The national dialogue about rising waters tends to focus on coastal states like Florida and New York, with inland states largely absent from the conversation. But residents in Michigan, which has one of the longest coastlines in the continental U.S., are also contending with changes that are leading local officials to reexamine their coastal management policies. As climate change amplifies Lake Michigan’s natural fluctuations and brings increased storminess, communities are beginning to plan for an uncertain future.

Historically, for every decade or so residents have endured high waters, the next has brought retreating levels—and a wave of new lakeside development. This seesawing system, which can involve differences of up to six feet in water levels over the course of a few years, is masking a more gradual pattern of coastal erosion, according to Richard Norton, a professor of urban and regional planning at the University of Michigan. The focus on extremes, he said, has sidelined action on coastal management.

In 2014, Norton and a team of researchers started working with the City of Grand Haven and the Charter Township of Grand Haven, neighboring communities on the southeast perimeter of the lake, to think beyond current conditions and discuss best coastal management practices for the long term. At the center of their approach is a method called scenario planning.

Scenario planning allows communities to plan for an unpredictable future by exploring multiple possibilities of what could happen. The framework—which the Consortium for Scenario Planning, an initiative of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, promotes through technical assistance, educational resources, and a network of practitioners—has shown potential in these jurisdictions, which sit in one of the most politically conservative counties in the state and whose residents have varying views about the risks of climate change.

The Role of Local Planning

Local governments have a unique opportunity to help shape the future of coastal areas. While the National Flood Insurance Program influences private development, local governments make the majority of “public decisions that shape private development in high-risk coastal zones,” Norton and his coauthors write in a new article published in the Journal of the American Planning Association (Norton et al 2019).

However, few jurisdictions are fully embracing the role—about 40 percent of master plans from 60 Michigan Great Lakes communities studied didn’t include any discussion of coastal area management issues, according to research by Norton in the mid-2000s. At the time, three quarters of the plans hadn’t adopted any meaningful coastal area management policies.

A multi-disciplinary and multi-university team of researchers led by Norton wanted to see if scenario planning, a notoriously technical process, could be simplified and adapted to the context of municipalities that lack the technology and capacity to conduct extensive analyses. Funding for the project came from the Michigan Coastal Zone Management Program of the Department of Environment, Great Lakes, and Energy and is supported through a grant under the National Coastal Zone Management Act of 1972. The project was also supported by the nonprofit planning firm Land Information Access Association, which provides technical assistance to local leaders through its Resilient Michigan program.

Coastal management concerns are often edged out by factors including other planning issues, the role of coastal properties in providing property tax revenues, emotional attachments to properties, and resistance to government regulation, Norton said.

A few years ago, the team reached out to several towns, including the City of Grand Haven and Grand Haven Charter Township, to discuss the possibility of embarking on a consultant-led scenario-planning process. At the time, both communities were in the middle of updating their master plans. Like most of the state’s 122 jurisdictions on Lake Michigan, the two communities have small populations with limited staff capacity.

An extended planning process ensued. From 2014 to 2016, local officials, planning commissions, city council and township board, and residents from the two places took part in over 20 working meetings and presentations.

Weighing Scenarios

Norton discussed the details of the project at the annual conference of the Consortium for Scenario Planning. Central to the process was the identification of three “climate futures.” Researchers created the scenarios, based on a 20- to 50-year planning horizon, by using easily available data, including historic water level data and FEMA maps, and basic GIS analysis. In the “lucky” future, water levels remain low and the community experiences one 50-year storm (as classified by FEMA). The “expected” future assumes average water levels and one 100-year storm. The “perfect storm” scenario is characterized by high water levels and a 500-year storm.

“The process helped people understand that we weren’t just looking at the worst-case scenario,” Jennifer Howland, community development manager for the City of Grand Haven, said.

As a next step, the cross-sector team drew on a variety of off-the-shelf data related to planning and development to outline three options for how the local governments could respond in each climate future. In one scenario, the governments maintained existing structures. In a second, residents were permitted to build out based on what current zoning allows. A third option incorporated a series of best management practices (BMPs), ranging from setbacks in nearshore zones to restrictions on building within wetlands. Combining the climate futures and management options, the researchers presented nine scenarios for local officials and residents to consider. They shared the fiscal, environmental, and land use impacts of each scenario.

In the City of Grand Haven’s “lucky” future, for example, if residents continue to build out under current zoning regulations, 207 structures will be damaged. If residents adopt BMPs, this number falls to 59.

A “lucky” future in which the Township builds out under the current zoning regulations results in $11.6 million in potential damages in areas that currently house properties bringing in $194,015 in net annual revenue. In the “perfect storm” scenario, building out under current zoning regulations results in $89 million in potential damages in areas that hold properties bringing in $358,000 in annual tax revenue.

Researchers also calculated the discrepancy between the land area designated as high-risk erosion areas by the state and the land area that they calculated would be inundated in the three climate futures. The land area identified by the state was much smaller than the land area identified as high-risk areas by researchers, highlighting the important role these local governments can play in filling the gap.

“When we first presented the materials, there were looks of shock and surprise, but once people processed the information and understood that these are reasonable futures we should be thinking about, there was less opposition,” Norton said. “If we had just gone straight to announcing setbacks, that would have been hugely controversial.”

Local officials also used other strategies to help the conversations along. Howland emphasized that science-based maps and aerial images of historic shorelines made the analysis more poignant for residents. Stacey Fedewa, community development director for Grand Haven Charter Township, said focusing on the weather-related impacts of climate change was an effective way to bring the global issue to the local level.

“If we flood from a big storm, we will be without power, the roads will be flooded, the businesses will be shut down,” Fedewa said. “Trucks wouldn’t be able to enter. If we are able to bounce back faster by being resilient, businesses shut down less, employees come back to work sooner than they would have otherwise.”

The sessions were also important in demonstrating that building close to the shore and using armoring measures such as seawalls and riprap can create long-term damage to natural beaches. This “stop nature” inclination, as Norton calls it, is exacerbating erosion of adjacent beaches and contributing to the annual foot of shoreline erosion in high risk erosion areas.

In their resulting master plans, the two jurisdictions incorporated recommendations from the process to varying degrees. The body of the City of Grand Haven Master Plan includes regulatory and infrastructure policies recommended by the researchers. The city also updated its sensitive areas overlay district and added a beach overlay district based on the aerial images presented by the researchers that show the high water mark changing over time. It created strict rules for armoring lakeward of the line established by the beach overlay district: no shoreline protection measure can be installed within this area, with the exception of specific types of seasonal temporary fencing (City of Grand Haven 2016). A new homeowners guidebook helps property owners understand what they can do and provides alternatives (LIAA 2018).

In the township, the planning director and commission included conceptual overviews and policy recommendations in the body of their plan, but chose to relegate the more detailed analyses to the plan’s appendix out of concern about resistance in the politically conservative community (Grand Haven Charter Township 2016). The township also considered new proposals to prohibit seawalls—which can interrupt natural sediment transport processes, creating larger waves and more erosion that wears down the walls over time—and to increase the setback for new construction to 200 feet from the high ordinary water mark, a significant change from the current 50-foot setback. The proposals did not pass—in part because officials were focused on taking steps to protect homes from record high water levels this fall—and regulatory decisions will remain with the current authority, the Michigan Department of Environment, Great Lakes and Energy.

“Water levels will go back down again,” Norton said. “They always have. So how can we help town officials keep this on the agenda when there is not a crisis?”  

Scaling the Approach

Norton believes scenario planning is a promising tool for local decision making and thinks the fact that these governments incorporated coastal management policies in their master plans is an important step. “The simplicity of the methods is helpful,” he said. “They are focused on decisions: should they adopt setbacks or not?” Norton does acknowledge that even this simplified method typically requires some in-house expertise, such as the ability to manipulate ArcGIS.

He hopes some of the lessons learned, about both scenario planning and shoreline management, can be applied in other communities, ideally with the help of outside consultants who can provide the analysis needed at a reasonable cost or without the need for outside consultants at all. And word does seem to be spreading in the region: Howland has shared the city’s work with neighboring communities along the lake and presented at a dune symposium in East Lansing. Fedewa has encouraged Spring Lake township, north of Grand Haven, to utilize the resources of the Resilient Michigan program.

Norton, who now plans to expand his work to nearby Lake Huron, said scenario planning is an ideal tool to prepare for the uncertainty inherent in an age defined by rising waters, no matter what type. “What we are doing is very applicable in ocean coastal settings too.”

This article was published in the print edition of the July 2020 issue of Land Lines with the title “Great Lakes Communities Use Scenario Planning to Prepare for Rising Waters.”

To learn more about how scenario planning can help communities prepare for the future, read “Scenario Planning in a Pandemic: How to Embrace and Navigate Uncertainty.”

Emma Zehner is communications and publications editor at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead Photograph: A house in Grand Haven Charter Township sits precariously close to the shore in December 2019, following several months of intense storms. Credit: Grand Haven Charter Township.

References

City of Grand Haven. 2016. City of Grand Haven 2016 Master Plan. Grand Haven, MI. https://grandhaven.org/residents/grand-havenmaster-plan/.

Grand Haven Charter Township. 2016. Grand Haven Charter Township 2016 Master Plan: Executive Summary. Grand Haven Township, MI. http://www.ght.org/wp-content/uploads/master-plan/ExecutiveSummary.pdf.

LIAA (Land Information Access Association). 2018. Living in Sensitive Areas: A Homeowners Guide for Residents of Grand Haven. Grand Haven, MI: City of Grand Haven. May. https://grandhaven.org/living-in-sensitive-areas-homeowners-guide/.

Norton, Richard K., Stephen Buckman, Guy A. Meadows, and Zachary Rable. 2019. “Using Simple, Decision-Centered, Scenario-Based Planning to Improve Local Coastal Management.” Journal of the American Planning Association. 85 (4): 405–423. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/01944363.2019.1627237.

When Washington, DC, officials unveiled a major report on housing equity last fall, they did so at an unassuming, one-story bike shop located in the city’s posh Tenleytown neighborhood. This quiet district of single-family homes lies seven miles northwest of the Capitol, and the location was meant to send a message: the shop was all that was left of a plan proposed several years ago that would have added much-needed housing to the neighborhood. After fierce opposition from nearby residents, the developer scratched the mixed-use development.

Tenleytown and the other wealthy neighborhoods that make up Rock Creek West are home to the fewest affordable homes and apartments in the city—by far. Of the nearly 52,000 affordable housing units citywide, just 470 are in Rock Creek West, the city’s report found. Conversely, roughly half of the affordable housing stock (more than 25,000 units) is located in the city’s poorest neighborhoods, across the Anacostia River. 

The point of the report, says Office of Planning Director Andrew Trueblood, is to lay out the current landscape for housing so that future construction doesn’t simply continue to concentrate affordable housing in lower-income neighborhoods. 

“There is a reason we are where we are” when it comes to the location of affordable housing, he says. “Some of that has been through reactions to opposition, some of it has been through policy. The reasons why we’re here today haven’t gone away. But what we’re trying to do is change the discussion.”

The report sets a goal of adding 12,000 affordable homes and apartments citywide by 2025, with the largest share—nearly 2,000 units—going in Rock Creek West. Capitol Hill, another high-cost neighborhood, is targeted for 1,400 affordable units. The city plans to meet its goal by enabling new construction, preserving affordable housing set to soon expire, and converting market-rate homes and apartments into permanently affordable housing.

Mayor Muriel Bowser has set an overall housing goal of 36,000 new units within the city by 2025. Those numbers are based on an analysis by the Metropolitan Washington Council of Governments, which found the metro area (which includes suburban areas of Maryland and Virginia) needs 320,000 housing units by 2030 to keep up with population demands. As if that weren’t ambitious enough, the council called for 75 percent of the units to be affordable to middle- and low-income families. 

Like many hot-market cities, Washington is struggling with a housing affordability crisis. The region is expected to gain about 413,000 new jobs between 2020 and 2030—but only 245,000 new housing units over the same period. A recent study found that 220,000 families across the region could be forced to leave their homes in the coming years as housing costs rise. At play are zoning density restrictions, gentrification, and transit connectivity needs that combine to either concentrate poverty in smaller areas or simply price low- and middle-income families out altogether. 

As cities like Washington, DC, seek to create affordable housing, they are increasingly mindful that where they build matters as much as the number of new homes. For decades, government affordable housing programs focused on creating as many affordable homes as possible. That often meant selecting lower-income neighborhoods, which tended to have fewer regulatory barriers to development and less organized opposition from residents. 

“One of the biggest mistakes the field made was when they went to build affordable housing, they did it in cheap areas,” says Lincoln Institute of Land Policy Senior Policy Analyst Jessie Grogan. “It ended up further concentrating poverty.”

In an effort to reverse that process, the Obama administration created a new rule in 2015 requiring cities that receive federal housing funds to take active steps to reverse longstanding patterns of segregation. The rule, called Affirmatively Furthering Fair Housing (AFFH), built on 1960s civil rights legislation that bars overt discrimination in the housing industry (which is still a problem today). The new rule is now in limbo, and a dozen states and cities—including Washington, DC—are fighting to reinstate it. But DC’s plan to combat segregation shows that governments can still embrace the rule’s principles even in the absence of federal backing.

The District’s method of setting specific housing goals by neighborhood is one such approach. Philadelphia is studying an eviction crisis that has plagued lower-income neighborhoods; during 2017, one in 14 renters faced eviction. Kansas City wants to distribute Section 8 vouchers more evenly, with the goal of breaking up concentrations of poverty in the region.

But studies and reports are ultimately the first step in what will be a difficult process. It’s one thing to say that housing in a city is unfair, as 60 percent of residents in Washington, DC’s most affluent ward did in a citywide survey last year. But it’s another thing to support a project in the neighborhood. In 2016, for example, Los Angeles voters overwhelmingly approved a tax increase to provide $1.2 billion for 10,000 units of new housing for the homeless. But development stalled for years because of a requirement that developers receive a letter of support from the local city council member. Now the project is running behind and is more expensive than expected.

DC’s goals are soft targets. Trueblood says they are designed to get the city on a “trajectory” of more equitable affordable housing distribution by 2050, as outlined in the Council of Governments report.

“It’s a lot to overcome, but the city seems to have come to a point of ‘enough is enough,’” says Alex Baca, housing program organizer for the economic development nonprofit Greater Greater Washington. But adding affordability to a part of the city where home prices regularly top $1 million is an expensive proposition. It all comes down to whether the administration is able to find political backing for the cost. 

“I’m heartened to see the Bowser administration taking this seriously,” Baca adds. “But actually doing it is going to mean reducing funding for other things, and that’s where the mayor is going to have to use her power.” 

Looking ahead, Trueblood says the funding and cost estimates for the program are still being worked out, but the city expects to include it in next year’s budget. The administration also plans to use planning and zoning incentives to encourage the development of affordably priced units in the city’s most expensive neighborhoods. One of those tools, an expansion of the city’s inclusionary zoning policy, will increase the density allowed in a development if the developer builds more affordable units. 

Currently, the district requires 8 to 10 percent of the residential floor area be set aside for affordable rental or for-sale units, but the new policy is expected to include additional incentives for developers willing to go up to 20 percent, says Trueblood. 

To him, the case for housing equity can be summed up in one stark statistic via the city’s most recent health equity report: the difference in life expectancy between the city’s richest and poorest residents is 15 years.

“It might mean hard conversations with residents who want their neighborhoods protected,” he says. “But we’ve seen how our housing policy and resident outcomes have worked so far—and we need to think in a structurally different way.”

Liz Farmer is a fiscal policy expert and journalist whose areas of expertise include budgets, fiscal distress, and tax policy. She is currently a research fellow at the Rockefeller Institute’s Future of Labor Research Center.

Photograph: Rendering of a proposed mixed-use development in Rock Creek West, a wealthy area of Washington, DC. Credit: Valor Development.

Situated almost exactly in between Boston and New York, Hartford, Connecticut, is a classic mid-sized legacy city with great potential for reinvention. In this episode of the Land Matters podcast, planning commissioner Sara Bronin talks about the cutting-edge urban planning practices she hopes will put the city back on the map, after decades of decline.

“In light of the city’s structural challenges in terms of how it gets taxes and how it relates to the state, we’ve really felt within the city we have to take matters into our own hands,” Bronin says. Among the revitalization initiatives: a complete overhaul of an outdated zoning code, which has smoothed the way for lower-cost redevelopment of abandoned factories and other historic buildings now accommodating makers spaces and craft breweries.

An architect and law professor, Bronin helped kick off the Lincoln Institute’s recent scenario planning workshop in Hartford, put on in partnership with the Capitol Region Council of Governments.  The metropolitan region is starting to use scenario planning to project multiple futures for the area, in housing, economic development, and transportation.

With a population of about 125,000 – nearly 1 million including the communities all around it—Hartford is the state capital and the fourth largest city in the state. Once a center of innovation and commerce—inventions include firearms, typewriters, tools, sewing machines, bicycles, and even one of the nation’s first electric cars, plus the beginnings of the modern-day insurance industry – Hartford endured population and manufacturing loss, a decline in property tax revenue, crime and high unemployment dating back at least to the 1960s.

Adding to the challenges, a portion of Interstate 84 through downtown has reached the end of its lifespan, and needs to be rebuilt or reconfigured. Possible solutions include replacing sections with surface boulevards, lowering portions of the freeway, or building extensive tunnels for both vehicular traffic and high-speed rail.

That last proposal suggests a path to renewal through some big-picture thinking. Under the Rebooting New England initiative, Amtrak’s high-speed Acela route would go through Hartford between New York and Boston, placing the city at the center of a new Northeast megaregion – and instantly opening up housing and labor markets through faster connections among all the cities of southern New England. The proposal was inspired by the UK’s Northern Powerhouse effort linking older industrial cities north of London.

Zoning reform, scenario planning, major infrastructure investments, and megaregions are all in the mix, and get thorough consideration in this wide-ranging conversation.

You can listen to the show and subscribe to Land Matters on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, Stitcher, or wherever you listen to podcasts.

Learn More

The Downtown Highway That Could Drive Hartford’s Comeback

Anthony Flint is senior fellow in the Office of the President at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Photograph: Sara Bronin speaks at the third annual Consortium for Scenario Planning Conference, which took place in November in Hartford, Connecticut. Credit: Diego Lomelli Trejo.

As a rule, 12-acre development projects don’t tend to receive national or international attention. But that hasn’t been the case for Quayside, a parcel off Lake Ontario in Toronto. Two years ago, Waterfront Toronto—the government entity overseeing the redevelopment and reconfiguration of a larger swath of real estate along the Don River that includes Quayside—brought in Sidewalk Labs as a private partner. A subsidiary of Google’s parent company, Alphabet, Sidewalk Labs pledged to invest $50 million in the endeavor. The company seemed an ideal choice to help make Quayside a kind of prototype “smart city” neighborhood, and produced ambitious plans.

It also produced no small amount of controversy, and at times it has appeared that the entire partnership might implode. That threat seems to have passed, at least temporarily. All the friction has had an unexpected result: Quayside could prove to be a much more valuable prototype for smart city planning than originally imagined.

That’s not because of what has been built (which is, to date, nothing), but rather because of the way its bumpy ride has clarified the core smart-city issues that need to be resolved before any building can happen—not just in Toronto, but in any urban area. While it’s hard to find an example of a smart city project that’s quite as comprehensive as Quayside aims to be, there are many playing out on a more limited scale, from Kansas City’s “smart city corridor” effort centered on a two-mile streetcar line to the LinkNYC program (also from Sidewalk Labs) replacing pay phones in New York City with WiFi-enabled kiosks.

The biggest issue needing resolution may be privacy. That may seem intuitive, and Sidewalk Labs itself professed to be aware of, and sensitive to, privacy concerns in its initial proposal. That proposal included plenty of the sort of tech-forward ideas you’d expect from a Google-connected entity, from heated bike lanes to autonomous delivery robots. Many of the proposed elements relied upon sophisticated sensors to collect data and guide efficiency in everything from trash collection to traffic to lighting.

While Sidewalk’s proposal addressed privacy, the company was apparently caught off guard when it was criticized for leaving too much discretion to private-sector tech vendors. Among those unimpressed: former Ontario privacy commissioner Ann Cavoukian, a prominent privacy advocate Sidewalk had added to its advisory board who promptly resigned from that role.

Cavoukian, now the executive director of the privacy-focused Global Privacy & Security by Design Centre consultancy, explains that she recognizes the potential value of data collection for shaping a neighborhood or a city. But she believes, in essence, that in the context of the “smart” city, securing privacy is a planning-level decision better left to the public sector. “The technology, the sensors, will be on 24-seven,” she says. “There’s no opportunity for people to consent or revoke consent. They have no choice.”

She specifically advocates what she terms a “privacy by design” strategy, which “scrubs” data at the point of collection. For instance: Cameras or sensors gathering traffic data might also pick up license plate numbers. If Cavoukian and other privacy advocates have their way, that level of personal data would simply not be collected. “You still have the value rendered from the [aggregate] data,” she says. “But you don’t have the privacy risks because you’ve de-identified the data.” The essence of the privacy by design idea is that it privileges the public interest over private use of data; Cavoukian has pointed to the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation—which strictly protects individual privacy and has forced even the biggest tech players to adjust since its implementation in 2018—as a model.

Sidewalk Labs proposed gathering wide swaths of data in a kind of “trust,” with private vendors encouraged to anonymize data. To critics like Cavoukian, this delayed privacy decisions until too late in the process: post-planning, post-implementation, less a baseline than an afterthought. One poll found that 60 percent of Toronto residents who were aware of the plan didn’t trust Sidewalk’s data collection. The two sides are still working out details, but have agreed for now that sensor-gathered data will be treated as a public asset, not a private one. (Sidewalk Labs did not respond to an interview request.)

The Toronto proposal was controversial for other reasons. Notably, it sought oversight of much more than the original 12-acre parcel, dangling the possibility of locating a new Google Canadian headquarters along the city’s waterfront as part of a scheme that would give Sidewalk latitude over 190 acres of potentially lucrative properties. This proposal was turned back, but spurred a useful debate about smart cities and equity.

Jennifer Clark, a professor and head of the City and Regional Planning Section at the Knowlton School of Architecture in the College of Engineering at the Ohio State University, has studied smart city efforts around the world, and is the author of Uneven Innovation: The Work of Smart Cities, forthcoming from Columbia University Press in February 2020. As she explains, technology businesses and government or planning entities come to these collaborations with distinct perspectives. Enterprises like Sidewalk Labs that are devoted to new city technologies, she says, “come from a particular orientation of thinking about who the ‘user’ is. They’re very much thinking through a consumer model, with users and consumers as essentially the same thing. That’s not how planners think about it in cities. Users are citizens.”

Similarly, companies designing the technology meant to make a city “smart” are looking for a revenue model that will not just fund a given project, but can ultimately prove profitable—which guides the nature of their prototyping products and services that might be applied elsewhere. Clark points out that a seldom-discussed element of the smart city phenomenon is its “uneven implementation.” Quayside and the wider waterfront redevelopment it is part of are expected to result in high-value properties, used and frequented by a demographic attractive to businesses.

“There’s an assumption that if you do these urban development districts, you’re experimenting on the model, you get the model right and then you do broad deployment, so that there’s equity,” Clark says. But frequently, in practice, “there is no path to that.” Whatever innovations emerge tend to recur in demographically similar contexts.

What often underlies this dynamic is a kind of power mismatch. The private side of a development partnership is often richly funded, in a position to offer financial incentives, and thus to essentially dictate terms; the public side may have fewer resources, and less sophistication about assessing or fully deploying cutting-edge technology. But in this case, Clark notes, the Quayside story (which she addresses in her book) may be a bit different.

“Toronto has a history of community organizing and community development,” she notes. “And the community organizations there have a sophisticated understanding of the data collection practices that were proposed.” Thus the privacy pushback, and how it gets resolved, might prove to be the real lasting payoff, especially if it’s resolved in a way others can emulate.

A replicable model, one that offers guidelines for both technology and the rules that technology must play by, is essentially the outcome that Cavoukian wants. She is now working with Waterfront Toronto, and explicitly hopes that Quayside—with either Sidewalk Labs or new partners—can become a rejoinder to the surveillance-oriented versions of the smart city that are taking shape in tech-advanced urban areas from Shanghai to Dubai.

“We want to be the first to show how you could do this and put that out as a model,” she says. “We want a smart city of privacy.”

Rob Walker is a journalist covering design, technology, and other subjects. His book The Art of Noticing was published in May 2019. 

Photograph: Rendering of an interior pedestrian walkway at Quayside. Credit: Picture Plane for Heatherwick Studio for Sidewalk Labs.

To mark the fiftieth anniversary of Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy collaborated with the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design to publish Design with Nature Now, showcasing some of the most advanced ecological design projects in the world today. We asked some of the book’s contributors to weigh in on Ian McHarg’s lasting influence and what will make it possible to design with nature at scale today.

Above: Some of the book’s authors and editors at the Cambridge book launch in October 2019. Front row: Frederick Steiner, Laurel McSherry, Anne Whiston Spirn. Second row: Andrew Revkin, Erle Ellis. Third row: Alan Berger, Emily McKeigue, Jonah Susskind. Fourth row: Maureen Clarke, William Whitaker. 

“I think we need to get serious about regenerative design. Regeneration involves recovery and rebuilding, yes, but also restoration, renewal, and revitalization. Regeneration improves ecosystems by contributing to ecosystem services rather than depleting them. Several of the Design With Nature Now projects illustrate this. For instance, Freshkills Park is more about regeneration than resiliency as it is transforming a huge landfill into a new, healthy landscape.”

— Frederick Steiner, Dean and Paley Professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design; Volume Editor and Author of “Green the Earth, Restore the Earth, Heal the Earth,” Design with Nature Now

Above: After operating as a garbage dump for more than 50 years, Staten Island’s FreshKills Landfill was transformed into a public park starting in the early 2010s. The grasslands park, which will stretch over 2,000 acres once it is completed in 2036, will offer spaces for athletics, education, and recreation.

“We need an expansion of McHarg’s methods . . . creatively reimagined to accommodate more complexity and diversity and to design—as much as that is possible—a planetary future with both nature, and human nature, in mind.”

— Andrew Revkin, Director of Columbia University’s Earth Institute Initiative on Communication and Sustainability; Author of “Design as a Quest, Not a Task,” Design with Nature Now

Above: McHarg’s landscape suitability analysis maps, which are widely considered the predicate for Geographic Information Systems (GIS), showed where to locate development and where to leave nature undisturbed.

“I knew nothing about landscape architecture until I read Ian McHarg’s description of the field in the brochure of the Graduate School of Fine Arts at the University of Pennsylvania in 1969. McHarg’s text was a call to action. It spoke directly to me, offering the opportunity to join a profession that would give scope to all my disparate interests: landscape, environment, history, art, photography, social action. I decided to switch from Penn’s doctoral program in art history to landscape architecture.”

— Anne Whiston Spirn, Cecil and Ida Green Distinguished Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning; Author of “A Landscape of Ideas and Action: Place, Process, Form, and Language,” Design with Nature Now

Above: Since 1987, Spirn has directed the West Philadelphia Landscape Project, which aims to improve regional water quality and rebuild healthy neighborhoods through environmental and design education. Over the years, staff and residents have transformed vacant urban lots, built community gardens, proposed green infrastructure elements, and developed school curricula about the region’s history. The above photo shows Aspen Farms in June 2018.

“For climate change adaptation, design with nature is already increasingly in demand, in the form of ‘nature-based solutions’ and green infrastructure. To scale these up, one key element is the integration of these solutions into infrastructure standards, such as those guiding urban development and road construction. On the other hand, I fear that efforts to mitigate climate change through green infrastructure, including green roofs and tree planting to store emissions of carbon from fossil fuels, are no better than a fig leaf hiding the much harder ultimate solution to climate change: the need to transition from carbon emitting to clean energy systems.”

— Erle Ellis, Professor of Geography and Environmental Systems at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County; Author of “Nature as Designer: Emancipating Nonhuman Ecologies in an Increasingly Human World,” Design with Nature Now

Above: Ellis was a keynote speaker at the Design with Nature Now conference hosted by the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology in June 2019.

“McHarg promoted the understanding of natural systems to avoid damaging the resources humans are dependent upon. In McHarg’s time, he had to understand what was in place and what would be there in the foreseeable future if we learned how to manage it. But now, what is there is moving and changing, so it is even more imperative to try to understand natural systems and their behavior.”

— Ignacio Bunster-Ossa, Vice President at AECOM; Author of “McHarg: The Long View, Shortened,” Design with Nature Now

Above: Bunster-Ossa led the development of the Bethlehem SteelStacks Arts + Cultural Campus in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The project, which transformed the former Bethlehem Steel Plant into an arts, culture, and community space, was awarded the Urban Land Institute’s Global Award of Excellence and Rudy Bruner Award.

“Our challenge, if we are to build something greater out of the detritus that escaped McHarg’s grasp, is to intelligently interpret the systemic thinking brought forth by him to generations of landscape architects and regional planners during the later twentieth century. His model must be implemented both to protect pre-development land, and post-development waste.”

— Alan Berger, Leventhal Professor of Advanced Urbanism and Co-Director of the Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism at MIT; Coauthor of “The Planetary Optic and Finding the Real Ground,” Design with Nature Now

Above: As part of the work at MIT’s P-REX lab, Berger, Berger mapped Philadelphia’s “urban void geography.” The project identified hundreds of small vacant lots to determine how they might be combined into bigger lots in a landscape reuse program. The above map shows vacant parcels, retail areas, toxic release sites, and parks.

“I think the thing that makes McHarg’s ideas still so important is that they were not just McHarg’s ideas. The power of his work came, in many ways, from his ability to consistently convene a robust transdisciplinary conversation. His ideas were generated through the deconstruction of silos within and outside of academia.”

— Jonah Susskind, lecturer in MIT’s Department of Urban Studies and Planning and researcher at the Norman B. Leventhal Center for Advanced Urbanism; Coauthor of “The Planetary Optic and Finding the Real Ground,” Design with Nature Now 

Above: McHarg on the set of The Mike Douglas Show in 1969 discussing his book.

“In less than 20 years, McHarg … established the place of design in the awakening environmental consciousness. The pessimism (or was it realism?) in his remarks on the Earth Day stage was a call to action, an expression of outrage at the current state of affairs. People were listening and taking action; the environment had become a great unifying force.”

— William Whitaker, Curator and Collections Manager for the Architectural Archives at the University of Pennsylvania’s Stuart Weitzman School of Design; Author of “Why Do I Have to Be the Man to Bring You the Bad News,” Design with Nature Now

Above: McHarg in 1970 at Independence Mall during the first Earth Week, which was organized by University of Pennsylvania students and faculty.

Photographs (in order of appearance):

Credit: Maggie Janik.

Credit: Alex S. MacLean, Landslides Aerial Photography. 

Credit: University of Pennsylvania Graduate School of Fine Arts  Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

Credit: Anne Whiston Spirn.

Credit: University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.

Credit: Ignacio Bunster-Ossa.

Credit: Alan Berger.

Credit: Ian and Carol McHarg Collection, The Architectural Archives, University of Pennsylvania.

Credit: Courtesy University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.