Maintenance is the continuous care that keeps landscapes functioning—watering, pruning, repairing, replacing. It is where design meets reality over time. Today, maintenance is under pressure: to reduce costs, reduce water, reduce labor, reduce emissions. Every strategy to lower maintenance raises the question—what are we willing to sacrifice? Choices about maintenance extend beyond site boundaries, touching supply chains, material production, CO₂ footprints, and global ecologies. Maintenance is -or should be- central in contemporary landscape architecture. A design is only as sustainable as its afterlife, and every decision about planting, surfaces, and water is also a decision about labor, ecology, and climate.
In the U.S., lawns cover nearly 2 percent of the land surface and, as researcher Cristina Milesi revealed using satellite data, “could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America”—their total area is three times larger than that of irrigated cornfields. The infatuation with lawns runs so deep that, in some cases, failing to […]
The colloquium will investigate the relationship between the design and maintenance of living systems, seeking to cultivate practices, terminology, and theoretical insights into approaches that attempt to maintain otherwise. About The current separation between landscape design and landscape maintenance is no longer tenable. Unpredictable weather patterns and dwindling water supplies intersect with cuts to municipal […]
Almost every park needs a playground area and children’s playgrounds are one of the toughest typologies to design. The equipment available is either ugly or beyond budget, especially in the public realm. Then the programme is repetitive — poles, slides, swings, climbing walls, sandpits. For the designer to cover the developmental needs of all ages […]
The 2025 Colloquium by Network City and Landscape, NSL, titled “Beyond Maintenance: Responsive Practices for Changing Landscapes,” will be held at ETH Zürich from February 26-28, 2025, under the invitation of Prof. Teresa Galí-Izard. The event aims to explore the integration of landscape design and maintenance in response to evolving environmental and social challenges. With […]
Sh*tscapes is a 160-page book by London-based landscape architects Vladimir Guculak and Paul Bourel. They are also founders of studio gb, landscape architecture and design studio focused on the integration of nature into the city.
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