe Architects; Richard Lynch (ecologist); and Sanna & Loccisano Architects (expediters).

Urban Futures: Medellín, Colombia

The city of Medellín suffers from extreme inequality that is reflected in its housing types and the broader built environment within the city’s valley section. The wealthy tend to live in central, well-serviced enclaves, while the poor live on peripheral steep slopes in self-constructed settlements. Since 2003, the city has undergone an internationally recognized urban transformation, coinciding with a restoration of peace in what was once the most dangerous city in the world.

In 2004, Medellín began rapidly linking what it identified as “nodes of development” in some of the city’s poorest neighborhoods — libraries, schools, and public spaces — to public transportation. It built gondolas, escalators, and bridges over steep ravines to link those neighborhoods to the city’s metropolitan transit system. Public space projects have also been built to bring more life to the channelized river. The Medellín River Parks Master Plan is a linear sequence of public spaces along the river that bisects the city and is where the oldest formal elements of the city are located. The construction of the first phase of the park required a section of the highway to be buried beneath the new park, and bridges have been built across the river, connecting the two parts of what had been a divided city.

These projects are an outgrowth of a philosophical and practical shift in planning first described in the city’s Plan de Ordenamiento Territorial of 1998, a document that built on existing United Nations efforts to provide basic services to the informal communities, or comunas, on the urban periphery. This document is still used and was updated in 2017, with an added focus on sustainability, walkability, accessibility, and the revitalization of the urban core. Practically and symbolically, the poorest residents were able to connect to the city and to the civility and services it promises its citizens.

Though Medellín has successfully provided services to informal settlements on its periphery, the question of how informal settlements arise in the first place and whether their growth can be planned is also relevant to the millions of people expected to migrate to rapidly urbanizing cities in this century. A significant planning document that addresses this larger issue is the recently completed BIO 2030 Plan — a strategic plan to structure future growth through cooperation among the ten municipalities of the Aburrá Valley — produced by governmental bodies in collaboration with Urbam, the Center for Urban and Environmental Studies at EAFIT University in Medellín, an organization led by Alejandro Echeverri. This comprehensive plan documents the geology, hydrology, ecology, and fragmentation of the entire valley and, using these layers as a base, provides detailed designs for different developments. Similarly, professors of landscape architecture and urban design David Gouverneur and Christian Werthmann, among others, are developing projects with students related to the social, ecological, and political challenges of designing informal settlements. Gouverneur’s Informal Armature approach offers a framework for self-constructed neighborhoods, prior to the occupation of the land, and Werthmann’s team, building on the work of Urbam EAFIT, offers detailed construction techniques to minimize risks from earthquakes and landslides and maximize access to basic infrastructure.

Project credits: Plan Director Medellín, Valle de Aburrá. Un sueño que juntos podemos alcanzar. Medellín: Alcaldía de Medellín, Área Metropolitana del Valle de Aburrá and Urbam EAFIT, www.eafit.edu.co/centros/urbam/articulos-publicaciones/SiteAssets/Paginas/bio-2030-publicacion/urbameafit2011%20bio2030.pdf. Medellín River Parks: Architectural design: Sebastián Monsalve, Juan David Hoyos. Design team: Osman Marín, Luis Alejandro Jiménez, Andrés Santiago Fajardo, Sebastián González, Juan Diego Martínez, Maria Clara Trujillo, Alejandro Vargas, Carolina Zuluaga, Daniel Zuluaga, Sara París, Daniel Beltrán,Daniel Felipe Zuluaga, David Castaneda, Alejandro López, David Mesa, Andrés Velásquez, Juan Camilo Solís, Melissa Ortega, D. David Hernández del Valle. Landscape design: Nicolás Hermelín. Photography: Alejandro Arango Escobar, Sebastián González Bolívar. Engineering team: Consorcio EDL. Builder team: Guinovart Obras y Servicios Hispania S.A. Grupo OHL Construcción. Construction supervision team: El Consorcio integral—Interdisenos. Design audit team: Bateman Ingeniería S.A. Medellín’s town hall: Aníbal Gaviria. Director of Administrative Department of Planeación de Medellín: Jorge Alberto Pérez Jaramillo. Management of Medellín River Parks: Antonio Vargas del Valle.

Shifting Ground / Medellín Project team: Institute of Landscape Architecture, Leibniz Universität; Hannover: Christian Werthmann, Joseph Claghorn, Nicholas Bonard, Florian Depenbrock, Mariam Farhat; Centro de Estudios Urbanos y Ambientales (Urbam) / LA Universidad EAFIT (Escuela de Administración, Finanzas e Instituto Tecnológico): Alejandro Echeverri, Francesco María Orsini, Juan Sebastian Bustamante Fernández, Ana Elvira Vélez Villa, Isabel Basombrío, Diana Marcela Rincón Buitrago, Juan Pablo Ospina, Anna Manea, Daniela Duque, Ángela Duque, Simón Abad, Lina Rojas, Maya Ward-Karet, Santiago Orbea Cevallos; Harvard Graduate School of Design: Aisling O’Carroll, Conor O’Shea. Contracting authority: Municipal Planning Authority of the City of Medellín. Cooperation partners: Fundacíon CIPAV, Fundación Sumapaz, Aníbal Gaviria Correa, Jorge Pérez Jaramillo, Juan Manuel Patino M., Paola Andrea López P., Sergio Mario Jaramillo V., David Emilio Restrepo C., Mario Flores, John Cuartas, María Alejandra Rodríguez N. Participating project specialist: Eva Hacker, soil bioengineering; Marco Gamboa, geology; Michel Hermelin, geology; Iván Rendon, sociology; Tatiana Zuluaga, urban planning. Duration: 2011–today.

Photos in order of appearance. 

View of the boardwalk through the Weishan Wetland Park. Credit: AECOM. 

Bill McDonald drives in cattle to a corral for branding on the Sycamore Ranch. Credit: Blake Gordon. 

The Princess Amalia offshore wind farm. The wind farm consists of sixty wind turbines and is located in block Q7 of the Dutch continental shelf, 23 kilometers (14 miles) from shore. Credit: Siebe Swart, 2013. 

Tiering and diverse plantings create seasonal interest and opportunities for outdoor science education. Credit: AECOM. 

Freshkills Park illustrative plan. Credit: James Corner Field Operations.

Aerial view of the first phase of the Medellín River Parks, constructed in 2016. Credit: Alejandro Arango Escobar. 

The following is an excerpt from a longer essay in Design with Nature Now. Its title refers to the opening line of Ian McHarg’s speech at the first Earth Day in 1970.

As a native of Clydebank, Scotland, Ian McHarg (1920–2001) grew up on the shadowy fringes of the Industrial Revolution. His father, John Lennox McHarg, started his professional and married life with the promise of upward mobility as a manager in a manufacturing firm. Both of his grandfathers were carters who labored transporting whiskey kegs and soft goods behind teams of Clydesdale horses. The economic depression of the 1930s took its toll on family and city alike. The time McHarg spent alongside his mother, Harriet Bain, tending the family garden—their hands working the soil together—must have awakened his curiosity about nature and the larger landscape. Young Ian’s hikes from the urban grit of Glasgow to the idyllic countryside of the Kilpatrick Hills formed enduring counterpoints in his adolescent development.¹

At the age of sixteen, McHarg resolved to be a landscape architect and dropped out of high school to formally apprentice with Donald Wintersgill, head of design and construction operations for Austin and McAlsan, Ltd., the leading nursery and seed merchants in Scotland. Service in the British Army during World War II (1938–1946), including bloody fighting during the invasion of Italy, delayed the completion of his training. However, it was in these years that a parochial, “gangling . . . hobbledehoy” developed a strong sense of self-confidence and courage.² He had also marched through the Roman ruins in Carthage, Paestum, Herculaneum, Pompeii, Rome, and Athens, as well as the length of Greece, and returned to Scotland a worldly man.

After the war, McHarg resumed his training at Harvard University, completing a bachelor’s degree before receiving master’s degrees in landscape architecture and city planning. He supplemented his required courses with classes in government and economics, which had a lasting impact on his thinking. At Harvard, McHarg recalled, modern architecture was “a crusade . . . a religion. We were saved; therefore, we must save the world.”³ He had returned to Scotland in the summer of 1950 with the conviction of a reformer, but a life-threatening bout with tuberculosis diminished his professional prospects. Following four years in the Scottish Civil Service engaged in planning postwar housing and towns, McHarg packed up and sailed for America.

The Philadelphia in which McHarg arrived in early September 1954 was thinking big about the future. Postwar reformers had mounted the Better Philadelphia Exhibition in the fall of 1947 to introduce the virtues of urban and regional planning through a series of dazzling and engaging displays installed on two floors of the city’s Gimbels department store. New ideas for revitalizing the city took a more sensitive approach to urban renewal, incorporating historic fabric and human scale. Architectural Forum called this approach “the Philadelphia cure,” a version of clearing slums with “penicillin, not surgery” that featured works by architect Louis Kahn to illustrate recent developments.⁴ Three hundred thousand citizens visited the exhibition, and the organizers’ efforts came to fruition in the reform administrations of Mayors Joseph Clark and Richardson Dilworth. Both politicians supported Edmund Bacon, who served as executive director of the Philadelphia City Planning Commission (PCPC) from 1949 to 1970. Under his leadership, Philadelphia was highly regarded for its imaginative city planning, and Bacon’s close ties to architects suggested that the field would have an important role to play in the city’s future. G. Holmes Perkins, who was chair of the PCPC and dean at the University of Pennsylvania’s School of Fine Arts, helped to establish this atmosphere of accomplishment.⁵

Meanwhile at Penn, Perkins was working to shed the vestiges of Beaux Arts formality, but not all of its concern for the City Beautiful. The school was an energetic environment, committed to the city, with a dynamic faculty in architecture and city planning. Broadly understood, the faculty coalesced around the notion that a building, in its design, should be understood as an element integral to a larger context and that the role of the designer was, in part, to interpret how a building should relate to and grow the “patterns” around it. . . . 

As concern over cities shaped funding priorities in the 1950s, alarm over environmental degradation—signaled by Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring—sharpened priorities in the mid-1960s. President John F. Kennedy’s “New Frontier” and President Lyndon B. Johnson’s call for “a new conservation” catalyzed efforts at the national level. . . . Ecology became McHarg’s central focus, a lens through which a comprehensive assessment and evaluation of the environment became possible. Studio problems, as well as his professional commissions, were the primary vehicles for testing ideas and for developing the method and techniques needed to advance the ecological approach to landscape architecture. The great river basins of the Potomac and the Delaware became ideal regions for study; their boundaries were shaped by ecological forces rather than political divisions. By 1966, McHarg had successfully assembled a team of ecologists, scientists, environmental lawyers, and designers . . . and was actively shaping an expansive agenda.⁶

William Whitaker is curator of the Architectural Archives at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. He is coauthor (with George Marcus) of The Houses of Louis I. Kahn and recipient of the 2014 Literary Award of the Athenaeum of Philadelphia.

Photograph: Ian McHarg in Portugal, July 1967. Credit: Pauline McHarg, Ian and Carol McHarg Collection, Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

Notes

¹ For McHarg’s account of his youth and education, see Ian L. McHarg, Design with Nature (Garden City, NY: Doubleday/Natural History Press, 1969); and Ian L. McHarg, A Quest for Life (New York: John Wiley, 1996). The official birth registration for McHarg lists his given names as “John Lennox,” after his father. His family must have begun using the Gaelic variation “Ian” early on. Extract of an entry from the Register of Births in Scotland, obtained by author from the General Register Office of Scotland, August 2018.

² McHarg, Quest for Life, 63–64.

³ Ibid., 77.

⁴ “The Philadelphia Cure: Clearing Slums with Penicillin, not Surgery,” Architectural Forum 96, no. 4 (April 1952): 112–119.

⁵ Thomas Hine, “[Philadelphia] Influence in Architecture on the Decline,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 7, 1980, M1–2.

⁶ Ian L. McHarg, “An Ecological Method for Landscape Architecture,” Landscape Architecture 57, no. 2 (January 1967): 105–107.

In 1969, Ian L. McHarg, professor of planning and landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania, published a manifesto titled Design with Nature. Translated into Chinese, French, Italian, Japanese, and Spanish, and still in print to this day, it is arguably the most important book to come out of the design professions in the 20th century. Design with Nature not only captured the zeitgeist of the late 1960s by decrying modern civilization’s—or at least North America’s—sprawling urbanism and environmental degradation; it went further than most by proposing a practical method for doing something about it.

Using rudimentary digital tools and painstaking analog drawings, with his students and colleagues at Penn, McHarg developed a method of overlaying maps of the biophysical characteristics of a given place to make decisions about future land use. Part science and part common sense, the method provided an empirical, rational, and ostensibly objective basis for deciding which land was most suitable for which purpose—for example, farms on the good soil here, forest upland from water supply there, and of course, housing outside of flood zones and behind coastal dunes.

Throughout history, cultures have either withered or flourished as a result of how they live with land and water, or per McHarg, how they designed with nature. For cultures attuned through experience to the specific conditions of their landscapes, designing with nature becomes a form of lore. In this sense McHarg’s design philosophy is nothing new. But his advocacy of ecology as the basis for design and its application to the modern city was. McHarg’s great achievement, then, was to create a simple, universal method for assessing and then incorporating environmental science into the decision making processes of modern development. When applied well, his method offered a way to both guide and substantiate design decisions, especially those that limited the scope and scale of otherwise sprawling development.

However, Design with Nature is more than a land use manual. It soars from geology to cosmology, it cuts from Christianity to Buddhism, and it interleafs speculations on entropy and evolution to arrive at a unifying theory of design. For McHarg, to design with nature meant for humanity to intentionally and benignly fit itself to the environment. Drawing on the most advanced ecological science of his time, this idea of fitness flowed from a belief that cultural and natural systems could coexist harmoniously, in balance, if each part were in its proper place. For him, this was not just biological determinism at work; it was the highest of arts.

McHarg’s vision, like that of his mentor the great polymath Lewis Mumford and Patrick Geddes before him, was that by living with rather than against the more powerful forces and flows of the natural world, humanity would gain a biocentric sense of place; and this, in the deepest sense, would replace the Abrahamic theologies and capitalist culture of consumption he held responsible for the environmental crises of the 1960s.

For McHarg, Western culture’s greatest promise was a synthesis of the sciences and the arts that had yet to be applied to how we dwell on the land, and it was the profession of landscape architecture that could steward society through this evolutionary process. To this day, at least in theory if not in practice, this remains the field’s primary raison d’être.

On the occasion of the 50th anniversary of the publication of Design with Nature, with this new book and its associated exhibitions and conference, we ask what might be meant by design(ing) with nature now? As faculty at the school to which McHarg devoted his life, we feel a particular responsibility to explore these questions at this time and from this place. While McHarg’s prescience warrants celebration, our intention in marking the 50th anniversary of his magnum opus is not hagiographic. Rather, we view our responsibility, and the purpose of this volume, as one of constructive and critical discourse—to ask how the ethos of designing with nature has evolved over the past half-century, and to speculate on its prospects over the next fifty years.

By making recourse to Nature as a higher authority on the one hand and reducing it to interpretation through data-driven positivism on the other, McHarg was always going to get into philosophical trouble and attract criticism. Indeed, much of what has happened in landscape architecture over the past fifty years can be read as either an endorsement or a critique of his philosophy and method. Had McHarg titled his book Design with Landscape instead of Design with Nature, and had he offered caveats about the limits of his method to inform human creativity and ingenuity, then accusations of hubris and artlessness that were periodically leveled at him could have been largely avoided. But in his rush to change the field—and indeed to change the world—McHarg overlooked some of those critical details.

That McHarg inspired debate is, however, no small part of his enduring significance. Whereas these debates once may have threatened to split the profession between “the designers” and “the planners,” we can now see a profession that has intellectually matured around these tensions. We see a profession that is diversified in its practices but united in its sense of ecological and artistic purpose. We see a profession equipped with a range of design techniques that build on, rather than obviate, their foundation in the McHargian method of landscape suitability analysis described earlier. And yes, we also still see the rift between McHarg’s grandiloquence and daily practice—a rift that to some extent must always exist between the ideal and the real. Without gaps between the theory and practice of designing with nature, there would be nowhere for landscape architecture to grow or evolve. . . .

As anyone who knew him or even attended just one of his lectures will attest, McHarg was an unforgettable character, a man of passion and erudition in equal measure. Ian McHarg died in 2001, his life’s work completed well before the expressions “climate change” and “the Anthropocene” became central societal concerns. The environmental reality these terms now signify, the debates and anxieties they engender, and the increasing calls for climate action make McHarg’s prophetic injunction to design with nature more pertinent than ever. Paul Crutzen, the atmospheric scientist usually credited with first declaring this to be the epoch of the Anthropocene, has described its advent as beginning with the Industrial Revolution and then radically accelerating after 1945. In 2011, along with his colleagues Will Steffen and John McNeill, Crutzen argued that we should begin moving into a new period in which we “steward the earth.”¹ This of course was the essential message of Design with Nature some fifty years earlier, and in this regard the profession of landscape architecture has been at the vanguard of a broader cultural revolution that now comes into its own in the context of the Anthropocene. This is not to say, however, that the profession has fulfilled its McHargian mandate of leading global environmental stewardship. Such a claim would be absurd. More to the point, it could hardly be argued that the world is environmentally better off now than it was when Design with Nature was first published. On the contrary, the dawn of the Anthropocene signals the opposite. We are plunging, headlong, into an epoch of global environmental change at an unprecedented scale and pace. How we learn to live with that change is the central challenge for the next half-century of design. In the work we have collected here there are real clues as to how, through design, we can better tune our cities and their infrastructure to the forces and flows of the Earth system. The fact that such projects are the exception and not the rule only underscores their importance as landmarks of a more widespread historical change yet to come.

The 21st century is marked by the fact that humanity has directly or indirectly modified every habitat on the planet, and much of it deleteriously so. With the unintended consequences of global warming, species extinction, and resource depletion, it is now possible that our extraordinary success as a species could also become our demise. Our recognition of this “tragedy of the commons” is what distinguishes us from other species that have also flourished in the course of evolutionary history. To not only know this, but to act on that knowledge in a precautionary way, is to intentionally design environments so that they are more life-giving and more life-sustaining, for all forms of life. This is not a punitive or messianic project; it is a political and above all a creative project, one that transcends geographies, economies, and the forces of globalization that have overwhelmed and divided the planet—between developed and developing, rich and poor. That is the enduring and inspiring meaning of Design with Nature, and it is to that end that this new book is dedicated.

Richard Weller and Karen M’Closkey are professors of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design. Frederick Steiner is dean and Paley professor at the school; Steiner and Weller are also co-executive directors of the school’s Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology, where Billy Fleming serves as the Wilks Family Director.

Image: Cover of Design with Nature, 1969. Credit: Doubleday/Natural History Press, American Museum of Natural History.

Notes

¹ Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen, and John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?,” AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 38, no. 8 (2011): 614–621.

“Man is an epidemic, destroying the environment upon which [he] depends and threatening his own extinction.”

Addressing a throng of 30,000 people in Philadelphia’s Fairmount Park at the first Earth Day demonstration in 1970, landscape architect and author Ian McHarg minced no words. His was not a feel-good speech; in addition to the sobering assessment above, he also informed the crowd, “You’ve got no future.”

Those words, though dark, were intended to help his listeners see the light. McHarg believed humanity was mired in a plight of our own creation, but not an intractable one—and he had solutions to offer. Exactly one year earlier, he had held in his hands the first bound copy of his book Design with Nature, a nearly 200-page treatise in which he called for a new way of thinking about the relationship between people, the built environment, and the land we occupy. The book’s first print run sold out. So would a second. It was evident by the time he delivered that Earth Day speech that a hunger existed for the ideas he was putting forth. In fact, his philosophy would ultimately change the way an entire generation of planners, architects, and designers thought about the relationship between people and place. His book, along with the work of other leading thinkers like Jane Jacobs, helped change the way many of our cities look and function, especially in the United States. It still tops lists of influential design and planning publications.

Fifty years ago, Design with Nature helped launch the field of ecological planning—and helped us pivot from a late 20th-century society that viewed cities as a necessary evil to one that increasingly sees them as attractive, liveable places that just might hold the key to our salvation as a species. Today, the Lincoln Institute is delighted to partner with McHarg’s successors at the Stuart Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania on the follow-up volume excerpted in this issue, Design with Nature Now. Edited by Richard Weller, Karen M’Closkey, Billy Fleming, and Frederick Steiner, the new book offers an unprecedented collection of thoughtful tributes to McHarg, exemplary projects that reflect his tenets, and forthright assessments of how far we’ve come—and how far we’ve yet to travel.

Taken together, the book (forthcoming in October) and an eponymous international exhibition and conference, both hosted at Penn in 2019, remind us of the urgency that led McHarg to write his seminal work—and the unavoidable fact that, in many ways, that urgency has only increased. With urbanization occurring rapidly—some two billion more people are expected to live in the world’s cities by 2050—and climate change demanding that we rethink nearly everything about where and how we live, McHarg’s ideas are more apt than ever.

For the Lincoln Institute, introducing a new generation to his work is part of a broader effort to elevate the critical role of land as a solution to our most pressing economic, social, and environmental challenges. We do this through publications like this book, and through our work on the ground in places like the U.S. Rust Belt, where we bring together small legacy cities to think about innovative revitalization strategies; in China, where we support a government-led effort to implement stormwater-absorbing sponge cities; and in Latin America, where we promote new teaching tools to engage planners in the work of improving urban conditions.

This kind of work is important everywhere, but especially in the developing world, where urban growth is accelerating and weakly governed. A shift toward quality growth is beginning to happen; we can support that shift by embracing and spreading McHarg’s principles. To contradict his warning that society has no future, we must continue the work of getting urbanization right. That means ensuring safe neighborhoods and strong economies, yes, but it also means replacing impervious pavement with bioswales and redesigning streetscapes at the human scale; implementing green and blue infrastructure where gray infrastructure once reigned; and converting energy-intensive buildings into sustainable structures that are healthier places to live and work. These are not glamorous projects, but neither are they extraneous; they are fundamental to our ability to redesign and rebuild a functioning society for ourselves that does not, in the words of McHarg, “threaten our own extinction.”

Is humanity indeed an epidemic bent on destroying our environment and ultimately ourselves, or can we find and apply a cure? At the Lincoln Institute, the Stuart Weitzman School of Design, and other organizations dedicated to studying the connections between people and place, we know that tools ranging from thoughtful land use policy to innovative design can contribute to a positive prognosis. But the time for action is now. We can’t change the past, but we can embrace the vision of McHarg and his many successors in the field of landscape ecology and broaden the implementation of ideas that elevated practice in the fields of architecture, urban planning, stormwater management, and many others. We must build upon McHarg’s legacy and Design with Nature Now—before it truly is too late.