Cities around the world are hard at work on traffic congestion. Boston is designing streets for a mix of bikes, pedestrians, buses, scooters, and cars, and creating special drop-off zones for Uber and Lyft in high-volume areas, such as around Fenway Park. But the task is about to get more complex, with the advent of driverless vehicles, delivery robots, and AI-enabled trackless trams—all of which will require a more wholesale physical transformation of the cityscape.

With shared autonomous mobility, travel lanes can be narrower, because vehicles can essentially tailgate each other. There will also almost certainly be less need for parking in downtowns, as self-driving cars will pick up and drop off and head to the next ride. Intersections will be reconfigured as traffic signals are guided by artificial intelligence.

It’s a big task with a lot of complexity—and no little uncertainty about what, exactly, will be needed in the years ahead. That’s where the emerging practice of scenario planning comes in, says Heather Hannon, who manages the scenario planning initiative at the Lincoln Institute. In this cutting-edge approach to urban planning, communities or regions construct and analyze multiple versions of the future, leaving ample room to change course as unexpected wrinkles arise.

In the past, cities have approached challenges in a more linear fashion. The solution to more cars and trucks, for example, might be a new freeway. Scenario planning allows for much more flexibility, as conditions warrant—without relying on interventions that are hard to alter. The approach also benefits from robust public participation in the planning process, Hannon says. Community input is critical to judge the merits of any major infrastructure scheme.

Scenario planning is being used not only in the design of future streetscapes, but in many other areas as well—importantly, in planning for climate change, where unknowns and uncertainty abound.

The Consortium for Scenario Planning offers a community of practice for planners, community leaders, and stakeholders of all kinds, including access to technical assistance, educational resources, and a network of fellow innovators. It recently held its annual conference in Hartford, Connecticut, and will hold a workshop in Vancouver, British Columbia.

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

We’re Redesigning Our Streetscape – but What If We’re Getting It All Wrong? (The Boston Globe)

Driverless Ed (Land Lines)

Scenario Planning: Embracing Uncertainty to Make Better Decisions (Policy Brief)

Thinking About the Unthinkable (TED Talk)

Photograph Credit: iStock / Getty Images Plus – JIRAROJ PRADITCHAROENKUL

Born and raised in the working-class Boston neighborhood of Dorchester, Martin J. Walsh is serving his second term as Boston’s 54th mayor, focusing on schools, affordable housing, and immigration, among many other issues. He has also become an international leader in confronting climate change and building resilience, hosting a major climate summit in 2018 and forming a coalition of mayors committed to working on renewable energy and other strategies. He has pledged to make Boston carbon-neutral by 2050, and has led Imagine Boston 2030, the first citywide comprehensive plan in half a century, as well as the Resilient Boston Harbor initiative. He made time to speak with Senior Fellow Anthony Flint to reflect on being mayor in the midst of the unfolding climate crisis.

Anthony Flint: You have been one of the most active mayors in the nation on the pressing issue of climate change. Tell us about your recent efforts to coordinate action—and how you feel about all this work being done at the local level in the absence of a federal initiative?

Marty Walsh: We hosted our first climate summit, and we’ve been working with mayors across America. I was elected as the North American co-chair for C40 prior to President Trump pulling out of the Paris climate accord. We’ve been working with Mayor [Eric] Garcetti in Los Angeles and other mayors to make sure that cities recommitted themselves to the Paris climate agreement. This is such an important issue for the country and for Boston, and it’s so important to have engagement and leadership. It’s unfortunate that we haven’t had a [federal] partner in the last few years. But we’re going to continue to take on the challenges and continue to think about the next generation. What I’m hoping is that ultimately we will have a federal partner, and [when that time comes] we won’t be starting at zero.

AF: Turning first to mitigation: what are the most important ways that cities can help reduce carbon emissions? Should cities require the retrofitting of older buildings, for example, to make them more energy efficient?

MW: We have a program called Renew Boston Trust, identifying energy savings in city-owned buildings. It’s important to be sure we start in our own backyard. We have 14 buildings underway for retrofits—libraries, community centers, police and fire stations. Secondly, we’re looking at electrifying some of our vehicles. The third piece is looking at retrofitting and new construction, making sure all new construction is built to higher performance standards with fewer carbon emissions. Ultimately, as we think about reducing carbon emissions, we are looking at 85,000 buildings in our city . . . if we want to hit net zero carbon by 2050, we’ll have to retrofit those buildings, large and small. Then there’s transportation—getting our transportation system to be cleaner and greener. Even if we had a strong national policy, it’s ultimately the cities that will have to carry out the reductions.

AF: Even if we stopped all carbon emissions tomorrow, the planet will still have to manage significant sea level rise, flooding, volatile weather, wildfires, and more, because of inexorably rising temperatures. What are the most promising efforts here and around the country in building resilience?

MW: For Boston and East Coast cities and oceanfront property, our Resilient Boston Harbor plan lays out some good strategies. We have 47 miles of shoreline, and rivers that run through and border our city. We’ve looked at [the 2012 Atlantic hurricane] Superstorm Sandy and at what happened in Houston [due to Hurricane Harvey in 2017], in terms of protecting people in major flooding events. We have one big plan for the harbor, but there are other neighborhoods where we have to make sure we’re prepared. We’re doing planning studies in all of these areas [under the Climate Ready Boston initiative] to deal with sea-level rise. They eventually become one environmental plan.

It is a public safety matter. It’s about quality of life and the future of our city. In the past, mayors have focused on economic development and transportation and education. Today, climate change, resilience, and preparedness are part of the conversation in ways they weren’t 25 years ago. 

AF: At the Lincoln Institute, we’re big believers in working with nature through blue and green infrastructure—and coming up with new ways to pay for it. Are you also a fan of this approach, which the Dutch and others have developed?

MW: Resilient Boston Harbor is really a green infrastructure plan. One project that speaks to that is Martin’s Park, named for Martin Richard [the youngest victim of the 2013 Boston Marathon bombing]. We raised parts of the park to prevent flood pathways, and installed mini piles and vegetated beds reinforced with stone to prevent erosion at higher tides. We’re looking at doing something like that throughout the inner harbor. We’re spending $2 million at Joe Moakley Park, which is the start of major flood pathways to several neighborhoods . . . we’re trying to cut back on as much flood-related property damage and disruption of people’s lives as possible. Berms and other barriers can help keep the water out . . . but there are opportunities to let the water through and not let it build up, in a major storm event.

AF: In addition to new taxes that have been proposed, would you support a value capture arrangement where the private sector contributes more to these kinds of massive public investments? 

MW: On top of private investment—which we’re going to need more of—we are working with philanthropic organizations, to see if some philanthropic dollars can go into these kinds of projects. In our budget this year, we’re dedicating 10 percent in capital budget to resilience. We’re also looking at taking some dedicated revenue and putting it into resilience. For example, we raised fines and penalties for parking violations. That will go right back into transportation and resilience, including things like raising streets up. That’s a start. Over time, we’ll dedicate more of our budget to this. At some point hopefully, the federal government will invest. Right now, they are paying millions and millions for disaster relief. Rather than coming in after an event and a tragedy happens, I would hope that they will want to make investments on the front end.

AF: Given projections that large swaths of Boston will be underwater later this century, can you reflect on a personal level about this threat to the city you currently lead? How would you inspire more urgency to address this problem?

MW: That’s our job. Our job is to govern in the present day, and manage all the day-to-day operations, but our job is also to lay down the foundation of what our city looks like in the future. The infrastructure that we build out will be here for the next 50 to 60 years. The Resilient Boston Harbor plan is [designed] to deal with sea-level rise 40 or 50 years from now. We’re building all of that with the expectation of preserving and protecting the residents of the city. I would hope that when I’m not here as mayor anymore, the next mayor will come in and will want to invest as well. This is the legacy of the city—I wouldn’t say it’s necessarily my legacy—to look back years from now, for residents to look back and be grateful for the investments and the time that leaders took in 2017 and 2018 and 2019.

I don’t think as a country we’re where we need to be. The Dutch and other European countries are farther ahead. So we’re playing catch-up. We’re not waiting for the next generation to try to solve this problem.

Photographs in order of appearance

Boston Mayor Marty Walsh speaks at the annual Mayor’s Greenovate Awards, which recognize climate and sustainability leaders in the community. Credit: John Wilcox, courtesy of City of Boston Mayor’s Office.

Mayor Walsh addresses a crowd of protesters at City Hall during the September 2019 youth climate strike. Credit: Jeremiah Robinson, courtesy of City of Boston Mayor’s Office. 

Median rent in Brooklyn climbed between two to six percent each month during the first half of 2019, reaching $2,914 by July, according to Bloomberg (Price 2019). As the map indicates, low-income housing tax credits (LIHTCs) tend to be clustered in the northeast section of the borough. Affordable housing is in short supply in the more westerly neighborhoods whose mixed-use library and housing projects are described in this issue: Brooklyn Heights, where average rent increased 53 percent from 1990 to 2010–2014, and Sunset Park, where average rent increased 24 percent during the same period (NYU 2016).

View the PDF version of this map for more detail and a key.

References:

NYU Furman Center. 2016. “State of New York City’s Housing and Neighborhoods in 2015.” New York: New York University. https://furmancenter.org/files/sotc/NYUFurmanCenter_SOCin2015_9JUNE2016.pdf.

Price, Sydney. 2019. “Brooklyn Beats Manhattan for NYC Apartment Rent Increases.” Bloomberg. July 11. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2019-07-11/brooklyn-beats-manhattan-for-new-york-apartmentrent-increases.

With climate change posing imminent risks that range from rising seas to more extreme weather events, cities must work with ecology rather than against it to develop sustainably, according to the new book Design with Nature Now (available here). Urban design that values natural systems can help us confront the most serious environmental challenges of this century, says the book, released this month by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design.  

Timed to coincide with the 50th anniversary of pioneering landscape architect Ian McHarg’s influential manifesto Design with Nature, the new volume features more than 160 color images that illustrate 25 cutting-edge projects that address biodiversity loss, sea-level rise, water and air pollution, and urbanization. These instructive interventions include a park on the site of a New York City landfill that once accepted 29,000 tons of refuse a day; a wetland in China constructed to filter pollution from a planned city of 50,000 people; a proposal for built landforms in coastal Norfolk, Virginia, that would absorb stormwater and tides; and an ambitious concept for a wind turbine farm in the North Sea.  

Featuring essays and analysis from leaders in the field of ecological planning, design, and landscape architecture, Design with Nature Now pays tribute to McHarg’s philosophy and impact while demonstrating the continued relevance of his work for a swiftly changing era.  

“Design with Nature Now reminds us of the urgency that led Ian McHarg to write his seminal work—and the unavoidable fact that, in many ways, that urgency has only increased,” said George W. “Mac” McCarthy, president of the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy. “With urbanization occurring rapidly and climate change demanding that we rethink nearly everything about where and how we live, McHarg’s ideas are more apt than ever.” 

The book features insights from leading practitioners behind renowned contemporary public works, including James Corner, project lead for New York City’s celebrated High Line Park; Anne Whiston Spirn, who has spearheaded an effort to restore nature and rebuild community in West Philadelphia; and Laurie Olin, whose projects include the master plan for the Los Angeles River and the design of Manhattan’s Bryant Park. It also offers a behind-the-scenes look at the roots of geographic information system (GIS) technology—McHarg is broadly credited with developing the concept behind the widely used planning tool—and compelling evidence that thoughtful design principles can help combat climate change.

McHarg drew new connections between ecology and cities in the 1960s and helped to create the multidisciplinary field of ecological planning. Today, the Ian L. McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology at the University of Pennsylvania brings environmental and social scientists together with planners, designers, policy makers, and communities to develop practical, innovative ways of improving the quality of life in the places most vulnerable to the impacts of climate change. The editors of Design with Nature Now, who are McHarg’s successors at the University of Pennsylvania, affirmed the importance of his principles in the climate change effort.  

“We are plunging, headlong, into an epoch of global environmental change at an unprecedented scale and pace,” write editors Frederick Steiner, Richard Weller, Karen M’Closkey, and Billy Fleming in the introduction to the book. “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.”  

Reflecting on McHarg’s legacy and on the impact of the new book, author and activist Bill McKibben said, “Ian McHarg would be heartened to see the range and quality of thinking he’s inspired. Each of these essays will leave you with an enlarged sense of possibility, which is a great gift in a constrained world.” 

Bruce Babbitt, former U.S. Secretary of the Interior and former board member of the Lincoln Institute, also weighed in, noting, “This exceptional book presents the enduring wisdom of Ian McHarg to a new generation. His insights, freshly interpreted in the pages of landscape designs and drawings, give me hope for the future of our planet.” 

To learn more or to order a copy of Design with Nature Now, visit: https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/books/design-nature-now.

Photograph Credit: Shenmin Liu.

Carlos Morales-Schechinger knew he was doomed. An official in Mexico’s ministry for urban development, he was slated to speak at a conference in San Luis Potosi immediately following a fully programmed morning and large lunch. With the students in front of him doing little to fight an onslaught of yawns, Morales had to get creative. 

On a whim, he decided to forgo his formal lecture on Mexico’s national urban land policy. Instead, he asked a student in the front of the room if he could buy the chair the student was sitting on, offering a bill from his pocket as payment.  

After some initial confusion, the student accepted. Morales then started auctioning off the seat. He spoke in a low voice to illustrate its locational advantage, increasing demand. Soon he had the students invested in both his presentation and that suddenly invaluable piece of furniture. By the end of the session, equipped only with standard classroom objects, he had brought to life the processes of land price determination, densification, and other phenomena related to the notoriously complex and often misrepresented topic of urban land markets.  

That was 30 years ago. Over the decades since, Morales’s spontaneous attempt to engage sleepy students has evolved into and informed a variety of educational games, including a multiday organized game called GIROS. Taking its name from the Spanish for both “transaction” and “turning around,” which captures the notion of the interdependencies of land markets, GIROS was designed by Martim Smolka, director of the program on Latin America and the Caribbean at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, and enhanced in collaboration with Morales, now a member of the Lincoln Institute’s teaching faculty. GIROS has been played well over 150 times and inspired spinoffs in most of Latin America, and in the Netherlands, Taiwan, Ghana, Kenya, the Philippines, and other countries. Participants have ranged from urban planning students to high-level public officials.  

GIROS requires few props. Smolka and Morales developed a basic game board with color-coded pieces used to map the evolution of an imaginary city. Participants divide into teams, wearing hats to indicate roles like government officials, NGOs, different classes of citizens, and developers. During the first rounds, players—assigned “hidden agendas” to simulate the opaque nature of land markets—negotiate and trade plots in a market with little regulation. Halfway through play, the “government” introduces regulations such as high-density zones, altering the city’s development trajectory. When each round concludes or when a theoretically significant phenomenon occurs as the result of a transaction, the students take off their hats to discuss what happened and why.  

Depending on the decisions players make, the game can take many forms. But at least two takeaways, evident since the game’s origins, always emerge. The first is that land value is not intrinsic, but is instead shaped by factors including transportation costs, land use regulations, taxation, and other externalities. The second takeaway, which the Lincoln Institute is fully embracing as part of its current instructional design work, is that games are a seriously important part of land policy education.  

GIROS is just one of the Lincoln Institute’s growing suite of educational games and interactive tools. While these tools are primarily used in the Institute’s courses in Latin America, active learning increasingly plays a role in all its educational offerings. “In terms of broader learning design, we really want to shift the balance of our in-person courses away from presentations and lectures and toward more active learning activities,” said Ge Vue, associate director of Learning Design at the Lincoln Institute. “The game is one example of this.”  

Games are a unique and useful pedagogical tool for a number of reasons, according to Vue. They encourage action, interactivity, and innovative thinking in ways that traditional classroom approaches don’t. Vue emphasizes that games have the potential to teach not just content, but also more applicable problem-solving skills. They are a flexible tool, allowing students to provide feedback and input in real time and facilitators to contribute their own knowledge and guidance along the way.  

Giovanni Pérez Macías, a lawyer who first played GIROS in 2007 as part of a three-month Lincoln Institute land policy course in Panama, sees the ability of the instructor to change the direction GIROS takes as one of this game’s strengths. “If Carlos sees that a certain group needs to learn a specific issue in urban development or land policy, he can lead the game [in a way that teaches] that issue,” he says.  

Whatever the outcome, Morales explained in a video about the game produced by Erasmus University Rotterdam, students must understand their own influence. “If you win the game, you have to explain why,” he said. “If you aren’t able [to explain why you won], you lose points. The main point is not winning or losing, it is learning.” 

Teaching with Games 

Popular games that invite players to take on the role of developer or city planner are a familiar part of the cultural landscape. Monopoly was created in 1903 by Henry George aficionado Elizabeth Magie, then bought by the Parker Brothers in the 1930s and transformed into the capitalist game known around the world today. More modern digital games like SimCity, in which players build and manage urban areas, and Minecraft, which places players in an undeveloped landscape with the tools they need to build cities and other structures, have kept the tradition going.  

These games overlap with and influence the urban planning world—“I wouldn’t be where I am today without SimCity,” an official with the National Association of City Transportation Officials told the Los Angeles Times for a 30th anniversary article on the game (Roy 2019)—but they don’t always reflect the realities of urban development.  

In the case of Monopoly, for instance, Smolka points to the fact that land values don’t vary with the behavior of the players as an example of how the iconic board game reinforces misconceptions about land markets. Smolka explained that part of the inspiration for GIROS came from a game that had been conceived in Bogotá to teach land value capture principles but suffered from this same problem: “You lose the most important part of the conversation. The rationality of the agents must affect land use and land values.”  

Smolka is not alone in his assessment. In an article on mainstream citybuilding games, Bradley Bereitschaft, assistant professor of geography at the University of Nebraska, wrote, “the limitations and inaccuracies of these games limit their utility in understanding complex urban processes” (Bereitschaft 2016). In fact, it was that type of academic unease that led to the development of so-called “serious games” beginning in the 1960s. Clark C. Abt, a German educator and engineer, put a name to the emerging trend in his 1970 book Serious Games. Such games, he wrote, “have an explicit and carefully thought-out educational purpose and are not intended to be played primarily for amusement. This does not mean that serious games are not, or should not be, entertaining” (Abt 1970).  

Many of the early urban planning games were “products of local needs,” according to Eszter Tóth, a PhD student at HafenCity University Hamberg who conducts research in the field of children’s participation in urban planning (Tóth 2015). Often developed by universities at the behest of local municipalities, these games were typically played only a couple of times and never published. One game that did have a longer shelf life—and has been cited by some as the origin of simulation gaming, which imitates real-life situations—was Metropolis. Richard Duke, a professor at the University of Michigan, designed that simulation in 1966 to help the Lansing City Council work through a complex budgeting process.   

Soon after, Alan Feldt, a professor of urban and regional planning at Cornell who would later become one of Duke’s collaborators, designed an urban planning board game specifically intended for use in higher education. The Community Land Use Game (CLUG) centered around a board with 196 one-inch squares. Over the course of 20 hours, five teams made up of two or three students each from his undergraduate and graduate regional planning courses aimed to build factories, stores, and residences in relation to transportation, resources, and utilities with the goal of maximizing land value.  

A 1969 Cornell Daily Sun article on Feldt’s game, which by then had been used as a teaching aid in Mexico, Germany, Israel, and England, weighed in on the new trend: “Playing with blocks used to be considered appropriate behavior for kindergarteners, but today’s modern teaching theory is turning such former juvenile pastimes into accepted university techniques.” 

Why Play Is Good for Planners 

Paulo Sandroni, an economist and now retired professor at the Getulio Vargas Foundation in São Paulo, Brazil, who has collaborated with the Lincoln Institute and developed simulators and games of his own, believes games are particularly useful for teaching urban planners.  

“Urban planners in general are decision makers, and a game gives them the opportunity to practice and to play in an arena of trade-offs; if I want more of X, I will have less of Y,” Sandroni said. “Urban planners deal with a whole city, a very complex organism. In other professions there are limitations because they deal with more specific subjects, but games can be adapted to any situation that requires choosing different ways to solve a problem.”  

“You can face in real time, even if simplified, the same questions and same problems that the real decision makers do in their professional lives,” Pérez Macías said.  

The physical aspect of games like GIROS may be particularly useful for urban planners, who are more physical by nature of their interest in the design of the built environment, said Daphne Kenyon, resident fellow in tax policy at the Lincoln Institute. Kenyon helped facilitate the play of PLUS, a condensed spinoff of GIROS, at the national American Planning Association conference in April 2019. Over the course of the APA session, planners moved between chairs and tables that represented housing units and plots of land. At the conclusion of the first round, when a lack of government intervention had led the players who were in the role of developers to overproduce for the rich and underproduce for the poor, a group of professionally dressed real-life planners huddled together on the floor in an effort to signify their homelessness. Vue explains that students’ physical interaction with a game or the creation of new objects provides more options to represent their thinking and communicate the reasoning behind their actions. 

Role-playing games like GIROS also help students inhabit perspectives they might not otherwise, says Kenyon, who plans to use a condensed version of the game in an economics course she teaches at Brandeis University. Kenyon thinks the game might challenge some of her students’ assumptions by forcing them to see the challenges that developers, in particular, can face in city-building scenarios.  

The Lincoln Institute’s games are also part of a larger response to a persistent trend: Many urban planning master’s programs, whether in the United States or Latin America, offer limited or no instruction in urban economics and property taxation as part of their core curriculum. Instead, they focus more narrowly on urban design and the physical nature of cities. Smolka and others see games and other active learning techniques as a way to fill this gap. As Smolka explained, “GIROS is designed to teach the kind of professional who is averse to equations or formulas the fundamentals of how land prices are determined and how norms and regulations affect public revenues.”  

In the past few decades, as municipalities have increasingly rejected top-down planning processes, serious games have become an increasingly popular tool to aid public processes and help leaders think through real scenarios with real data.  

Play the City, an Amsterdam-based firm whose tagline is “serious gaming for smart and social cities,” believes gaming has the potential to replace traditional formats of civic engagement. The company designs physical games tailored to specific cities that bring stakeholders together to address issues including affordable housing, urban expansion, climate change, and participatory design. Play the City is also committed to documenting games that improve city making, and maintains a database that includes GIROS.  

The Latin America Context  

The Lincoln Institute currently uses GIROS and other games primarily in Latin America, where the majority of the organization’s courses—which focus on formal and informal urban land markets, land value capture, urban redevelopment projects, and other related topics—are offered. While some local governments in the region have embraced the role of games in the planning process, academics have traditionally been less willing to use games in university classrooms.  

Sandroni thinks that hesitancy can be attributed to a lack of time, financing, and exposure to these teaching aids. He first started experimenting with using games in his classroom in the 1990s. He noticed that students were always playing cards between classes, so he developed two card games of his own, bringing them into the formal setting of the classroom. Since 1999, he has run O Jogo da Economia Brasileira (Game of the Brazilian Economy), a national tournament in which economics students from across the country compete and gain an understanding of exchange rates, inflation, foreign debt, and other concepts. By supporting teachers and modeling the use of games in the classroom, Sandroni said, “the Lincoln Institute is really pioneering the use of games in education in Latin America.”  

Pérez Macías thinks the key to changing the cultural resistance toward games is to provide professional development opportunities so teachers can experience the games for themselves. At least that’s how it worked for him, he said. After taking his first Lincoln Institute course, where he was exposed to most of the Institute’s games that had been developed to date, Pérez Macías started taking additional courses in gamification and became a self-described gamification practitioner, incorporating spinoffs of GIROS into his own courses. He is now using a methodology called LEGO Serious Play that is generally used to facilitate meetings and communication in corporate settings, but which Pérez Macías has adapted as a tool to teach urban issues, like participatory design and negotiation and agreement building between urban stakeholders.

Gislene Pereira, a professor in architecture and urban planning at the Federal University of Paraná who first saw GIROS in 2009 in Caracas, says she appreciated that it allowed participants “to think with the logic of each agent of the city”—literally wearing many hats. She has since helped to oversee the development of a simplified version for use in courses for architecture and urbanism students and in training for city councilors on land policies, tax, and non-tax instruments.  

The appetite for games has grown in Latin America, a trend that was confirmed, at least anecdotally, by a weeklong course put on by the Lincoln Institute in Guatemala in early 2019. The course focused on using tools like games and tribunals, crosswords, and videos to teach land market and policy issues to urban planners (see sidebar). As part of the application process, applicants—some of whom had attended Lincoln Institute courses in the past—had to describe a tool they were already using in their classrooms. Of the 78 applications the Institute received, 34 said they used some type of game in their courses, with others citing the use of case studies, simulations, videos, and theater assignments.  

“We are seeing much more interest than we thought,” said Enrique Silva, director of International and Institute-Wide Initiatives at the Lincoln Institute. “In Guatemala, we saw that there is an audience and a willingness [for active learning tools], and most importantly a demand. There was a sense that people would love to be more engaged.” 

Looking Ahead  

The success of GIROS and other games in Latin America has paved the way for the Lincoln Institute to think more strategically and broadly about its pedagogical approach. “We started by thinking that if people acquired knowledge and skills about pressing global challenges and issues and how to address them through land policy, they would make good choices, implement good projects, and make the best use of limited resources to improve the quality of life in the community,” Vue explained. “With games, we’ve become more explicit about critical thinking skills like problem solving, social skills like teamwork and collaboration, and ethical behavior of the different interest groups that are crucial to navigating local and global challenges in the real world.”  

Moving forward, Vue hopes to roll out active learning approaches more consistently in the other regions where the Lincoln Institute offers courses and to encourage faculty to rethink the design of conventional courses, lectures, and presentations. The Learning Design program at the Lincoln Institute is embarking on new multimedia projects, including a case study on equitable revitalization in Cleveland that will be used in courses as far afield as Taiwan, and hopes to make many of its tools available on an e-learning platform.  

“As the Lincoln Institute thinks about its educational approach, the future may be less about what’s new, and more about how instructors can be most effective at tackling a persistent learning challenge,” Vue said. “The Lincoln Institute operates on a global stage because issues like climate change cross political and geographical boundaries and require change in strategic thinking and ethical behaviors. Through well-designed learning experiences that get people to collaborate, converse, teach, and learn with others who are different from them, people tend to be more humbled about what they don’t know, more open to different perspectives, and more likely to be inspired and feel supported to act globally.” Serious games are one approach, but to reach a diverse audience, Vue explains the Lincoln Institute needs to expand its palette of teaching strategies.  

In a sense, he believes the Lincoln Institute’s use of games is an active learning experiment in and of itself. “I am hoping that we can improve the current designs of our games each time we use them,” Vue said. “It doesn’t mean you make a dramatic change in the rules, instead [it’s] around ensuring that a range of participants can learn and succeed. Just because we design a game, doesn’t mean it’s done.”

Active Learning at Lincoln 

Ge Vue, associate director of Learning Design at the Lincoln Institute, said he encourages those who teach to think about active learning no matter what tool they’re using: “You can insert instances of active learning in a simple scenario statement in a PowerPoint [just as you might] in a more elaborate, multiday game.” In addition to games such as those described in this article, the Lincoln Institute employs a variety of student-centered, participatory active learning tools, including:  

Case Studies  

One of the Lincoln Institute’s newer active learning approaches is the use of case studies in the classroom. Over the past year, for example, the Lincoln Institute redesigned a conventional lecture on public-private partnerships into a teaching case study on the financing of Millennium Park in Chicago. The case study, which prompts critical thinking and interaction, was then used in a municipal finance executive education course in collaboration with the University of Chicago Harris School of Public Policy.  

Tribunals/Debates  

During a Lincoln Institute tribunal session, participants are given a particular proposition, with half of the group required to conduct research and argue in favor, and the other half against. The activity culminates with presentations, questions from other students in the course, and the final verdict of a pre-assigned “judge.” 

Theater Productions/Videos  

Palo Alto: Un Sistema Economica is a dramatic satire on political economy adapted to the Latin American context. It is based on the 1934 theater production of The Shovelcrats: A Satire on the Illusional Theory of Political Economy by the Schalkenbach Foundation and produced by the Colombia-based Teatro Vreve for use in Lincoln Institute courses. In recent years, teachers have provided students with a version of the script that excludes the final scene, asking students to write an ending.

Cartoons  

Produced by the Lincoln Institute and Brazil’s Ministry of Cities, Jose K. Tastro y las Directrices para el Catastro Territorial Multifinalitario represents common situations faced by municipal cadaster employees as they implement land information systems to meet the needs of the public and private sectors. A second cartoon, Jacinto Bené Fício and the Property Tax, tells the story of two cities, one with a well developed property tax system and the other with a poorly developed system. 

Crossword Puzzles  

The crossword puzzle, un juego de palabras, is used to help students review vocabulary and concepts and offers a less intimidating alternative to drill-based review techniques. The Lincoln Institute’s new crossword puzzle on informal markets asks readers to come up with words based on clues such as “who bears the burden of a charge to land values.”

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

Photograph: Participants in a Lincoln Institute course in Santa Domingo, Dominican Republic, play a round of GIROS. The teams wear hats to indicate their roles. Credit: Anne Hazel.

References 

Abt, Clark C. 1970. Serious Games. New York, NY: Viking Press.  

Bereitschaft, Bradley. 2016. “Gods of the City? Reflecting on City Building Games as an Early Introduction to Urban Systems.” Journal of Geography. 115 (2): 51–60. https:// www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00221341.2015.1070366.  

Play the City. “Games for Cities Database.” http://gamesforcities.com/database/.  

Roy, Jessica. 2019. “From Video Game to Day Job: How ‘SimCity’ Inspired a Generation of City Planners.” Los Angeles Times. March 5. http://gamesforcities.com/database/http://gamesforcities.com/database/.  

Tóth, Eszter. 2014. “Potential of Games in the Field of Urban Planning.” In New Perspectives in Game Studies: Proceedings of the Central and Eastern European Game Studies Conference Brno 2014, ed. Tomáš Bártek, Jan Miškov, Jaroslav Švelch, 71–91. Brno, Czech Republic: Masaryk University. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/311233864_Potential_of_Games_in_the_ Field_of_Urban_Planning.

In 1879, a delegation of officials from Detroit took a steamship across Lake Erie to Cleveland, where they examined the nation’s first electric streetlights. Three weeks earlier, inventor and engineer Charles Brush had flipped the switch on a dozen “arc lamps” in a public square in the latter city. “Most people seemed struck with admiration,” reported Cleveland’s Plain Dealer newspaper, “both by the novelty and brilliancy of the scene.”  

Detroit quickly embraced the new lighting technology, as did other major cities including San Francisco and Boston. In other places, including Brush’s own Cleveland, leaders debated whether to make the switch from gas lamps. (They were still arguing the point a few years later when Brush hired fellow Cleveland inventor John C. Lincoln to work at his company; the latter went on to found the Lincoln Electric Company and the Lincoln Foundation, which evolved into the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.)

Eventually, of course, electric streetlights became ubiquitous. During the 20th century, streetlight technology evolved gradually, with the carbon rods in Brush’s lamps giving way to Thomas Edison’s incandescent bulbs, then to mercury and sodium bulbs. In the past decade or so, that evolution has accelerated dramatically, thanks to two developments. First is the emergence of light-emitting diodes (LEDs), which offer considerable energy savings. Second is the more recent explosion of interest in outfitting streetlights with “smart city” technologies that go well beyond lighting—think everything from surveillance cameras to Wi-Fi hotspots.  

All of this underscores, and complicates, the often-overlooked role of streetlights in planning and land use. “A street lighting system is there for traffic safety, pedestrian safety, and to make people feel safe in cities where there may be high crime,” says Beau Taylor, executive director of Detroit’s Public Lighting Authority (PLA).  

More than a century after it installed those innovative arc lamps, Detroit was essentially forced back to the leading edge of lighting. By 2014, some 40 percent or more of its 88,000 sodium streetlights had become non-functioning at any given time. The city’s lighting infrastructure, spread over 139 square miles, had been designed for a thriving city of 2 million people in the 20th century. Maintaining it had become untenable.  

A $185 million bond funded 65,000 new LED streetlights, making Detroit the first large U.S. city to convert to LEDs. This upgrade was not just a matter of swapping out bulbs. The lighting from LEDs is different—a sodium bulb produces light that gradually tapers, while LEDs produce a more direct shaft that’s twice as bright—and Detroit’s population has shrunk, so planners had to install new poles in a revised configuration.  

Today the agency says the associated energy costs of the new lights are about half what they would have been with conventional lights. And an analysis by the Detroit Greenways Coalition, a policy and advocacy group, found that “pedestrian fatalities in dark, unlighted areas dropped drastically, from 24 in 2014 to just one in 2017,” concluding that the new lights were the primary factor.  

Those are significant outcomes. But there could be more to come: Detroit’s new streetlights are equipped with fixtures that can be retrofit to perform various “smart” functions. And this brings us to the technological revolution that has attached itself to the formerly humble streetlight.  

“When we use the word ‘smart,’ it means connected,” says Dominique Bonte, a vice president at consultancy ABI Research, which forecasts the smart streetlight market will grow 31 percent between 2018 and 2026. Lights that are connected by a network, whether Wi-Fi or fiber-optic cable, can be monitored or controlled remotely. These connections also open new possibilities, particularly as the more robust cellular network technology known as 5G rolls out over the next few years. “Streetlights, in the future, can become more like hubs or platforms,” Bonte continues.  

Streetlights are ideal for this role, as Austin Ashe, general manager for intelligent cities at GE subsidiary Current, explained to engineering trade publication IEEE Spectrum: “They have power, ubiquity, and the perfect elevation—high enough to cover a reasonable radius, low enough to capture a lot of important data.”  

This notion has already captured the imagination of cities around the world: if streetlights are already on every block, why not figure out what else they can do?  

A study by research firm IoT Analytics estimates the total number of connected streetlights in North America will reach as high as 14.4 million over the next five years, naming Miami as the city with the most extensive deployment of connected LED streetlights, with nearly 500,000. In Los Angeles, 165,000 networked streetlights are designed to serve as a kind of backbone for the deployment of other technologies, such as noise-detection sensors that monitor gunshots and other sounds. San Diego has tested streetlights outfitted with audio and visual surveillance technology, plus sensors that monitor temperature and humidity. In Kansas City, a new 2.2-mile downtown streetcar line is dotted with wi-fi kiosks, traffic sensors, and LED streetlights with security cameras attached, all linked by fiber-optic cable. And Cleveland is embarking on a $35 million effort to replace 61,000 fixtures with smart camera-enabled LED streetlights. Similar efforts are underway in Paris, Madrid, Jakarta, and other cities around the world.  

But as these experiments play out, concerns are coming into view. The ACLU and others take issue with the idea of camera-enabled streetlights watching the public’s every move, calling for government oversight to ensure that “smart cities” don’t become “surveillance cities.” As municipal enthusiasm for new technologies outpaces their regulation, some leaders are considering caution: “Technology is advancing at a rapid pace,” a San Diego City Council member told the Los Angeles Times. “As elected officials, we have to not only keep up with the increasing developments, but also ensure that the civil rights and civil liberties of our residents are protected.”  

And then there are the economics of it all. Streetlights can eat up to 40 percent of municipal energy bills, according to the U.S. Department of Energy, so basic efficiency upgrades tend to pay off over time. But as ABI’s Bonte points out, the return on investment for more elaborate projects isn’t always clear, and realizing the benefits can take decades.  

Looking ahead, Taylor of the Detroit PLA says his agency is tracking the experiments underway in other cities and participating in efforts to figure out which smart products or services might actually benefit the people of Detroit. If the city decides to, for example, add more public wi-fi to parks or other spaces, retrofitting the streetlights is an option. But that’s in the future. “Smart city technology is more of a multiplier effect for a street lighting system,” he says. “Our primary focus was getting the lights back on.”  

Even that comparatively cautious approach came with risks: In a frustrating development, the PLA found that lights supplied by one of its vendors are burning out far more quickly than they should. The city now has to swap out those lights, at a cost of around $9 million, and has sued the supplier.  

No wonder Taylor seems happy to wait and watch as others experiment. The last thing a city wants, given the pace of technology, is to have to overhaul its “smart” system a decade from now. “It’s not about getting it all done up front,” he says. “It’s about keeping options open.”

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

Photograph: The new generation of streetlights can do everything from monitor the weather to listen for gunshots. Many city officials view this as a boon, but some civil rights organizations are calling for strict regulations. Credit: Coolfire Solutions.

Ian McHarg me introdujo a la transección ecológica. Me situó de una forma única en la tierra donde hacía poco había llegado como estudiante desde la India, a 12.000 kilómetros de distancia. No solo estaba en Filadelfia; estaba en una línea dibujada desde los montes Apalaches que pasaba por la meseta Piedmont y llegaba a la llanura costera y el Océano Atlántico. La transección me resultaba familiar, ya que había aprendido acerca de la Sección del Valle de Patrick Geddes, a partir de su trabajo en la India en la década de 1910. Según sus palabras, era “esa pendiente general desde la montaña hasta el valle que encontramos en todas partes del mundo”.¹

Sin embargo, la transección no solo me situaba; también ofrecía un punto en común a los estudiantes de mi clase, que provenían de cinco continentes distintos. Cultivaba una visión del paisaje que llevaríamos a todas partes. Para muchos de nosotros, era como estar de nuevo en nuestros hogares.

Cada semana, llegábamos a un punto en la transección: las minas de carbón cerca de Scranton, el campo de rocas en la zona de Pocono, los bosques del Wissahickon, los prados cerca de Valley Forge, las cascadas de Manayunk, los lodazales y canales de Pine Barrens y las dunas en la costa de Jersey. Cavábamos fosas en el suelo, identificábamos vegetación, buscábamos pistas acerca de qué había sobre la superficie terrestre y debajo de esta, y en nuestras notas de campo armábamos el rompecabezas de la historia seccional de la tierra. En el taller, trabajábamos en grupos y nos familiarizábamos con sitios particulares de la transección. Cada uno de ellos era un área de 65 kilómetros cuadrados, representada por un mapa topográfico en el que identificábamos distintos suelos, vegetación, usos del suelo, laderas y geología. Resaltábamos las líneas de arroyos, terrenos anegables, humedales y acuíferos, y construíamos distinciones evidentes entre rasgos que pertenecían al suelo y los que pertenecían al agua. Si bien los mapas de base eran los mismos todos los años, usábamos una escala de 1 centímetro por 60 metros (1 pulgada por 500 pies) y nos enorgullecíamos de elegir nuestra paleta de colores, que se extendía en gradientes sutiles de verde, azul y marrón, tal vez en un intento por disolver los límites impuestos por el mapa, que no se correspondían con nuestra experiencia en el campo. Pero era inevitable que la transección en el campo retrocediera hasta ser un recuerdo distante, a medida que el mapa se convertía en el sitio principal de análisis y diseño. Después de todo, permitía hacer capas con la información de múltiples disciplinas sobre la misma superficie geográfica. Como estudiantes de diseño y planificación, nuestra tarea era responder al mapa. Esta fue nuestra experiencia en el taller 501 en la Universidad de Pensilvania en 1989, el taller de paisajismo fundamental iniciado por Ian McHarg y Narendra Juneja en uno de sus últimos años.

Diez años más tarde, me tocó enseñar el taller de paisajismo fundamental.² No llevaba a los alumnos a la transección de mis días como estudiante, sino a un lugar a partir del cual pudieran construir su propia transección. Llevaban cintas métricas, hilo, niveles improvisados, lápices, papel periódico, fichas y tiza. No llevaban mapas para orientarse, solo las páginas en blanco de sus cuadernos de bocetos, para empezar a negociar un terreno desconocido. Yo los alentaba a caminar, no tanto para que encontraran el camino, sino para que hicieran el propio. Algunos se abrían camino entre arroyo y cresta, otros entre bosque y restos industriales, y otros tantos entre humedales y corredores de infraestructura. Al igual que los supervisores de caminos frente a los ejércitos, a cargo de mapear territorios desconocidos, triangulaban entre puntos y los conectaban con líneas de vista y medición. Aprendían a prestar atención a los puntos que seleccionaban. Algunos eran fijos; otros, efímeros. También aprendían a valorar las líneas que los conectaban, y prestaban particular atención a la línea entre tierra y agua. Esta línea estaba colmada de controversia. Se sabía que cambiaba todos los días y todas las estaciones; pero en una tierra de colonos, también cambiaba a discreción. Aprendían a valorar la humedad en todas partes (en el suelo, el aire, las plantas, las rocas, las criaturas), en vez de aceptar la presencia del agua tal como se indicaba en los mapas. El terreno no se agotaba con una sola caminata. Cada vez, se caminaba de un modo diferente. Luego de triangular, los alumnos esbozaban, seccionaban y fotografiaban con ojos y oídos sintonizados en la medición y el movimiento, el material y el horizonte, la continuidad y la ruptura. Habían aprendido a ver cómo se disolvían estas distinciones y fronteras, y ahora empezaban a articular nuevas relaciones y límites.

Los alumnos aprendían qué se necesitaba para hacer un mapa. También aprendían qué se necesitaba para armar una transección. Se necesitaba atravesar. Atravesar es el acto de viajar por un terreno con el objetivo de registrar descubrimientos y también imponer una nueva imaginación. En este sentido, ya diseñaban mientras armaban una transección. El diseño estaba en los ojos con los que veían, las piernas con las que caminaban, las decisiones que tomaban, los instrumentos con los que medían. Aprendían lo que Geddes y McHarg sabían muy bien: que el paisaje y el diseño emergen en simultáneo en el acto de atravesar para armar una transección.

El trabajo en las paredes y los escritorios de los alumnos suscitaba una sonrisa y una fuerte inhalación, características de McHarg cada vez que entraba en mi taller 501, con las cuales expresaba un aprecio por las secciones y triangulaciones que se bocetaban en grafito, los montajes fotográficos que se armaban y los moldes de yeso que se preparaban. Era un aprecio que solo podría provenir de alguien que sabía que la transección le debía a la acción de atravesar.

Hoy, llevo a alumnos de talleres más avanzados a lugares de conflicto, pobreza y tragedia presente, como Bombay, Bangalore, las Ghats occidentales de la India, los desiertos de Rayastán, Jerusalén y Tijuana. Estos son lugares en laderas propias de montañas al mar, laderas que, según lo que creían Geddes y McHarg, “estaban en todas partes del mundo”. Pero soy muy consciente, como lo habrían sido ellos, de que estas “transecciones” son producto de los caminos atravesados por “diseñadores” previos a nosotros: agrimensores, exploradores, colonizadores, conquistadores. Sus transgresiones extraordinarias articularon los paisajes que se convirtieron en lo ordinario de estos lugares, incluso lo que se da por sentado como natural y cultural, suelo y agua, urbano y rural. En resumen, crearon las bases del conflicto de hoy. Sin duda, lo menos que podemos hacer en nombre de McHarg y Geddes es volver a atravesar estos lugares, atrevernos a una nueva imaginación que no necesariamente pretenda resolver problemas, sino mantener la transección viva como agente de cambio.

Anuradha Mathur, arquitecta y arquitecta paisajista, es profesora en el Departamento de Arquitectura Paisajista de la Escuela de Diseño Stuart Weitzman, Universidad de Pensilvania. Escribió junto a Dilip da Cunha Mississippi Floods: Designing a Shifting Landscape (Inundaciones en Mississippi: diseñar un cambio en el paisaje)Deccan Traverses: The Making of Bangalore’s Terrain (Travesías en Deccan: cómo se hizo el terreno de Bangalore) y Soak: Mumbai in an Estuary (Empapar: Bombay en un estuario). Ambos coeditaron Design in the Terrain of Water (Proyectar en el territorio del agua).

Notas

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

² Estuve a cargo del taller 501, el taller de paisajismo fundamental en el Departamento de Arquitectura Paisajista de la Universidad de Pensilvania, entre 1994 y 2014, con algunas pausas en el medio. Durante este período, tuve la oportunidad de trabajar junto a Katherine Gleason, Mei Wu y Dennis Playdon, y a partir de 2003, con mi compañero Dilip da Cunha. Les debo muchísimo a estos colegas, en especial a Dennis y Dilip, quienes aportaron estructura, opiniones profundas y un gran nivel de habilidad al 501, y me enseñaron el verdadero significado de atravesar un terreno.

La publicación de Design with Nature (Proyectar con la naturaleza) cambió el campo de la arquitectura paisajística para siempre. El libro, su punto de vista ecológico, el método racional y el autor también tuvieron un importante efecto positivo en mi propia vida y en mi carrera. La primera vez que escuché hablar de Ian McHarg fue de boca de unos compañeros de arquitectura de Seattle que se quedaron en mi departamento de Nueva York en 1966. Viajaban ida y vuelta a la península Delmarva para un taller sobre arquitectura paisajística en Harvard, donde Ian enseñaba durante un período sabático de la Universidad de Pensilvania. Me sorprendió un poco que estuvieran planificando para una península entera que abarcaba gran parte de dos estados.

Lo escuché hablar por primera vez en Seattle y lo conocí en marzo de 1971, cuando enseñaba con Grant Jones en la Universidad de Washington. Había venido a dar las conferencias de John Danz, que consistían, en gran parte, en extractos de Design with Nature.¹ Las tres conferencias se llamaban: “Man, Planetary Disease” (“El hombre, enfermedad planetaria”), “An Ecological Metaphysic” (“Una metafísica ecológica”) y “Design with Nature” (“Proyectar con la naturaleza”). Era fascinante. Su presentación de los problemas que surgían de nuestra ideología, política y hábitos de la práctica era convincente. Al igual que muchos otros, lo entendí. Entre las conferencias nocturnas y los eventos sociales, Ian se sentía perdido durante el día; entonces, venía a la escuela y pasaba el tiempo en nuestro taller. De cerca, era encantador, cálido y amable con los estudiantes, quienes preparaban un plan de ordenamiento paisajístico para Bainbridge Island. Fue un crítico astuto y generoso con Grant y conmigo. Un año más tarde, fui a Europa a trabajar en una historia paisajística del sur de Inglaterra, y para estudiar la sociología del dominio público de Roma.

Gracias a una feliz coincidencia, me incorporé al cuerpo docente de la Universidad de Pensilvania en 1974, en un momento en que el Departamento de Arquitectura Paisajística y Planificación Regional contó con una rica presencia de científicos naturales y sociales, además de arquitectos paisajistas, arquitectos y planificadores, entre su cuerpo docente. El currículo era ambicioso, abarcador y agotador, pero emocionante y notablemente productivo en la investigación, la enseñanza y la producción de futuros educadores y profesionales que se fueron a todas partes del mundo y difundieron el mensaje de Design with Nature. Desde entonces, el análisis ecológico (la integración de datos mediante técnicas de superposición y un método interactivo basado en una matriz para planificar y diseñar a un rango de escalas propuesto por Ian y nuestro currículo) se ha infiltrado en los métodos de trabajo de las prácticas de diseño, los currículos de enseñanza en las instituciones académicas y los organismos públicos de todo el país y el mundo.

Ian tenía veinte años en 1940, y la Segunda Guerra Mundial había empezado. Su juventud se suspendió mientras estallaba puentes como comando tras líneas enemigas. Luego, fue parte de una generación que quería arreglar las cosas, no cometer los errores de las generaciones anteriores.

Los pensamientos marxistas y freudianos, que habían tenido una influencia sobre los empeños intelectuales durante varias décadas antes de la guerra, fueron reemplazados por una nueva perspectiva: el estructuralismo, que ofrecía significado y métodos a disciplinas desde la lingüística y la literatura hasta la filosofía y la ecología, e incluso la economía y el diseño, durante los 50 y los 60. El mundo intelectual, académico y profesional de los años de posguerra estaba empapado de un pensamiento de sistemas instrumentales y la creencia de que debían aplicarse la razón y los métodos racionales, sin importar el campo y el tema. McHarg aprovechó sus estudios de grado en Harvard para realizar un curso intensivo de ciencia, sociología y teoría de planificación urbana. Estaba decidido a desarrollar un método y una práctica para planificar paisajes que fueran objetivos, no subjetivos; que fueran tan racionales y replicables como las ciencias duras, no intuitivos y obstinados, “no como el diseño de los sombreros de dama”, diría él enfurecido. Paso a paso, desarrolló el currículo en la Universidad de Pensilvania con la ayuda del dinero para investigación que le permitía a él y a sus colegas considerar el problema de la vivienda humana y los problemas más fundamentales de la planificación y diseño de comunidades a una escala desde vecindarios hasta regiones fisiográficas.

En sintonía con varios científicos naturales que se habían convertido en figuras públicas, McHarg usó la televisión nacional para defender la planificación ambiental. No cabe duda de que su retórica, su presentación y sus publicaciones tuvieron una influencia importante en la creación y los primeros años de la Agencia de Protección Ambiental y las leyes de Agua Limpia y Aire Limpio, de los mandatos de Lyndon Johnson y Richard Nixon, en los Estados Unidos. Los problemas que mencionó e intentó abordar (asuntos relacionados con salud, seguridad, asentamientos, recursos, ecología y capacidad de recuperación) siguen siendo los más importantes que enfrentamos, y hoy parecen ser más evidentes y graves que en su momento más estridente.

A veces, la gente me pregunta cómo era el departamento, o me sugiere que piensa que McHarg era indiferente con el diseño. Sencillamente, no es cierto. Otros especularon que Bob Hanna, Carol Franklin, otros diseñadores profesionales y yo éramos una especie de antídoto de diseño para el llamado método. De hecho, con el apoyo y la convicción de Ian, intentábamos demostrar que la ciencia y la ecología no se oponían al diseño, sino que lo respaldaban cuando se trabajaba bien, que en realidad eran parte de la implementación.

Él intentó aclarar esto en un libro que extendía sus ideas a la ecología humana, pero el volumen esperado “Design for Man” (“Proyectar para el hombre”) nunca se concretó, en parte debido a las dificultades irresolubles inherentes a la ciencia social. En el análisis final, la arquitectura paisajística no es una ciencia. Al igual que la arquitectura, es un arte útil, que utiliza los descubrimientos y los conocimientos de la ciencia junto con los conocimientos del arte, la destreza, el diseño y la construcción para atender las necesidades humanas en entornos sociales. Eso lo sabíamos, y debatíamos hasta el cansancio que, en cierto punto, nuestros estudiantes debían cargar todos sus análisis a la espalda como un paracaídas y saltar, con la esperanza de lograr un aterrizaje suave y no chocar. Les comunicaba sus opciones como profesionales éticos, acerca de costos, seguridad, salud y resultados ambientales. Las ideas de McHarg eran una guía y se debían usar como listas de verificación sobre responsabilidad, no como un conjunto de reglas que limitan la imaginación, y como una restricción de la estupidez y la ignorancia, no de la creación.

Me di cuenta de que el método de superposición para examen, comparación e interacción entre varios factores y temas (naturales, sociales, históricos, teóricos) podría ser tan estimulante y útil para construir y crear un esquema mediante consideraciones aditivas como lo era para escarbar en los factores históricos y naturales para elaborar matrices de idoneidad, lo cual resulta interesante. En más de veinte proyectos con Peter Eisenman, exploré superponiendo capas de información y proyectando hacia el futuro, con la intención de encontrar estructuras de diseño alternativas, soluciones formales y artísticas a problemas complejos de planificación y diseño. Algunos ejemplos de mi trabajo, construido y no construido, son el centro Wexner de la Universidad Estatal de Ohio; el parque Rebstock en Frankfurt, Alemania; y la Ciudad de la Cultura en Santiago de Compostela, España. Después de muchos proyectos algo experimentales, también descubrí que los procesos naturales y la ecología son metáforas poderosas que han sido de gran ayuda y una inspiración en mi trabajo. Varios de mis proyectos más recientes derivan de reflexiones y análisis profundos de la historia ecológica, para lograr una comprensión de un lugar y una situación, y diseños físicos complejos y receptivos. La comunidad residencial en el campus norte de la Universidad de Washington, en Seattle, que se completó hace poco, Apple Park en Cupertino, California, y Los Angeles River Master Plan actual de OLIN, que está en desarrollo, y sus proyectos piloto, son ejemplos de este enfoque.

En las últimas dos décadas, McHarg y Design with Nature recibieron varias críticas, que son tan inapropiadas y están tan mal informadas como el menosprecio hacia Frederick Law Olmsted y sus parques por parte de una generación reciente de profesionales. Sin embargo, la mayor parte de la crítica a McHarg se centró en los medios, los métodos y los datos del trabajo, y argumentan que están desactualizados y son simplistas. Hay algo de cierto en esto, debido a que los sistemas estructurales de pensamiento son políticos y moralistas por naturaleza; es inevitable que surjan asuntos éticos, ya sea en ciencia, humanidades o profesiones. Los debates en el departamento y en su propia oficina acerca de la planificación y el diseño solían centrarse en asuntos sociales, más que biológicos; en particular, los miedos al determinismo derivados de métodos particulares para responder a los datos, los datos mismos, los costos y beneficios que resultaban del peso relativo asignado a varios factores y el papel de la imaginación, la política y el albedrío en las decisiones humanas. Es indudable que las tecnologías usadas para detección remota, mapeo, y procesos y cómputos digitales ahora son más sofisticadas. Del mismo modo, en las ciencias sociales los métodos cuantitativos evolucionaron, al igual que las preocupaciones por relaciones humanas y economías complejas y polémicas y todo tipo de grupos que no se tenían en cuenta hace cincuenta años. Sin embargo, la percepción y el enfoque fundamentales de Ian, a pesar de su método (imperfecto, como son inevitablemente todas las formas de investigación), le otorgan un marco a la planificación paisajística y regional de hoy. A pesar de todos los desarrollos en sistemas de información geográfica, ninguno ha demostrado que él estuviera trabajando en los problemas incorrectos, ni que esos problemas no siguen siendo de vital importancia en la actualidad. Asimismo, sus detractores han subestimado la responsabilidad de Ian de crear el contexto profesional en que los arquitectos paisajistas y los planificadores operan hoy; los profesionales de hoy se centran en preocupaciones similares y usan la tecnología que él promovió y recomendó.

Ian fue una fuerza que cambió nuestra perspectiva para siempre, pero también era una persona muy humana y contradictoria. Si bien a veces podía ser difícil de tratar, era muy leal y devoto con sus amigos y familiares, y demostraba un orgullo feroz y una protección absoluta con respecto a su cuerpo docente, se peleaba y hacía las paces con ellos a nivel social y privado, en revisiones y reuniones de claustro. Todo en un esfuerzo infinito por mejorar nuestro trabajo, nuestras vidas y el planeta. Uno de mis recuerdos más preciados es de él parado sobre un tronco, iluminado desde atrás por el sol abrasador, con un pantalón de piyama, un cigarrillo en una mano y una manguera en la otra, regando la inmensa huerta de su granja en Marshallton, condado de Chester, Pensilvania. Ovejas, cerdos y vacas de tierras altas deambulaban en el fondo mientras él mojaba el embrollo de plantas clasificadas en hileras y tarareaba su canción favorita de Coleman Hawkins. Ian siempre entendió que los humanos son parte de la naturaleza, y que solo comprendiendo la ecología y mediante acciones constructivas podríamos salvarnos y tener una buena vida.

Laurie Olin es uno de los arquitectos paisajistas más reconocidos en actividad. Desde la visión hasta la concreción, ha liderado muchos de los proyectos de la firma OLIN, entre otros el territorio del Monumento a Washington en Washington, DC; Bryant Park en Nueva York y el centro Getty en Los Ángeles. Es profesor emérito de arquitectura paisajística en la Universidad de Pensilvania y expresidente del Departamento de Arquitectura Paisajística en la Universidad de Harvard.

Notas

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