Design and the Green New Deal
Date Posted: May 2, 2019
Posted In: Ideas,
From Places Journal: I don’t know when the myth of landscape architects as climate saviors began, but I know it’s time to kill it. The New Landscape Declaration — a book emerging from a 2016 summit attended by the brightest thinkers in our field — frames landscape architecture as an “ever more urgent necessity,” if not the foundation of civil society. As engineers shaped the built environment of the 19th century and architects the 20th, landscape architects have claimed this century as their own. 1
That’s a bold statement for an obscure profession whose 15,000 U.S. members spend most of their time designing small parks, office courtyards, and residential projects for private clients. Yet it’s not just landscape architects who see a big future for the field. Famed industrial designer Dieter Rams has said that if he were starting his career today, he’d focus on landscapes, not machines. And public officials have recruited landscape architects to the front lines of urban development (as James Corner’s High Line and Thomas Woltz’s Public Square frame Hudson Yards) and climate resilience (as the federal program Rebuild by Design ties hurricane recovery to coastal defense). 2
But if The New Landscape Declaration sought to articulate and elevate our professional ideals, mostly it exposed the gap between rhetoric and reality. The book arrived in fall 2017, a few months after David Wallace-Wells published his alarming article, “The Uninhabitable Earth,” with its memorable opening line quaking, “It is, I promise, worse than you think.” That 7,000-word jeremiad was later expanded into a bestselling book, with acknowledgments thanking the dozens of climate writers, scientists, and activists who informed the author’s research. This is mainstream media’s most comprehensive account of the climate movement, and it contains no mention of work by landscape architects. There is no commentary on Rebuild by Design. It’s as if landscape architecture does not exist. Setting aside the justified critiques of Wallace-Wells’s apocalyptic framing, what does it mean that landscape architects are missing from this prominent book on a topic we claim as our own? Is our discipline a necessity? Are we closing the gap between ideals and practice? We are not, I promise, saving the world. 3
In 1969, Ian McHarg published Design with Nature, which famously argued that landscape architects “must become the steward[s] of the biosphere.” 4 Since then an entire genre of self-important design writing and advocacy has emerged from the premise that social and ecological crises are best addressed through design in general and landscape architecture in particular. Much of this takes the form of propaganda about our profession’s primacy and exceptionalism — positing seriously that a more beautiful flood barrier in lower Manhattan, a few oyster reefs near Staten Island, or a pocket park surrounded by luxury towers are ideal works of design, exemplars of what Erle Ellis calls the “good Anthropocene.” 5 The New Landscape Declaration is one such work of propaganda. This essay is not.
From where I sit — in McHarg’s former department, in a center bearing his name, on the 50th anniversary of his most important book — that rhetoric rings hollow. As my colleague Richard Weller observes, “When the word stewardship is uttered, landscape architects either nod approvingly or roll their eyes. On the one hand, our declarations of stewardship distinguish us a profession and are appropriate to the magnitude of the ecological crisis. On the other, claims to stewardship are, as James Lovelock indicated at the outset, just hubris: in our case, a small profession with an inferiority complex inspired by a charismatic leader … continuing to make inflated statements about both its purpose and capacity.” 6