The New Landscape Declaration

A Call to Action for the Twenty-First Century

Landscape Architecture Foundation

• Publisher: Rare Bird Books, A Vireo Book
• Year: 2018
• eBook ISBN: 9781947856103
• Topic: Biological Sciences
• Subtopic: Environmental Science
• Index: Biological Sciences

On the eve of its 50th anniversary, the Landscape Architecture Foundation asked a diverse group of the world's leading landscape architects to reflect on the last half-century and present bold ideas for what the discipline should achieve in the future. Well beyond the public conception of the profession as "gardener" or "park designer, " these landscape architects discussed their role in addressing weighty issues like climate change, urbanization, management of vital resources like water, and global inequities. The New Landscape Declaration brings together their ideas and experiences in essays from thirty-three preeminent thinkers, including:

• James Corner, designer of the High Line in New York City
  
• Randy Hester, founder of the modern participatory design movement in landscape architecture
  
• Kate Orff, researcher, innovator, and design activist
  
• Martha Schwartz, acclaimed landscape architect and artist turned activist
  
• Carl Steinitz, Geodesign pioneer
  
• Richard Weller, prolific design researcher and author
  
• Kongjian Yu, celebrated designer, dean, and author from the People's Republic of China The New Landscape Declaration asserts the vital role of landscape architecture in solving the defining issues of our time. Relevant to designers across the globe, the ideas cross disciplinary boundaries and challenge current silos of thought and practice, underscoring the need to diversify, innovate, and create a bold culture of leadership, advocacy, and activism.
  

Part I: Introduction

Across borders and beyond walls, from city centers to the last wilderness, humanity’s common ground is the landscape itself. Food, water, oxygen—everything that sustains us comes from and returns to the landscape. What we do to our landscapes we ultimately do to ourselves. The profession charged with designing this common ground is landscape architecture.

From the New Landscape Declaration

Chapter 1

Our Time?

Richard Weller

In the Architectural Archives of the University of Pennsylvania, you can find the diaries of Ian McHarg. Penciled in for the day of June 2, 1966, McHarg had only one thing to do: meet with his contemporaries who had been assembled by the Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF)—Grady Clay, Charles Hammond, Campbell Miller, George Patton, and John Simonds. Legend has it that the meeting took place at Independence Hall in Philadelphia where they drafted and read out a 490-word Declaration of Concern. They decried pollution, stressed that “man is not free of nature’s demands,” and hailed landscape architecture as “a key to solving the environmental crisis.” They insisted that because of their basis in the natural sciences, landscape architects can interpret the landscape “correctly,” and that therefore they are “qualified to plan and design the environment.”

No one knows who really wrote the declaration or what the process was leading up to its publication, but the declaration’s emphasis on understanding the landscape through its biophysical layers, not to mention its tone of bravado, would suggest that it was McHarg who held the pen.

The substance of the declaration was hardly earth-shattering, and there is no evidence that it attracted any media attention, but it did come at a significant moment in time. The year 1966 was bracketed by two hugely symbolic events. The first, in 1965, was the death of McHarg’s alter ego—the charismatic champion of utopian modernism, Le Corbusier. The second, in 1967, was NASA’s public release of the first whole Earth image. From here on, humanity would begin to comprehend its planetary ecological limits. Simultaneously, guided by Jane Jacobs, the design and planning professions began their paradigmatic shift to a concern for real people in real places. Then, three years after the seeds of the declaration had been sown, McHarg’s magnum opus, Design with Nature, emerged fully formed, and it remains one of landscape architecture’s most important books to this day.

In Design with Nature, with the entire planet as his stage and a dark city as his backdrop, McHarg repeatedly refers to landscape architects as stewards of the biosphere. It is here, with such grandiose pronouncements, that the global profession of landscape architecture would find both its (post)modern raison d’être and the impossibility of its realization. And it is this contradictory condition, in equal measure humbling and hubristic, that resonates through the profession and its academies to this day. It is what makes landscape architecture so compelling and, in a world so thoroughly changed by human hands, so pertinent.

The 1966 Declaration of Concern had its limits. It was authored by five white men and focused on North America with no mention of equity, extinction, or climate change. As the fiftieth anniversary of the inception of the Landscape Architecture Foundation approached, it became obvious to the LAF leadership that the 1966 Declaration of Concern required renewal. This gave rise to a gathering, The New Landscape Declaration: A Summit on Landscape Architecture and the Future, held at the University of Pennsylvania on June 10 and 11, 2016. The summit provided the platform for a representative sample of selected landscape architecture academics and professionals to make new declarations and engage in debate with over 600 attendees. The 32 declarations presented at the summit are now gathered in this commemorative volume and served as the raw material from which the final wording of the New Landscape Declaration was hewn. These documents, alongside the new declaration, provide us with a historical opportunity to survey the profession’s state of mind and speculate on its future. To that end, as I read them, three big topics emerged around which the 32 declarations orbit: climate change, urbanization, and the profession’s identity in the twenty-first century.

Climate change

As a paleontological and contemporary phenomenon, climate change was known in the 1960s when the 1966 Declaration of Concern was drafted but did not gain popular currency until two significant events: in 1979 when a National Academy of Sciences committee forecast temperature rise, and in 1988 when the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) was formed. Rather than reading its absence from the 1966 declaration as shortsightedness, the original declaration’s essential message—that human systems should be tuned to the earth’s systems—is one that climate change makes more prescient, not less.

It is no mistake then that an overwhelming majority of the 32 new declarations refer to climate change and its symptoms as matters of priority. But apart from just using the expression to galvanize the profession, we need to ask what climate change really means for landscape architecture. Naomi Klein provides a big clue when she writes: “…climate change changes everything.”

The climate has always been changing, so, technically speaking, climate change is nothing new, but anthropogenic climate change is different. We have now irrevocably altered natural history on a planetary scale, and while we have always made an impact, we have never before altered the fundamental workings of the earth system as a whole. Once you actually understand what this means, it is shocking. This is our Copernican revolution. What nature is or is not, and what it means to be human, are profoundly destabilized. In this sense, climate change is another name for, and evidence of, the arrival of the Anthropocene: an epoch in which cultural and natural histories have collapsed into one another and their fates rendered mutual. If anything beneficial is to come from our pumping billions of tons of carbon into the earth system, it is that its empirical existence ends the long history of mistaking nature as a mere resource we can exploit without consequence or venerating nature as something inviolable.

Nature in the era of climate change and the Anthropocene is then quite different from the nature invoked by the 1966 Declaration of Concern. That 1960s nature was still a pure thing “out there,” something being polluted, something to be saved, and for McHarg, a template we ought to study with scientific accuracy and then “correctly” follow. To design with the nature of the Anthropocene is, however, not so simple. Not only is nature now wildly unpredictable, it is also widely recognized as a cultural construct. This represents a shift away from the supposed harmony of sustainability that has dominated environmentalism for the latter half of the twentieth century, to the mutability of resilience.

Nature in the Anthropocene, the nature manifested by climate change, is not yet well known, but one thing is certain—it is now what we make it. And what we make it follows on directly from how we conceptualize it.

And this is precisely what landscape architects do: whether we are aware of it or not, we give form to certain conceptualizations of nature. Our projects are, as it were, little worlds—experiments and case studies in synthesizing nature and culture in evermore ingenious and complex ways. Thus, we find ourselves in a historically and culturally significant position. Indeed, as was declared at the summit: engineers led the nineteenth century, architects the twentieth, and this is now our time.

But just saying it is our time does not make it so, and if there is one thing that almost all the new declarations glossed over, it is that landscape architecture still lacks the self-critical philosophical underpinnings that are needed to restrain its messianic tendencies and make more credible its claims to large-scale land use planning and urban design, let alone planetary stewardship. Maybe landscape architecture is not yet big enough for criticism and we must band together to build the profession, but as other professions and disciplines have demonstrated, it is ultimately criticality, not backslapping, that forges a profession that the public looks up to.

Urbanization

In tandem with changing the chemical composition of the atmosphere, over the last 50 years humanity has also altered the surface of the planet with urbanization and its related infrastructure as never before. This historical phenomenon seems likely to continue for much, if not all, of the twenty-first century as world population moves into double-digit billions. If birthrates and migration from rural to urban areas continue to increase as demographers expect them to, then we can reasonably assume that an additional three billion people will become urbanized between now and 2100. The equivalent of over 350 New York Cities will be needed to accommodate them—a little over 4.2 constructed each year.

Around the world, urban growth is occurring as both informal and planned development and pushing in two directions—centrifugal sprawl on the one hand and centripetal de...

Table of contents

• The New Landscape Declaration
• New Landscape Declaration Summit and Publication Project Team
• About the Landscape Architecture Foundation
• About the New Landscape Declaration Summit
• 2016 LAF Board of Directors
• Contributors
• Preface
• Chronology
• A Declaration of Concern
• The New Landscape Declaration
• Part I: Introduction
• Chapter 1
• Chapter 2
• Part II: The Need for Action
• Chapter 3
• Chapter 4
• Chapter 5
• Chapter 6
• Chapter 7
• Chapter 8
• Chapter 9
• Chapter 10
• Part III: The Landscape
• Chapter 11
• Chapter 12
• Chapter 13
• Chapter 14
• Chapter 15
• Chapter 16
• Chapter 17
• Chapter 18
• Chapter 19
• Part IV: The Future of the Discipline
• Chapter 20
• Chapter 21
• Chapter 22
• Chapter 23
• Chapter 24
• Chapter 25
• Chapter 26
• Chapter 27
• Chapter 28
• Part V: Voices of the Future
• Chapter 29
• Chapter 30
• Chapter 31
• Chapter 32
• Chapter 33
• Chapter 34
• PART VI: The Call to Action
• Chapter 35
• Chapter 36
• Chapter 37
• Chapter 38
• Chapter 39
• Chapter 40
• Chapter 41
• Chapter 42
• Chapter 43
• Special Thanks
• Image Captions and Credits