En la ciudad ecuatoriana de Durán, más del 70 por ciento de los 325.000 residentes estimados no tienen servicio de agua potable ni alcantarillado. Deben comprar agua transportada por camiones cisterna, una situación precaria y aparentemente insostenible que ha persistido durante casi 40 años. Cuando un equipo de periodistas se dispuso a investigar las razones de la inadecuada infraestructura de agua de Durán —y descubrió parte del encubrimiento del gobierno y la corrupción del sector privado detrás de esta—, comenzó a recibir amenazas de violencia.

Sin embargo, el equipo perseveró y publicó una serie de investigaciones multimedia, en la que se describe con gran detalle cómo la colusión entre los actores gubernamentales y el sector privado ha restringido el acceso al servicio básico de agua potable para la mayoría de la población de Durán. En octubre de este año, el Instituto Lincoln de Políticas de Suelo reconoció el trabajo de dos periodistas involucrados en el proyecto —Leonardo Gómez Ponce y otra persona cuyo nombre no se revela debido a amenazas continuas— con el Premio Lincoln 2024 (Premio Lincoln) al Periodismo sobre políticas urbanas, desarrollo sostenible y cambio climático. Ambos beneficiarios forman parte de la Unidad de Investigación Tierra de Nadie. El premio, ahora en su tercer año, se presentó como parte de la prestigiosa Conferencia Latinoamericana de Periodismo de Investigación 2024 (COLPIN) y reconoce al mejor periodismo de política de suelo en América Latina y el Caribe.

Ponce y otros ganadores del Premio Lincoln se unieron a una mesa redonda, moderada por Laura Mullahy, Senior Program Manager del Instituto Lincoln, el día 3 de la conferencia anual COLPIN, celebrada este año en Madrid. El organizador del evento de cuatro días fue el Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (IPYS), con sede en Lima, Perú.

Los periodistas enviaron 265 obras para el Premio Lincoln este año, dice Mullahy, más del doble del número recibido en cada uno de los primeros dos años. Dichas obras se extendían por todo el mapa, tanto literalmente (representando 63 ciudades en 22 países) como en relación con los temas tratados. La escasez de agua, el cambio climático y la vivienda fueron temas predominantes, al igual que las investigaciones sobre conflictos de suelo, migración climática, asentamientos informales y uso ilegal o injusto de la tierra.

Mullahy dice que la profundidad y la tenacidad de los informes fueron inspiradoras. Algunos de los periodistas ganadores dedicaron varios años a la investigación y escritura de sus reportajes. Dice: “Me emocionan un poco estos premios porque son personas tan dedicadas”. Mullahy también se enorgullece de que dos de los ganadores hayan participado en cursos del Instituto Lincoln para periodistas latinoamericanos en el pasado, que se diseñaron para presentarles los conceptos básicos de la política de suelo.

A continuación, encontrará los ganadores del Premio Lincoln 2024 al Periodismo sobre políticas urbanas, desarrollo sostenible y cambio climático, junto con enlaces a su trabajo (vea los ganadores de 2023 aquí).

Ganadores del Premio Lincoln 2024

Primer premio: Leonardo Gómez Ponce y colega por la serie Durán, los hijos del tren y las mafias del agua, una investigación de años publicada por la revista ecuatoriana Tierra de Nadie.

La plataforma en línea para esta serie de investigación de varias partes y muy informativa se abre con un conteo en tiempo real de los más de 38 años (cada mes, día, hora y segundo) que el 70 por ciento de los residentes de la ciudad de Durán, Ecuador, han pasado sin agua potable ni sistemas de alcantarillado en funcionamiento.

“Este es un ejemplo de cómo las empresas sin escrúpulos pueden limitar la planificación y el desarrollo de la infraestructura de una ciudad”, dice Mullahy. “El comité de selección valoró la calidad de la investigación, la contribución de datos y documentación de respaldo, y la clara demostración de que, sin infraestructura de servicios básicos, las poblaciones permanecen en la pobreza y no es posible progresar”.

Segundo premio: Alexánder Marín Correa, Juan Camilo Parra, Miguel Ángel Vivas, Camilo Tovar Puentes, María Angélica García Puerto y Juan Camilo Beltrán, por “Escasez de agua en Bogotá: ¿Cómo llegamos a este punto? ”, publicado por El Espectador en Colombia.

Producido por un grupo de periodistas del periódico colombiano El Espectador, en este artículo se narra cómo una combinación de factores históricos, ambientales y de gestión condujo a una catástrofe sanitaria en Bogotá.

En el artículo se relata cómo la capital de Colombia ha experimentado un rápido crecimiento y una mayor demanda de agua, mientras que la deforestación y el cambio climático han disminuido las fuentes de agua. La situación se ve agravada por la contaminación de los ríos y la falta de infraestructura adecuada. En el artículo se muestra claramente que la gestión del agua ha sido ineficiente, lo que ha provocado problemas de distribución y acceso inequitativo. Este contexto plantea un desafío urgente para garantizar el suministro sostenible de agua a la población de Bogotá.

Tercer premio: Aramís Castro, por “Boom inmobiliario en la Amazonía del Perú agudiza la pérdida de bosques”, publicado por OjoPúblico en Perú.

En el artículo de Castro se analiza cómo la especulación inmobiliaria está contribuyendo a la deforestación en la Amazonía peruana, lo que demuestra cómo la venta de tierras rurales está transformando regiones como San Martín y Ucayali, donde ya se han perdido miles de hectáreas de bosques.

Castro analizó cientos de anuncios en las redes sociales y descubrió que las empresas inmobiliarias privadas estaban promoviendo representaciones de edificios modernos en entornos arbolados y naturales y atrayendo a los compradores con lemas como “El nuevo Miami en la selva peruana”. Sin embargo, muchos de los lotes rústicos carecen incluso de servicios básicos de agua o alcantarillado y, a menudo, contribuyen a la degradación del ecosistema. La investigación muestra cómo la falta de regulación y control en la venta de tierras agrava la deforestación, la pérdida de biodiversidad y otros problemas ambientales.

Mención de honor 1: Lucía Viridiana Vergara García, Darío Ramírez, Isabel Mateos, Rodrigo Flores Esquinca, Alonso Esquinca Díaz, Erick Retana, Eduardo Mota y Eduardo Buendía, por “Aquí no cabe un tren” y “La Sedena arrasó la selva para construir 6 hoteles del Tren Maya”, producido por Mexicanos contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad en México.

En este artículo y el pódcast que lo acompaña, se analiza cómo la construcción del Tren Maya en México y los nuevos hoteles vinculados a este megaproyecto podrían causar daños irreversibles al medio ambiente, lo que contradice los argumentos a favor del desarrollo de las regiones por las que pasará el tren. El trabajo explora de manera clara y creativa el tema con ricos testimonios y plantea una serie de problemas con el proyecto: desde la tala de árboles y la falta de estudios técnicos y científicos de sus impactos ambientales hasta los efectos de la construcción en áreas arqueológicas protegidas y una biosfera declarada Patrimonio de la Humanidad por la Unesco en 2002.

Mención de honor 2: Daniel Fonseca por “¿Dónde vamos a vivir? Datos, proyectos e intentos de solución al problema de vivienda en América Latina”, publicado por Distintas Latitudes, Honduras.

En esta investigación periodística, realizada para Distintas Latitudes por la séptima generación de la Red LATAM de Jóvenes Periodistas, se explora la crisis de la vivienda en América Latina desde diferentes ángulos. Se destacan problemas, como el acceso a la vivienda, el aumento de la desigualdad y la falta de políticas inclusivas para grupos vulnerables como los jóvenes, las mujeres y la comunidad LGBTI.

En la serie, se examinan la dinámica del crecimiento urbano no planificado y cómo los gobiernos no han abordado adecuadamente la demanda de vivienda digna, y se busca arrojar luz sobre las condiciones actuales y proponer soluciones para garantizar el derecho a una vivienda adecuada en la región.

Mención de honor 3: Aitor Sáez por “Aguas revueltas: sequía y saqueo en México”, publicado por​ Pie de Página, México.

En esta serie de investigación, se describe la crisis del agua en 12 regiones de México. En el informe, se reflejan los diferentes conflictos relacionados con la falta de agua, que resultan tanto de la crisis climática como de la intervención humana directa, especialmente a través de la coerción del crimen organizado.

Mención de honor 4: Miguel Ángel Dobrich y Gabriel Farías, por “De la sequía a la inundación: el impacto sobre el trabajo en la zona costera de Uruguay, de Este a Oeste”, publicado por Amenaza Roboto en Uruguay.

En este artículo, se explora el impacto del cambio climático en las condiciones de trabajo en diferentes áreas de Uruguay, desde Valizas hasta Ciudad del Plata, y se describe cómo el clima extremo afecta a los pescadores artesanales, los trabajadores domésticos y otras personas que dependen de ecosistemas vulnerables. También se aborda la desigualdad y el riesgo de inundaciones en las comunidades costeras. La investigación combina datos geoespaciales y visualización avanzada para mostrar el impacto de estos cambios.

Mención de honor 5: Vinicius Sassine y Lalo de Almeida por “Cerco às aldeias” (“Asedio de aldeas”), publicado por Folha de São Paulo en Brasil.

En esta obra, se describe cómo las empresas mineras, o garimpos, roban la tierra, el agua y la salud de los grupos indígenas mundurukú, kayapó, nambikwara y yanomami de la Amazonía brasileña. En las áreas donde operan estas empresas mineras, los habitantes sufren enfermedades debido al contacto con el mercurio, que es el metal pesado tóxico utilizado para separar el oro del suelo. Se diagnostica a los niños con retrasos cognitivos y a los adultos con enfermedades físicas. Sin embargo, el Gobierno brasileño no tiene planes de poner fin a la minería ilegal.

Imagen principal: Un camión lleva agua a Durán (Ecuador), donde casi el 70 % de los residentes ha vivido sin agua potable durante décadas. Hace poco, un proyecto plurianual que investiga esta crisis ganó un premio de periodismo del Instituto Lincoln. Crédito: Unidad de Investigación Tierra de Nadie.

Urban planners, elected officials, representatives of nonprofit organizations, and others came together in the historic metropolis of Cairo in late 2024 to confront the relentless pressures that global cities are facing, at the World Urban Forum 12 convened by the United Nations Human Settlements Programme (UN-Habitat). The theme of the summit was “It all starts at home.”

Growing populations, a continuing housing crisis, and climate change–triggered disasters including floods, droughts, and fires—as well as vast destruction associated with military conflict—have brought new intensity to efforts to support burgeoning urban areas across the globe, particularly in the developing world.

At the closing ceremony, UN-Habitat Executive Director Anaclaudia Rossbach, noting that two-thirds of the world’s population resides in urban areas, highlighted the pivotal role of local governments in shaping cities and human settlements. Rossbach, previously the director of the Latin America and the Caribbean program at the Lincoln Institute, said the conference set new records of engagement, with 24,000 participants from 182 countries.

“The World Urban Forum is a uniquely relevant event for those concerned about the quality and promise of human settlements large and small,” said Enrique R. Silva, chief program officer at the Lincoln Institute. “It’s an event that tackles the complex nature of urban issues by embracing a diversity of voices, techniques, and tools. For the Lincoln Institute, the World Urban Forum is a key space in which we can demonstrate how land and land policy can provide effective solutions to address housing, climate, and public health concerns, among other global, national, and local policy priorities.”

At the summit’s Dialogue 4: Localizing Finance and Financing Localization, Silva lauded local government efforts to boost own-source revenues, especially revenues that can be generated through the property tax or land value capture. “A local government’s capacity to leverage and manage own-source revenue not only strengthens its local finances, but also demonstrates to national and multilateral funders that it has the ability to plan, finance, and deliver projects,” he said. “This capacity can help local governments access larger sources of funding for much-needed projects.”

Representatives from the Lincoln Institute delegation participated in panels and training sessions focused on financing local development, climate mitigation and resilience, land value capture, and affordable housing. They also took part in an open house presented by the Center for Geospatial Solutions and a special Urban Library event featuring municipal leaders and the Lincoln Institute book Mayor’s Desk: 20 Conversations with Local Leaders Solving Global Problems. That event included the governor of Cairo, Ibrahim Saber Khalil, who will be the next local leader interviewed in the ongoing Mayor’s Desk series. Other municipal leaders who participated in the panel, Mayors and Innovators: Replicable Strategies for Local Political and Technological Change, included Manuel de Araujo, mayor of Quelimane, Mozambique; Kostas Bakoyannis, former mayor of Athens; and Marvin Rees, former mayor of Bristol, England.

The issue of climate change remains prominent in any consideration of global cities and their future, said Amy Cotter, director of urban sustainability at the Lincoln Institute.

“In this unparalleled global conversation about all things urban, the context of a changing climate is ever present,” she said. “City leaders are very aware of their dual roles—both agent and victim of climate change impacts—and eager for levers of change that they can control. I was impressed with their level of engagement in our sessions on land-based climate finance and on preparing for a potential climate-induced population influx, and their commitment to putting ideas and approaches into practice back home.”

At the Urban Planning & City Solutions for Climate Mobility panel, Cotter acknowledged “the increasing difficulty of people to remain in precarious places” and offered ways that communities anticipating a potential influx of climate change–induced relocation can plan and prepare for that future, drawing from the recent working paper “Insights for Receiving Communities in Planning Equitable and Positive Outcomes Under Climate Migration.”

The Lincoln Institute continued to expand the knowledge base and create new resources on the topic of land-based climate finance. Economist Cynthia Goytia, lead author of the recently published working paper “Examining Opportunities and Challenges for Implementing Land-Based Financing Instruments for Funding Climate Action: A Study of Land Markets and Flood Risk Pricing in Different Contexts,” explored the ways cities can recoup the costs of resilience through value capture, at the session Financing Strategies and Smart Solutions for Cities Worldwide.

Luis Quintanilla, program analyst at the Lincoln Institute, led a training workshop on value capture and participated in Financing Urban Infrastructure: Innovative Options to Attract Investors. In collaboration with the Cities Forward initiative, the session Overcoming the Project Implementation Gap to Address Urban Sustainability and Resilience revealed the opportunity and benefit of land value capture for climate action.

Housing inadequacy—affecting an estimated 2.8 billion people worldwide—was the weighty topic at Meeting the Moment: Innovations in Housing Supply to Address Inequality in Cities, where Darla Munroe, director of Research and Cross-Cutting Initiatives at the Lincoln Institute, discussed the affordability of manufactured homes, as well as zoning reform efforts in the US aimed at increasing housing supply.

The Lincoln Institute has been engaged in UN-Habitat’s World Urban Forum summits for nearly 20 years.

Anthony Flint is a senior fellow at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, host of the Land Matters podcast, and a contributing editor of Land Lines.

Lead image: Anthony Flint of the Lincoln Institute, center, meets with Cairo Governor Ibrahim Saber Khalil, left, at the World Urban Forum. Khalil will be the next local leader profiled in the ongoing Mayor’s Desk series. Credit: Lincoln Institute.

The day after Hurricane Katrina made landfall on the Gulf Coast in August 2005, Jessica Dandridge-Smith turned 16. But instead of celebrating her milestone birthday at home, she and her family had evacuated from New Orleans, with what remained of her possessions stuffed into a single suitcase. When she eventually returned to the city, the suffering she saw—disproportionately wrought upon Black neighborhoods, and accompanied by a slow federal relief response—angered her. The pain and damage was the work of a violent storm, yes, but she recognized that Katrina had found a ruthless accomplice in centuries of structural racism and policy failures.

So began a two-decade career in community organizing and advocacy. For the past five years, as the executive director of the Water Collaborative of Greater New Orleans, Dandridge-Smith has been working to “actualize water as a human right” in southeast Louisiana, she says. That involves lifting community voices in pursuit of systemic, sustainable changes around water issues—everything from nature-based stormwater solutions and flood-risk reduction to ensuring water access and affordability. One of the questions guiding her work, she says, is, “What does it look like to turn community perspectives into policy?”

Her dedication to answering that question led Dandridge-Smith to Cambridge, Massachusetts, last spring, where the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the University of Massachusetts Amherst convened a two-day roundtable discussion on climate migration.

The event’s roughly two dozen attendees came from all corners of the United States, representing research and academic institutions, community-based and other nonprofits, municipal governments, utilities, and regional planning agencies, among other organizations. During their time together, they shared lived and learned knowledge and unique perspectives from their communities. And they talked about how to plan and prepare for an inevitability: As the impacts of climate change intensify, making life inconvenient or intolerable in places more prone to drought, wildfire, or flooding, people will increasingly relocate to safer places.

These moves may happen slowly, with forethought, given the means; or abruptly, out of necessity, in the face of disaster. They may take people just up the road, or to places that have been touted as “climate havens,” such as the Great Lakes region or northern New England.

Some attendees, like Dandridge-Smith, came from disaster-prone areas. Others live in receiving communities—places anticipating an influx of newcomers displaced by climate change. “We’ve had stagnant population growth in the county for years and years,” says Mike Foley, who heads up Cuyahoga Green Energy in Ohio, a county-owned utility tasked with creating renewable electricity microgrids. Foley notes that Cleveland had three times as many residents just 60 years ago. “So we’re able to be a receiving community, theoretically.”

Over the course of the two days, however, some recurring themes emerged, as described in a recent working paper. One of the more surprising conclusions that surfaced was a somber one: There’s no such thing as a climate haven—no place is fully, truly sheltered from climate risk.

Where People Go, and Why

Attendees from Vermont, often dubbed a climate haven, recounted how the fear and flooding residents faced during Hurricane Irene in 2011 returned just over a decade later in July 2023, when heavy downpours flooded the state capital and other areas, causing $2.2 billion in damage across northern New England and New York. The same realization would strike again with fiercer clarity the following year, when Western North Carolina, long considered a climate haven with a relatively low risk of drought, wildfire, or sea level rise, suffered catastrophic flooding in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene. The storm and related flash flooding left at least 96 dead in North Carolina and caused an estimated $53 billion in damage.

These events make it clear that no place can truly be considered immune to climate change, which made all those storms stronger and more damaging. But with projections showing that by 2100, at least 13 million Americans will be displaced by sea level rise alone—to say nothing of wildfire, extreme heat, or drought—some areas do present fewer or more tolerable risks than others. That doesn’t just mean so-called “climate havens” halfway across the country. It can also include crosstown neighborhoods a few miles inland that are less susceptible to flooding, or downtown apartment blocks that are safer from wildfires than those on a city’s outskirts.

So what can cities and regions do to prepare for large-scale, climate-induced population shifts? The convening of this cross-sectoral, multidisciplinary group—which may have been the first of its kind dedicated to climate mobility, says Amy Cotter, director of urban sustainability at the Lincoln Institute—elicited valuable insights that can guide planners, elected officials, and researchers attempting to answer that question. “We gained so much from having such a rich variety of perspectives in that conversation,” Cotter says, noting that the participants shared a wealth of hard-earned lessons and engaged in the kind of policy pollination that helps advance both creative and time-tested strategies.

One of the early insights to emerge from the roundtable was the very different needs of people and communities impacted by climate mobility, depending on the context. A Californian who takes a new job in the Midwest after one too many close calls with wildfire is arriving under very different circumstances than a family who just lost their home to a hurricane, for example.

To that end, it’s helpful to distinguish between “fast” and “slow” relocation. The former commonly occurs in a state of urgency after a disaster, as a result of displacement, and can often be temporary in nature. Slow climate relocation, on the other hand, tends to be a more permanent and deliberate decision influenced by myriad factors. These could include typical concerns like job opportunities and housing costs, but also fatigue from successive climate impacts, such as repeated fire evacuation warnings or sunny-day flooding incidents.

That distinction carries major equity implications, Cotter says, and determines what kind of support and resources newcomers and their receiving communities will need. “People who are confronted by crisis have no choice but to relocate. But this slow migration is also happening; it’s poorly understood, and it’s being done by people who have the wherewithal to make a choice to move,” she says.

In most cases, though, people tend to relocate where they can find opportunity, safety, and connection—be that family, friends, or a familiar cultural environment.

Sometimes that brings them only a few miles away, to the nearest safer place within their metro area. Other times, their new home is more distant, but along an existing cultural corridor. After Hurricane Maria devastated Puerto Rico in 2017, for example, tens of thousands of residents left the island, many resettling within existing Puerto Rican communities in Florida, Pennsylvania, New York, and Massachusetts, as this data visualization by Teralytics shows.

“Regardless of whether they’re moving in response to a crisis or because they’re making a choice to avoid a future unlivable situation, people are going where they have relationships,” Cotter says. “And that’s why we’re seeing people move to nearby locations or places that might be distant, or even . . . other places that are also in harm’s way. It’s because that’s where they have relationships or can find something affordable, not necessarily because they’re choosing some place with empirically lower risk.”

Those existing cultural and economic pathways could provide clues about who will migrate where, and inform the kinds of infrastructure—both hard infrastructure like transit, power grids, and water supplies, and soft, or social, infrastructure like health and human services—that communities need to settle newcomers in a sustainable, equitable way.

What the South Can Teach the North

When it comes to displacement and fast relocation, participants agreed that places in the northern United States could learn a lot from their southern counterparts, which have historically dealt with disasters more frequently. The five Gulf Coast states of Texas, Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, and Florida, for example, have experienced as many billion-dollar disasters in just the past five years as the entire Northeast region did from 1980 to 2018 (even adjusted for inflation), according to National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration data.

But the changing climate has left the North increasingly vulnerable. After averaging just one or two major disasters a year for three decades, the Northeast is now seeing about seven of them annually. (The Gulf Coast states averaged nearly two billion-dollar disasters per month in 2023.) And because most people tend to evacuate to the nearest safe place where they have family or friends, southern cities and organizations also have lessons to share with receiving communities in the North.

Legal aid nonprofits in the South, for example, have more experience navigating federal disaster assistance programs and securing relief funds for communities and evacuees. Dandridge-Smith and other attendees from the South were also surprised to learn that few participants from the Northeast had solid evacuation plans in place—even if such plans exist on paper, they’re not top of mind in the way they are in more disaster-prone areas—and that regional coordination on such matters is limited.

“That was definitely a wide awakening experience,” Dandridge-Smith says. “Without that emergency preparedness planning—and that requires communication, at every level of government, preparing people in advance and post-event—community members are not going to know how to react.”

New Orleans has always been a challenging place to live, she says, going back hundreds of years. But that redundancy helps build resiliency, at both the municipal and personal level. “Being in Louisiana after a hurricane is an amazing sight, because we’ve done it so many times that there is no panic. There’s sadness, and there’s frustration, and maybe even fear, but I’ve never seen people come together the way that Louisianans do,” she says. “Whatever happens in the future of the climate crisis, Louisianans will still be there, we can survive anything. And that’s not just a testament to our resilience, it is also a testament to learned resilience.”

Dandridge-Smith and others don’t love the way the current climate conversation tends to focus on resilience, since it subtly places a burden on people to endure more hardship than they should have to. But the hard-won tenacity of the New Orleans community helped spark an innovative and potentially replicable initiative she highlighted at the roundtable event.

“After Hurricane Ida, some people didn’t have power for weeks,” Dandridge-Smith explains. “What ended up happening is that people who did have power, whether they were on a different grid or maybe they had a generator, they took extension cords and put them in their front lawn, and people could come and charge their phone or computer, or medical equipment. And a lot of the churches got involved in that as well.”

That inspired a group called Together New Orleans to form the Community Lighthouse program, a coalition of 85 faith-based organizations that will act as community resilience hubs during power outages. Each lighthouse—including churches, temples, mosques, and other institutions across the city—will be equipped with commercial-scale solar panels and backup batteries, so they can act as emergency cooling or heating centers during a power outage and provide food, charging for light medical equipment and communications devices, and other essential services.

After Hurricane Francine caused power outages in September, nine of the first Community Lighthouse locations, four of them completely solar- and battery-powered, served some 2,300 residents. Each pilot location is being equipped with a trained disaster response team—the “human infrastructure” so crucial in these kinds of crises—and can provide aid organizations like the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) or the Red Cross with a trusted location from which to distribute supplies, food, communications, and other assistance to residents. Such centralized response centers could also be set up in communities receiving evacuees, where newcomers typically need help finding housing, applying for disaster assistance, enrolling their kids in local schools, and generally getting settled and stabilized in a new community.

Affordable Housing and Climate Relocation

While there are still a lot of unknowns around slow migration—for example, what are the tipping points that push people to relocate, and where or how far away do they go?—Cotter contends that housing costs are a central issue. “We’re already seeing climate relocation, but trends show people have been moving toward harm rather than away from it,” she says, often lured by housing affordability. The most fire- and flood-prone counties in the US, particularly those in Texas and Florida, continue to see a net inflow of new residents, according to Redfin.

“Looking at the map of domestic migration and housing cost burdens, it’s impossible to ignore the fact that people are accepting more risk to find a place that’s affordable for their families,” Cotter says. “And that’s a trade-off they’re being forced to make because of policies that leave us with a lack of affordable housing, particularly in low-risk places.”

Americans have been moving to the Sun Belt for decades, ever since home air conditioning became commonplace in the 1960s. The Phoenix metro area, for example, saw its population more than double between 1950 and 1970 (to over 1 million), then double again by 1990 (to 2.2 million), and then double again by 2020 (to 4.8 million)—despite increasingly long and scorching heat waves that now kill hundreds of residents each year. The median Phoenix home sold for $451,000 in October, according to Redfin; that’s around the national average, but less than half the price of homes in San Diego ($950,000) or Los Angeles ($1,040,000).

Meanwhile, in California and other places in the US, as urban sprawl (combined with restrictive zoning and parking rules) pushed new home construction into exurban areas—further into the wildland-urban interface, where nature and humans collide—millions more people moved into areas at risk of wildfire in recent decades, just as climate change was making those fires more frequent and more severe. The LA County wildfires in early 2025 served as a frightening reminder of this truth.

Getting more people to choose relative safety over climate risk, then, means creating more affordable homes and neighborhoods in safer places.

That’s a challenge Maulin Mehta is trying to address as New York director for the Regional Plan Association. In terms of climate mobility, the New York metro area—like many others—could be viewed as both a sending and receiving community. Parts of the city have already succumbed to the effects of climate change—hundreds of New York homeowners participated in voluntary buyout and acquisition programs after Hurricane Sandy, a storm made more severe by climate change—and sea level rise threatens many more homes. Some 52,000 New York City homes would be at risk from a (soon-to-be routine) five-foot flood, according to Climate Central. Yet the economic and cultural gravity of America’s largest metropolis continues to draw a steady stream of new arrivals.

The region is already in the grip of a housing crisis, Mehta says, and climate change will only exacerbate that as more areas become uninhabitable. So creating the conditions to encourage more housing—especially in suburbs that have long used exclusive zoning to stifle growth—is fundamental to the region’s future.

“We’ve been trying to figure out how we can promote zoning reform at scale to facilitate broader housing supply, without concentrating it on specific communities and specific areas that might be more open to development, because one neighborhood is not going to solve the housing crisis for the entire state,” Mehta says. “We’ve seen some more reverse commuting from New York City out to the suburbs, because there’s no place to live in the suburbs. So we’re just trying to figure out, how can we address the practical need for housing more broadly?”

To do that—to get reticent suburban residents to give up exclusionary zoning practices and allow much more much-needed housing—Mehta says the narrative around affordable and dense housing needs to change. “One thing we’ve been trying to do is fundamentally reframe what affordable housing means,” Mehta says. “If you think your single-family neighborhood is going to be overrun with [strangers], people balk at that. But when you see that, ‘Oh, my kid’s teachers can’t even afford to live here, our police officers and firefighters can’t afford to live here’—I don’t think that’s in people’s psyche when they think about affordable housing.”

Most climate relocation to date has been fairly local or regional—which means New York’s climate migrants are as likely to come from Long Island as from, say, Houston. “We can make the case that this is not just about new people coming in, this is about your own neighbors, your own family members that are going to be in jeopardy,” Mehta says. “Part of the narrative change requires people to reframe how they view new types of housing away from it being outsiders, and more about the people that they care about.”

Wires, Pipes, and Pumps—and How to Pay for Them

Housing is critical, but so are the physical landscapes and structures supporting it.

While the Cleveland area could use a population boom and has plenty of nearby freshwater and more affordable housing than most US cities, Foley does worry about the readiness of the area’s aging infrastructure—much of which hasn’t received enough investment over the past few decades—to handle tens of thousands of new residents. After a storm this past summer, he says, some 350,000 people were without power for multiple days. “Our electric grid is still pretty frail in most parts,” he says.

But the region also has a key advantage for growing sustainably: existing rights of way for new infrastructure. While some areas face legal battles when trying to site new renewable energy generation and transmission lines, Foley says, “We’ve got a fairly mature network of legal rights of way that exist, so we don’t have to reinvent the wheel or spend a lot of time and money on lawyer fees to figure out where wires and lines and pipes should be going.”

In that sense, much of the needed work is a matter of upgrading and modernizing service along current corridors that are out of harm’s way. But while having rights of way in place simplifies things, it doesn’t necessarily make it cheap. “We’re going to electrify vehicles, we’re going to electrify home heating systems,” Foley says. “We’ve got this embedded infrastructure in all these homes and buildings that are reliant on natural gas, and to address climate change we need to start electrifying all that stuff—which is expensive, and not simple to do. . . . But then add on top of that a potential 100,000 or 200,000 more people in the region, and that’s a greater stress.”

Since Cuyahoga Green Energy is a newly formed utility, it isn’t yet burdened by the costly upkeep of old or failing equipment, Foley says, “but we’ve got new infrastructure we’re going to have to build.” He hopes the public-private partnership model the utility has developed (along with federal grant money) will help accomplish that in a cost effective way.

A third-party operator will build and own the initial projects “underneath the utility’s auspices, and then we’ll have the right, after the investments have been paid off, to take over and own that infrastructure,” he explains. “So that model may be a way for us, if we get smart about it, to build out the infrastructure of the future without breaking the bank of local government.”

In Vermont, Green Mountain Power recently expanded its popular backup battery program. The utility offers heavily discounted leases or rebates of up to $10,500 on installed backup batteries if homeowners enroll to share stored energy during peak power surges—for example, during the hottest few hours of a July afternoon. This helps localize and stabilize the overall grid, allows excess solar and other renewable energy to be stored, and reduces the use of more expensive and dirtier “peaker plant” power.

And in New Orleans, the Water Collaborative has been pushing for a stormwater fee, called the Water Justice Fund, to more equitably pay for its massive, aging, and expensive water utility and drainage system.

New Orleans owes its modern existence to 97 drainage pumps, two dozen of which operate every day, Dandridge-Smith says, turning what had once been marsh and swamp into dry—but slowly sinking—buildable land. The pumps are both “a blessing and a curse,” she says.

For one thing, the pumps are old—one has been in use since its introduction in 1913—and expensive to operate. More than that, fighting nature is a hard bargain. “We were meant to be soft and wet and continually replenished with water. If you drain all the water out, you sink,” she says. Most of 19th-century New Orleans was above sea level; today, some areas of the city sit five feet below sea level.

The water utility system in New Orleans doesn’t just drain the city, it also handles water quality and sewage. “It is so big that it has its own power company,” Dandridge-Smith says. “That’s how big it is in scale, so it’s expensive to run.” And historically, that cost has been funded through property taxes paid by businesses and homeowners, but not by nonprofits and other large landowners.

“We’re a tourism economy. We don’t have high-end tech jobs to pay for this expensive endeavor that is New Orleans,” Dandridge-Smith adds. “So we needed to find a way to fund that, but also fund our way out of the pumps.” The Water Justice Fund, which she hopes to get on the city’s ballot in 2025, would instead charge all city properties a stormwater fee based on their total square footage of impervious surfaces.

The stormwater fee would fund not just the operation and maintenance of the city’s gray water infrastructure, but also neighborhood-scale green infrastructure and stormwater management projects, urban reforestation, blue and green job training programs, insurance innovations, and other more forward-looking investments. Residents themselves helped shape the plan, ensuring greater community buy-in. “The main recommendations came out of a 10-part workshop series where regular residents, ranging from the age of 16 to 82, learned the nitty-gritty, most boring, nuanced things about infrastructure and systems, and helped build out what we know as the Water Justice Fund of New Orleans,” she says.

Seeking Safety, Seeking Justice

In both sending and receiving communities, climate migration is fraught with justice issues. Why was someone in harm’s way to begin with? How much assistance goes to homeowners rather than renters? How can communities resettle newcomers without displacing existing residents?

The modern-day topography of climate risk and mobility has to some extent been shaped by centuries of injustice. Historically “redlined” neighborhoods—those areas mortgage lenders once deemed too risky to write loans in, based on the racial makeup of residents—carry a higher risk of extreme heat and flooding today. People of color continue to experience disproportionate exposure to harmful environmental hazards like toxic chemicals and air pollution because of where they live.

Even after the Fair Housing Act made housing discrimination illegal, many places employed exclusive zoning rules, large minimum lot requirements, and other tactics to effectively keep residents out based on race and income. Those who managed to build generational wealth through homeownership despite these obstacles now face the possibility of losing their homes to climate change.

Dandridge-Smith’s parents, for example, own properties that have been passed down from various family members over the years. “In a normal scenario, I would acquire that wealth one day and be able to sell it, care for it, or rent it out,” she says. “But I think about how, not just myself, but everybody in Louisiana is going to lose generations of wealth building” if the region succumbs to flooding. “Knowing the history of this country and how they’ve treated Louisiana in particular, we will be blamed, and we will not be protected or cared for. And I have a hard time grappling with that, because I know it’s not right—but it’s what’s going to happen,” she says.

In New York, Mehta says, home prices are so high that a low-income homeowner who accepts a voluntary buyout may not end up with enough money to buy another home without taking on a new mortgage. “If that’s how we build wealth as a society, and now we’re telling folks in areas at risk—who may live there because of historical policies that have pushed them to be there—that this asset of yours is no longer viable? If a buyout program doesn’t guarantee a one-to-one exchange of your existing house for a safer house?” Mehta says. “We’re not creating enough opportunity for low-income homeowners in general, and if we’re now saying even those assets they do have need to be sunsetted, what’s the strategy? Renting will work for some people, but what if they wanted to pass this on to their kids?”

Mehta says communities and planners need a thoughtful framework to make the kinds of hard choices that await. “It’s only going to get harder, and if we’re not proactive about it now, we’ve seen what happens,” he says. “We wait for the disaster, chaos ensues, people’s communities get erased or displaced, and we repeat that cycle over and over, which is to the detriment of the whole region.”

Planning and Policy Tools

As the roundtable event wrapped up, participants shared suggestions about what types of policy tools, planning approaches, and research could help ensure communities are better prepared for a world beset by climate movement.

Cotter says the inherent uncertainty around climate relocation—whether, when, and how many people will move, where to, in what circumstances, and how a massive influx or exodus could displace or destabilize communities—lends itself to exploratory scenario planning (XSP). This planning technique helps communities consider a range of possible futures and prepare for the unknown. (The Lincoln Institute’s Consortium for Scenario Planning Conference, in January, will include workshops on disaster recovery and resilience, among other topics.)

With more thoughtful, community-driven, and cooperative planning, Cotter hopes this disruptive challenge could also present an opportunity. “What are the planning approaches that can help leverage this phenomenon for positive, transformational change?” she asks. “To both facilitate people moving out of harm’s way, when they make that decision, and then for places to receive them in an equitable manner without causing burdens on existing residents?”

Cotter says land policy tools such as the transfer of development rights (TDR)—in which the owners of an at-risk property could sell their legal right to build a bigger structure to an owner in a safer location who wishes to build a taller-than-permitted development, for example—could also help play a role in thoughtfully redirecting development and creating more housing in safer areas.

New York City has allowed this practice for decades in certain scenarios. For example, owners of historic Broadway theaters who agreed to preserve their properties as entertainment venues could sell their forfeited “air rights” to nearby developments. Arlington, Virginia, allowed owners of historic garden apartments to sell unused development rights to other builders, in exchange for preserving the apartments as affordable housing for at least 30 years. And the TDR market in Seattle has helped preserve 147,500 acres of would-be sprawl in King’s County, redirecting development from forest and farmland to downtown. While TDRs have traditionally been used to preserve open space or historic landmarks, there’s no reason they couldn’t be employed to create more affordable and climate-resilient housing.

“Quite frankly, one of the best things you can do to prepare for an influx of population is to make sure that you’re building housing and infrastructure out of harm’s way, making your existing built environment and infrastructure more resilient, because then it will serve both your existing population and any newcomers better,” Cotter says.

Whether or not climate change delivers an influx of new residents to a community, making investments in preparedness is never a wasted effort, she adds.

“Housing out of harm’s way, sound and adequate infrastructure, disaster response—all of these will serve your existing population well,” Cotter says. “And if you do get an influx of population, you’ve got the stage set to do what governments should do: ensure that your residents and your business owners have what they need to thrive—and that includes being safe in the face of a changing climate.”

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Cars evacuate ahead of a hurricane. Credit: Darwin Brandis via iStock/Getty Images Plus.

In the Ecuadorian city of Durán, more than 70 percent of the estimated 325,000 residents have no drinking water or sewage service. They must purchase water trucked in by tanker companies—a precarious, seemingly untenable situation that has persisted for almost 40 years. When a team of journalists set out to investigate the reasons for Durán’s inadequate water infrastructure—and uncovered some of the government obscuration and private-sector corruption behind it—they began to receive threats of violence.

The team persevered, however, and published a multimedia investigative series that describes in vivid detail how collusion between government actors and the private sector has restricted access to the basic service of drinking water for most of Durán’s population. This fall, the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy recognized the work of two journalists involved with the project—Leonardo Gómez Ponce and another whose name is being withheld due to ongoing threats—with the 2024 Lincoln Award (Premio Lincoln) for Urban Policy, Sustainable Development, and Climate Change Journalism. Both recipients are part of the Unidad de Investigación Tierra de Nadie (No Man’s Land Research Unit). The award, now in its third year, was presented as part of the prestigious 2024 Latin American Conference of Investigative Journalism (COLPIN), and recognizes the best land policy journalism in Latin America and the Caribbean.

Ponce and other Premio Lincoln winners joined a roundtable discussion, moderated by Lincoln Institute Senior Program Manager Laura Mullahy, on Day 3 of the annual COLPIN conference, held this year in Madrid. The four-day event was organized by the Lima, Peru–based Instituto Prensa y Sociedad (Press and Society Institute), or IPYS.

Journalists submitted 265 entries for the Premio Lincoln this year, Mullahy says—more than double the number received in each of the first two years—and the entries were all over the map, both literally (representing 63 cities in 22 countries) and topically. Water shortages, climate change, and housing were prevalent subjects, as were investigations on land conflicts, climate migration, informal settlements, and illegal or unjust land use.

Mullahy says the depth and tenacity of the reporting was inspiring. Some of the winning journalists had been pursuing stories for several years. “I get sort of emotional about these awards,” she says, “because these are such dedicated people.” Mullahy was also proud that two of the winners had participated in Lincoln Institute courses for Latin American journalists in the past, which were designed to introduce them to core concepts of land policy.

Below, find the winners of the 2024 Lincoln Award for Journalism on Urban Policy, Sustainable Development, and Climate Change, along with links to their work. (See the 2023 winners here.)

2024 Premio Lincoln Winners

First Prize: Leonardo Gómez Ponce and colleague for the series, “Durán, los hijos del tren y las mafias del agua” (“Durán: The Children of the Train and the Water Mafias”), a years-long investigation published by Ecuador’s Tierra de Nadie.

The online platform for this multi-part, data-rich investigative series opens with a real-time counter tallying the more than 38 years—every month, day, hour, second—that 70 percent of residents in the city of Durán, Ecuador, have gone without drinking water or functioning sewer systems.

“This is an example of how unscrupulous businesses can limit the planning and development of a city’s infrastructure,” Mullahy says. “The selection committee valued the investigative quality, the contribution of data and supporting documentation, and the clear demonstration that without infrastructure of basic services, populations remain in poverty and no progress is possible.”

Second prize: Alexánder Marín Correa, Juan Camilo Parra, Miguel Ángel Vivas, Camilo Tovar Puentes, María Angélica García Puerto, and Juan Camilo Beltrán, for “Escasez de agua en Bogotá: ¿Cómo llegamos a este punto?” (“Water Shortage in Bogotá: How Did We Get to This Point?”), published by El Espectador in Colombia.

Produced by a group of journalists from Colombian newspaper El Espectador, this article chronicles how a combination of historical, environmental, and management factors led to a health catastrophe in Bogotá.

The article recounts how Colombia’s capital city has experienced rapid growth and increased demand for water, all while deforestation and climate change have diminished water sources. The situation is aggravated by river pollution and the lack of adequate infrastructure. The article clearly shows that water management has been inefficient, leading to distribution problems and inequitable access. This context poses an urgent challenge to guarantee the sustainable supply of water to the people of Bogotá.

Third prize: Aramís Castro, for “Boom inmobiliario en la Amazonía del Perú agudiza la pérdida de bosques” (“Real Estate Boom in the Peruvian Amazon Exacerbates Forest Loss”), published by OjoPúblico in Peru.

Castro’s article analyzes how real estate speculation is contributing to deforestation in the Peruvian Amazon, demonstrating how the sale of rural land is transforming regions such as San Martín and Ucayali, where thousands of hectares of forests have already been lost.

Castro analyzed hundreds of social media advertisements and found that private real estate companies were promoting renderings of modern buildings in wooded, natural settings, luring buyers with slogans like, “The new Miami in the Peruvian jungle.” But many of the rustic lots lack even basic water or sewerage services, and often contribute to the degradation of the ecosystem. The research shows how the lack of regulation and control in the sale of land aggravates deforestation, biodiversity loss, and other environmental issues.

Honorable Mention 1: Lucía Viridiana Vergara García, Darío Ramírez, Isabel Mateos, Rodrigo Flores Esquinca, Alonso Esquinca Díaz, Erick Retana, Eduardo Mota, and Eduardo Buendía, for “Aquí no cabe un tren” (“There’s No Room for a Train Here”) and “La Sedena arrasó la selva para construir 6 hoteles del Tren Maya” (“Sedena Razed the Jungle to Build 6 Mayan Train Hotels”), produced by Mexicanos contra la Corrupción y la Impunidad in Mexico.

This article and accompanying podcast look at how the construction of the Mayan Train in Mexico—and the new hotels linked to this mega-project—could cause irreversible damage to the environment, contradicting arguments for developing the regions through which the train will pass. The work clearly and creatively explores the topic with rich testimonials, and raises a range of issues with the project, from the felling of trees and the lack of technical and scientific studies of its environmental impacts, to the effects of construction in protected archaeological areas and a biosphere declared a UNESCO World Heritage site in 2002.

Honorable Mention 2: Daniel Fonseca for “¿Dónde vamos a vivir? Datos, proyectos e intentos de solución al problema de vivienda en América Latina” (“Where Are We Going to Live? Data, Projects, and Attempted Solutions to the Housing Problem in Latin America”), published by Distintas Latitudes, Honduras.

This journalistic investigation, carried out for Distintas Latitudes by the seventh generation of the LATAM Network of Young Journalists, explores the housing crisis in Latin America from different angles. It highlights problems such as access to housing, the increase in inequality, and the lack of inclusive policies for vulnerable groups such as youth, women, and the LGBTI community.

The series examines the dynamics of unplanned urban growth and how governments have failed to adequately address the demand for decent housing—and seeks to shed light on current conditions and propose solutions to guarantee the right to adequate housing in the region.

Honorable Mention 3: Aitor Sáez for “Aguas revueltas: sequía y saqueo en México” (“Troubled Waters: Drought and Looting in Mexico”), published by ​​Pie de Página, Mexico

This investigative series describes the water crisis in 12 regions of Mexico. The report reflects the different conflicts related to the lack of water, which result from both the climate crisis and direct human intervention, especially through the coercion of organized crime.

Honorable Mention 4: Miguel Ángel Dobrich and Gabriel Farías, for “De la sequía a la inundación: el impacto sobre el trabajo en la zona costera de Uruguay, de Este a Oeste” (“From Drought to Flood: The Impact on Work in the Coastal Zone of Uruguay, from East to West”), published by Amenaza Roboto in Uruguay.

This article explores the impact of climate change on working conditions in different areas of Uruguay, from Valizas to Ciudad del Plata, describing how extreme weather affects artisanal fishermen, domestic workers, and other people who depend on vulnerable ecosystems. It also addresses inequality and flood risk in coastal communities. The research combines geospatial data and advanced visualization to show the impact of these changes.

Honorable Mention 5: Vinicius Sassine and Lalo de Almeida for “Cerco às aldeias” (“Siege of Villages”), published by Folha de São Paulo in Brazil.

This piece describes how mining companies, or garimpos, rob land, water, and health from the Mundurukus, Kayapós, Nambikwaras, and Yanomami–Indigenous groups of the Brazilian Amazon. In the areas where these mining companies operate, inhabitants suffer from illnesses due to contact with mercury, the toxic heavy metal used to separate gold from the ground. Children are diagnosed with cognitive delays, and adults with physical illnesses. However, the Brazilian government has no plans to put a stop to illegal mining.

Lead image: A truck brings water to Durán, Ecuador, where nearly 70 percent of residents have lived without drinking water for decades. A multiyear project investigating this crisis recently won a Lincoln Institute journalism award. Credit: Unidad de Investigación Tierra de Nadie.

Two new translations of the Lincoln Institute book Design with Nature Now are hitting international bookshelves this year, and with them, a pair of interactive exhibitions—one in Nanjing, China, and a second in Taipei, Taiwan—have brought the publication’s concepts and projects to life for thousands of attendees.

Design with Nature Now was published in 2019 by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the University of Pennsylvania, commemorating the 50th anniversary of Ian L. McHarg’s landmark volume, Design with Nature. Published in 1969, that book helped redefine landscape architecture and introduced ecological planning principles aligned with the growing environmental movement. Edited by Penn faculty, Design with Nature Now reflects on McHarg’s enduring influence over half a century later and showcases a variety of visionary environmental design projects taking place around the world. They include a protected 2,000-mile Yellowstone to Yukon wildlife corridor, a 5,000-mile Great Green Wall of trees and shrubs being planted to combat desertification in Africa, and the transformation of what was once the world’s largest landfill into a 2,200-acre urban park and wetland habitat in New York City.

Recognizing that it would be easier for people to appreciate the enormity and scale of such massive projects when the accompanying photographs and maps were measured in feet as opposed to inches, a team at Penn—including coeditor Frederick “Fritz” Steiner, professor and dean of the Weitzman School of Design, and William Whitaker, architectural archives collections manager—curated a series of visually stunning exhibitions at the Weitzman School upon the book’s initial publication in 2019. With the work now being translated into both simplified and traditional Chinese (the former used predominantly in mainland China, the latter in Taiwan), Steiner found partners with Penn connections abroad who were eager to revive and reimagine those installations for new audiences.

The Taiwan Institute of Landscape Architects (TILA) agreed to host an exhibition in Taipei, where the mayor is a Penn Law School alumnus; Southeast University in Nanjing, China, offered to host as well. Southeast is “the oldest school of architecture in China, and it was founded by two Penn alums, so we have a very close relationship,” Steiner says.

The Nanjing exhibition opened first, running May 31 through July 31, while the Taipei installation was open from September 14 to October 12. The exhibitions drew “thousands and thousands of people,” says Steiner, who attended both openings.

“Both venues were amazing,”  Steiner says, and the settings enhanced the displays of maps and other materials related to the book: “The Nanjing exhibition was held in a kind of shopping plaza on a huge lake by the historic city wall—it’s a major subway stop and a park, a venue where a lot of people get married, so it was just swarming with people,” Steiner says. The Taipei exhibit was housed in a former tobacco factory “in the hippest cultural and arts center of the city,” he adds, at the Songshan Cultural and Creative Park.

Penn professor and Design with Nature Now coeditor Karen M’Closkey recently returned from a global landscape architecture conference that overlapped with the end of the exhibit in Taipei, and says the dynamic venue helped ensure that the exhibition was packed. “They’ve renovated all these buildings, there are small shops and bookstores,” she says. “It was busy with people the whole time, and on the pedestrian street between the buildings, there were always performances and people selling things. It was a very lively place.”

In Taipei alone, roughly 9,600 people attended the exhibition, says curator Matt Chu, deputy secretary general of the Taiwan Institute of Landscape Architects. The Taipei exhibition included guided tours, weekend lectures with Taiwanese government officials, and a two-day symposium as the installation came to a close in mid-October.

Over 600 attendees took one of the guided tours offered by TILA volunteers and adjunct professors, Chu says, each tour beginning with a deep introduction to ecological design projects and concepts in the auditorium. “Every tour was packed, and we were so thrilled by positive feedback from the audience,” Chu says.

Themes That Resonate

The 25 large-scale environmental design projects showcased in Design with Nature Now are organized into five major themes: Big Wilds, Rising Tides, Fresh Waters, Toxic Lands, and Urban Futures. The exhibits were likewise split into five thematic categories, but also included a section on McHarg himself, called The House We Live In, and a gallery of works by artist and landscape architect Laurel McSherry, created during her stint as a Fulbright Scholar in McHarg’s homeland of Scotland. In both Nanjing and Taipei, local government agencies augmented the exhibits by connecting the themes to their own environmental efforts around climate change and resilience.

Three of the thematic projects highlighted in Design with Nature Now are located in China—including a focus on Qianhai Water City in Shenzhen—but that’s hardly the only reason the book has found a welcome audience there.

“The importance of nature to Chinese culture is ancient, so I think there’s that historic connection,” Steiner says. “But also in a contemporary sense, it’s the biggest country in the world in terms of population, it’s become majority urban . . . so the issues of urbanization, loss of biodiversity, climate change—they’re not abstract. There’s a lot of interest politically, both in Taiwan and in the People’s Republic, in addressing these issues. I think the five big themes that we identified resonate very much.”

In addition to the larger-than-life reproductions of maps, photographs, and landscapes, the exhibits included 3D models and updated information on projects featured in the book and original exhibit.

In Taipei the exhibit included a three-dimensional model of the city. And one of Chu’s favorite installations in Taipei brought new clarity to a concept introduced in McHarg’s 1969 book. McHarg and his students had famously sliced up contoured landscapes, such as that of Staten Island, New York, into different layers—showing existing land uses alongside hand-drawn maps of the area’s physiography, water table, wildlife habitat, forest cover, and tidal inundation, among other ecological features—in an analog precursor to geographic information system (GIS) mapping.

“In the original exhibition in Philadelphia, they had those 18 Staten Island graphics on the wall,” Chu says. “But I kind of stacked them using transparent panels, so visitors can see all the different layers—the geology, the hydrology, the vegetation, all the layers—the way Ian McHarg explained how nature would influence culture and where development should go.”

Five years after the Penn exhibition, Chu was also able to display updated photos from the landscape architecture firm Field Operations, which has completed early phases of two major projects featured in Design with Nature Now: Freshkills Park in New York, which was once the largest landfill in the world, and Qianhai Water City in Shenzhen. “So it’s kind of a comparison with five years ago, when they were only in the planning phase,” Chu says. “They’ve got North Park, Phase One built in Freshkills Park, and in Shenzhen they got Guiwan Park built. And you can see the process, how it’s come from the planning phase, to design, to building it, and see how designing with nature really came true.”

The exhibits also included video, notes Steiner, with displays including a snippet from a late-1960s McHarg documentary; a film by McSherry that synced the waxing spring daylight hours of Glasgow with cinematic scenes in real time; and previously recorded live-cam footage of wildlife in the Yellowstone to Yukon corridor using an underpass to cross beneath a busy road. “Kids would all be huddled around watching the animals go through the underpass,” says Steiner, who notes that the curiosity went both ways, as bears, coyotes, and other animals came up to inspect the camera at close range.

The Nanjing and Taipei exhibits were such a success that other organizations are already inquiring about hosting the exhibits next year. Steiner says the Nanjing exhibit is slated to move to Shanghai next summer, while in Taiwan, Chu says, “So far we have the Taoyuan City Library and Kaohsiung National Science and Technology Museum expressing their willingness to exhibit next year,” as well as interest from Taiwan’s Forestry and Nature Conservation Agency.

Chu said the exhibition helped raise the visibility of the landscape architecture profession locally. “Even though Ian McHarg actually came to Taiwan about 40 years ago, to help Taiwan establish its National Parks system, people in Taiwan still associate the profession more with horticulture or gardening,” Chu says. “So this exhibition really opened their eyes [to the idea] that landscape architects can help with things like climate change and biodiversity loss using large-scale planning and design.”

Jon Gorey is a staff writer at the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy.

Lead image: Visitors explore the Design with Nature Now exhibit in Taipei. Credit: Matt Chu.