En 1969, Ian L. McHarg, profesor de planificación y arquitectura paisajística de la Universidad de Pensilvania, publicó un manifiesto llamado Design with Nature (Proyectar con la naturaleza). Este se tradujo al chino, el francés, el italiano, el japonés y el español, y hoy se sigue imprimiendo. Podría decirse que es el libro más importante producido por las profesiones de diseño en el s. XX. Design with Nature no solo capturó el espíritu de fines de la década del 60 al condenar la expansión del urbanismo y la degradación ambiental de la civilización moderna, o al menos de América del Norte; fue más allá que muchos otros y propuso un método práctico para hacer algo al respecto.

McHarg utilizó herramientas digitales rudimentarias y minuciosos dibujos analógicos y, junto con sus estudiantes y colegas de la Universidad, desarrolló un método para superponer mapas con las características biofísicas de determinado lugar y tomar decisiones acerca del futuro uso del suelo. El método, que incluía un poco de ciencia y un poco de sentido común, ofrecía una base empírica, racional y ostensiblemente objetiva para decidir qué suelo era el más adecuado para cada finalidad. Por ejemplo, granjas en suelo bueno aquí, tierras altas boscosas por suministro de agua allí y, por supuesto, viviendas fuera de zonas inundables y detrás de dunas costeras.

A lo largo de la historia, las culturas se marchitaron o prosperaron según el modo en que vivían con el suelo y el agua o, como dijo McHarg, según cómo proyectaban con la naturaleza. Para las culturas sintonizadas mediante la experiencia con las condiciones específicas de su paisaje, proyectar con la naturaleza se convierte en una especie de tradición. En este sentido, la filosofía de diseño de McHarg no es nada nuevo. Pero sí lo es su defensa de la ecología como base del diseño y su aplicación a la ciudad moderna. Por lo tanto, su gran logro fue crear un método simple y universal para evaluar la ciencia ambiental y luego incorporarla a los procesos de toma de decisiones en el desarrollo moderno. Cuando este método se aplicaba bien, ofrecía una forma de guiar y fundamentar decisiones de diseño, en especial las que limitaban el alcance y la escala de desarrollos que, de no ser por ellas, se expandirían aun más.

Sin embargo, Design with Nature es más que un manual para el uso del suelo. Se eleva desde la geología hasta la cosmología, parte del cristianismo hasta el budismo, e intercala especulaciones sobre entropía y evolución para llegar a una teoría unificadora de diseño. Según McHarg, proyectar con la naturaleza significaba que la humanidad se encajara en el ambiente de forma intencional y benigna. Esta idea de encajar se inspiró en la ciencia ecológica más avanzada de su época, y fluyó de la creencia de que los sistemas culturales y naturales podrían coexistir en armonía, en equilibrio, si cada parte estuviese en su lugar correcto. Para él, no se trataba solo de determinismo biológico en acción; era el arte más elevado.

La visión de McHarg, al igual que la de su mentor, el gran polímata Lewis Mumford, y antes de este, Patrick Geddes, era que al vivir con en vez de contra las fuerzas y flujos más poderosos del mundo natural, la humanidad adquiriría un sentido biocéntrico de pertenencia. Y, en el sentido más profundo, esto reemplazaría a las teologías Abrahámicas y la cultura capitalista de consumo, que él consideraba responsables de las crisis ambientales de los 60.

Según McHarg, la gran promesa de la cultura occidental era una síntesis de las ciencias y las artes que todavía no se aplicaban al modo en que habitamos el suelo, y la profesión de la arquitectura paisajística era la que podría dirigir a la sociedad en este proceso evolutivo. Hasta hoy, al menos en la teoría, si no en la práctica, esta sigue siendo la primera razón de ser de dicho campo. 

Para el 50.º aniversario de la publicación de Design with Nature, con este nuevo libro y las exposiciones y la conferencia relacionadas, nos preguntamos: ¿cómo sería proyectar con la naturaleza hoy? Al ser profesores en la escuela a la cual McHarg dedicó su vida, sentimos la responsabilidad particular de explorar estas preguntas en este momento y desde este lugar. Si bien el presagio de McHarg justifica una celebración, al marcar el 50.º aniversario de su obra magna, nuestra intención no es hagiográfica. Por el contrario, consideramos que nuestra responsabilidad y la finalidad de este volumen es un discurso constructivo y crítico; preguntarnos cómo evolucionó el ethos de proyectar con la naturaleza en este medio siglo y especular acerca de las expectativas de los próximos cincuenta años.

Por un lado, McHarg acudía a la Naturaleza como máxima autoridad y, por otro, la reducía a interpretación mediante positivismo basado en datos. Así, siempre se metería en problemas filosóficos y provocaría críticas. De hecho, gran parte de lo que ocurrió en la arquitectura paisajística en los últimos cincuenta años se puede interpretar como una adhesión o una crítica a su filosofía y su método. Si McHarg hubiese titulado su libro Proyectar con el paisaje en vez de Proyectar con la naturaleza, y si hubiese ofrecido advertencias sobre las limitaciones de su método para informar la creatividad y la ingenuidad humanas, entonces las acusaciones de soberbia y tosquedad que se le atribuyeron periódicamente se podrían haber evitado en gran medida. Pero en su apuro por cambiar el campo e incluso por cambiar el mundo, McHarg omitió algunos de esos detalles cruciales.

Sin embargo, el hecho de que haya provocado debates es una gran parte de su persistente importancia. Si bien estos debates pudieron haber amenazado con dividir la profesión entre “los diseñadores” y “los planificadores”, hoy podemos ver una profesión que maduró a nivel intelectual a partir de estas tensiones. Vemos una profesión diversificada en las prácticas, pero unida en el sentido de finalidad ecológica y artística. Vemos una profesión equipada con una serie de técnicas de diseño que construyen sobre la base del método antes mencionado de McHarg para analizar la idoneidad de un paisaje, en vez de obviarlo. Y sí, además todavía vemos la brecha entre la grandilocuencia de McHarg y la práctica diaria; brecha que, hasta cierto punto, siempre debe existir entre lo ideal y lo real. Sin las diferencias entre la teoría y la práctica de diseñar con la naturaleza, la arquitectura paisajística no tendría más lugar para crecer o evolucionar. . . .

Cualquiera que lo haya conocido o haya participado en una de sus clases podría dar fe de que McHarg fue un personaje inolvidable, un hombre tan apasionado como erudito. Ian McHarg falleció en 2001 y completó su obra mucho antes de que las expresiones “cambio climático” y “el Antropoceno” se convirtieran en preocupaciones centrales de la sociedad. La realidad ambiental que estos términos representan hoy, los debates y las ansiedades que suscitan y las crecientes exigencias de tomar medidas por el cambio climático logran que el llamamiento profético de McHarg a proyectar con la naturaleza sea más pertinente que nunca. Paul Crutzen, el científico atmosférico a quien se suele atribuir la primera declaración de que estamos en la era del Antropoceno, describió que su advenimiento comenzó con la Revolución Industrial y se aceleró radicalmente después de 1945. En 2011, Crutzen argumentó junto con sus colegas Will Steffen y John McNeill que deberíamos empezar a pasar a un nuevo período en el que “defendamos la tierra”.¹ Por supuesto, ese era el mensaje esencial de Design with Nature unos cincuenta años antes. En este sentido, la profesión de arquitectura paisajística ha estado a la vanguardia de una revolución cultural más amplia que hoy madura en el contexto del Antropoceno. Sin embargo, eso no quiere decir que la profesión haya cumplido con el mandato de McHarg de liderar la administración ambiental global. Afirmar eso sería absurdo. Más bien, casi no podría decirse que hoy el mundo está mejor a nivel medioambiental que cuando se publicó Design with Nature por primera vez. Por el contrario, el comienzo del Antropoceno marca lo opuesto. Nos zambullimos de cabeza en una era de cambio ambiental global a una escala y un ritmo inauditos. Cómo aprendemos a vivir con ese cambio es el desafío principal para los próximos cincuenta años del diseño. En la obra que hemos compilado aquí hay pruebas reales sobre cómo podemos, mediante el diseño, sintonizar mejor nuestras ciudades y su infraestructura con las fuerzas y los flujos del sistema terráqueo. El hecho de que dichos proyectos son la excepción y no la regla no hace más que subrayar su importancia como emblemas de un cambio histórico más extendido que aún no ha ocurrido.

El s. XXI está marcado por el hecho de que la humanidad ha modificado directa o indirectamente cada hábitat del planeta, y en gran medida de forma nociva. Con las consecuencias involuntarias del calentamiento global, la extinción de especies y el agotamiento de recursos, hoy es posible que nuestro éxito extraordinario como especie pueda convertirse también en nuestra desaparición. El reconocer esta “tragedia de los bienes comunes” es lo que nos distingue de otras especies que también han prosperado en el transcurso de la historia evolutiva. No solo saberlo, sino también actuar a partir de ese conocimiento de forma preventiva, es diseñar entornos intencionadamente para que ofrezcan y sostengan más vida, para todas las formas de vida. No se trata de un proyecto disciplinario ni mesiánico, sino de un proyecto político, y sobre todo creativo, que trasciende geografías, economías y las fuerzas de la globalización que han abrumado y dividido al planeta, entre desarrollado y en vías de desarrollo, entre ricos y pobres. Ese es el sentido persistente e inspirador de Design with Nature, y este nuevo libro está dedicado a ese fin.

Richard Weller y Karen M’Closkey son profesores de arquitectura paisajística en la Escuela de Diseño Stuart Weitzman, en la Universidad de Pensilvania. Frederick Steiner es decano y profesor de la cátedra Paley en la Escuela; Steiner y Weller, además, son codirectores ejecutivos del Centro Ian L. McHarg de Urbanismo y Ecología de la Escuela, mientras que Billy Fleming es director de Wilks Family.

Imagen: Tapa de Design with Nature, 1969. Crédito: Doubleday/Natural History Press, Museo Americano de Historia Natural.

Notas

¹ Will Steffen, Paul J. Crutzen y John R. McNeill, “The Anthropocene: Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?”, AMBIO: A Journal of the Human Environment 38, n.º 8 (2011): 614–621.

“El hombre es una epidemia, destruye el medioambiente del que depende y sentencia su propia extinción”.

Al dirigirse a una multitud de 30.000 personas en el parque Fairmount, de Filadelfia, durante la primera manifestación del Día de la Tierra, en 1970, Ian McHarg, escritor y arquitecto paisajista, no midió sus palabras. Su discurso no pretendía hacer sentir bien a nadie. Además de la aleccionadora afirmación citada, también informó al público: “Ustedes no tienen futuro”. 

Si bien esas palabras eran oscuras, pretendían ayudar a que los oyentes vieran la luz. McHarg creía que la humanidad estaba atrapada en un embrollo que ella misma había creado, pero del que había vuelta atrás, y él tenía soluciones para ofrecer. Precisamente un año antes, había dado a luz la primera copia encuadernada de su libro Design with Nature (Proyectar con la naturaleza), un tratado de casi 200 páginas en el cual exigía una nueva forma de pensar la relación entre las personas, el entorno construido y el suelo que ocupamos. La primera edición del libro se agotó. Y también la segunda. Para cuando dio ese discurso del Día de la Tierra, era evidente que las ideas que proponía se recibían con avidez. De hecho, su filosofía acabaría por cambiar el modo de pensar de toda una generación de planificadores, arquitectos y diseñadores acerca de la relación entre las personas y el lugar. Su libro, junto con el trabajo de otros pensadores destacados, como Jane Jacobs, ayudó a cambiar el aspecto y la funcionalidad de muchas ciudades, en particular en los Estados Unidos. Y sigue siendo una de las publicaciones de diseño y planificación más influyentes.

Hace 50 años, Design with Nature ayudó a lanzar el campo de la planificación ecológica, y nos ayudó a virar de una sociedad de fines del s. XX que consideraba a las ciudades como un mal necesario a una que cada vez las ve más como lugares atractivos en los que se puede vivir, y que podrían ser la clave para nuestra salvación como especie. Hoy, el Instituto Lincoln se enorgullece de su asociación con los sucesores de McHarg en la Escuela de Diseño Stuart Weitzman, de la Universidad de Pensilvania, para crear el volumen de seguimiento citado en este número, Design with Nature Now (Proyectar con la naturaleza hoy). El nuevo libro, editado por Richard Weller, Karen M’Closkey, Billy Fleming y Frederick Steiner, ofrece una colección inaudita de homenajes reflexivos a McHarg, proyectos ilustrativos que reflejan sus doctrinas, y evaluaciones sinceras acerca del camino recorrido y del que queda por recorrer. 

El libro (que llegará en octubre), junto con una exposición internacional y una conferencia epónimas a realizarse en la Universidad de Pensilvania en 2019, nos recuerdan la urgencia que llevó a McHarg a escribir esta obra influyente, y el hecho inevitable de que, en muchos sentidos, dicha urgencia se ha agravado. La rápida urbanización (se espera que hacia 2050 vivan dos mil millones de personas más en las ciudades del mundo) y el cambio climático exigen que volvamos a pensar en casi todo acerca de dónde y cómo vivimos; así, las ideas de McHarg están más vigentes que nunca.

Para el Instituto Lincoln, presentar su obra a una nueva generación forma parte de una labor más amplia por elevar la participación crucial del suelo como solución a nuestros desafíos económicos, sociales y ambientales más urgentes. Lo hacemos mediante publicaciones, como este libro, y trabajos de campo, como el de Rust Belt de los Estados Unidos, donde unimos a antiguas ciudades industriales pequeñas para pensar en estrategias innovadoras de revitalización; en China, donde apoyamos la labor del gobierno para implementar ciudades esponja que absorban agua pluvial; y en América Latina, donde promovemos nuevas herramientas de enseñanza para involucrar a los planificadores en el trabajo de mejorar las condiciones urbanas.

Este tipo de trabajo es importante en todas partes, pero en especial en el mundo en vías de desarrollo, donde el crecimiento urbano se acelera y no está bien regulado. Estamos empezando a ver un cambio hacia un crecimiento de calidad, y podemos apoyarlo si adoptamos y difundimos los principios de McHarg. Para rebatir su advertencia de que la sociedad no tiene futuro, debemos seguir trabajando para que la urbanización se implemente correctamente. Eso significa garantizar vecindarios seguros y economías sólidas, cierto, pero también significa reemplazar pavimento impermeable por jardines de biofiltración y rediseñar partes de la calle a escala humana, implementar infraestructura verde y azul donde antes reinaba la gris, y convertir edificios con gran consumo de energía en estructuras sustentables más saludables para vivir y trabajar. No se trata de proyectos glamorosos, pero tampoco superfluos; son fundamentales para nuestra capacidad de rediseñar y reconstruirnos una sociedad funcional que no “sentencie nuestra propia extinción”, como dijo McHarg. 

¿La humanidad es realmente una epidemia empeñada en destruir el medioambiente y, en última instancia, a sí misma? ¿O podremos encontrar y aplicar una cura? En el Instituto Lincoln, la Escuela de Diseño Stuart Weitzman y otras organizaciones dedicadas a estudiar las conexiones entre las personas y el lugar, sabemos que algunas herramientas, desde políticas reflexivas de uso del suelo hasta el diseño innovador, pueden ayudar a alcanzar un pronóstico positivo. Pero este es el momento de actuar. No podemos cambiar el pasado, pero podemos adoptar la visión de McHarg y sus tantos sucesores en el campo de la ecología paisajística y ampliar la implementación de ideas que elevaron la práctica en los campos de la arquitectura, la planificación urbana, la gestión de agua pluvial y muchos otros. Debemos construir sobre el legado de McHarg y Design with Nature Now, antes de que realmente sea demasiado tarde.

Over the past four decades, more than 500 million people have moved from rural China to the nation’s cities, drawn by economic opportunities unavailable in the countryside. Today, 60 percent of the population lives in urban areas, compared to just 18 percent in 1978. The rapid, often uncoordinated urban growth caused by this massive migration has dramatically altered China’s cities and the land around them, resulting in pollution, overcrowding, and other challenges. Officials in China are now encouraging a shift from policies focused purely on growth to those that prioritize a higher quality of urbanization, explains Lincoln Institute of Land Policy China Program Director Zhi Liu. This shift, Liu says, “implies environmental sustainability, climate resilience, and better quality of urban life for all.” Examples of quality urbanization projects range from converting a sprawling industrial complex in Guangzhou into a cultural district to mandating the reduction of emissions from coal-fired power plants in Beijing.

Liu and the Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy (PLC) recently organized an international conference to explore China’s urban development trends, hosting more than 300 scholars and experts from 12 countries. Topics included the growth of “super megacity regions,” which are clustered metropolitan areas with a combined population of more than 10 million; the impacts of the shift from labor-intensive to high-tech industries; research on community well-being in suburban areas; and a discussion of how to finance urban growth through densification and redevelopment. The event was co-organized by the Peking University College of Urban and Environmental Sciences (PKU), University of Hong Kong, and Regional Science Association of China.

The conference—the fifth in a series, with previous incarnations held in Hong Kong, Shanghai, London, and Glasgow—brought together researchers from the fields of urban studies, geography, sociology, economics, political science, urban planning, urban management, and public policy, as well as China studies. “The research presented at this conference provides much-needed empirical evidence that will be helpful for policy making and policy reform,” Liu said. In addition to sharing research and data, presenters recommended steps such as improving inter-city coordination to equalize basic public services and continuing to study the well-being of residents to develop a robust evidence base for community planning and development.

“The policy reform underway in China reflects a growing recognition that the outcomes of urbanization are not meeting the rising expectations of the government or people,” said the Lincoln Institute’s Vice President of Programs Armando Carbonell, who facilitated sessions at the conference. “China is a laboratory of urbanization, with fast-moving systems and a government willing to engage in policy experiments. Things move so quickly, you can hypothesize about what will happen, then actually see and learn from the results on the ground.”

With that type of learning in mind, the PLC also hosted a roundtable discussion at the conclusion of the conference, convening experts from China, Mexico, Uganda, and the U.S. to talk about land policy themes and research that cut across Africa, Latin America, and China. The group explored opportunities to build a research or educational program that bridges land policy work in those areas, concluding that there is a need for increased South-South knowledge sharing.

“Given that China’s urbanization process has been more recent than Europe’s or North America’s, and that it has been as fast as, if not faster than, what is happening in Africa, there are opportunities to learn from China’s successes and avoid the pitfalls,” said Astrid Haas, a senior economist at the International Growth Centre who attended the conference and roundtable. Haas, who is based in Uganda, thinks learning about the policy shift underway in China will help African cities “embark on a path of quality urbanization from the outset.” She also points out that policy makers in China can learn from African experts on topics such as the property tax, which is in use in some African countries but only just being considered in China. “There are strong opportunities for two-way learning,” Haas said.

As the PLC explores the possibility of expanding its work in the region—an idea that PKU President Ping Hao voiced support for in a meeting with Lincoln Institute staff members ahead of the conference—the Center could play a role in facilitating that sharing. “This is a perfect example of an opportunity for the Institute to help connect people across regions,” said Enrique Silva, who leads Lincoln’s International and Institute-wide Initiatives program and helped organize the roundtable discussion. “Though their state structures differ, China, Africa, and Latin America face many of the same ‘headline issues’ related to resource distribution and the challenges of rapid urbanization. We are eager to help develop peer networks and build capacity so they can learn from each other.”

Katharine Wroth is the editor of Land Lines. 

Photographs in order of appearance:

Recent efforts to improve quality of life in Guangzhou, one of the largest cities in China, include addressing air pollution and redeveloping industrial areas. Credit: Sergei Gussev/Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0.

Leaders from the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy and the Peking University met in Beijing this summer. On the front step, left to right, are Lincoln Institute President and CEO George W. McCarthy, Lincoln Institute Board Chair and Chief Investment Officer Kathryn J. Lincoln, and Peking University President Ping Hao. Zhi Liu, director of the Peking University-Lincoln Institute Center for Urban Development and Land Policy, stands second from left in the back. Credit: Courtesy of Peking University.  

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Notes

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fresh Waters: Weishan Wetland Park, Jining, China

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

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

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

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

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

Toxic Lands: Freshkills Park, New York, USA

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

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

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

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

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

Urban Futures: Medellín, Colombia

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

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

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

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

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

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

Photos in order of appearance. 

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

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

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

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

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

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