World-ecology, developed by Jason W. Moore, theorizes capitalism as a way of organizing nature, binding ecological and social relations into a single historical process. It challenges separations between “society” and “environment,” arguing that capital operates through the appropriation of “cheap nature”: labor, energy, food, raw materials. World-ecology reframes crises of climate and extinction as crises of the capitalist world-ecology itself, not as external shocks. For landscape and urban studies, it emphasizes that every design operates within global webs of extraction, metabolism, and inequality. World-ecology is thus both analytic and critical horizon, situating the production of environment within the dynamics of capital and power.
Landscape architecture should engage intensively with conviviality—it has the capacity to unify many issues in current theoretical debates and connect the discipline to the global network of the conviviality movement.
An essay on how we push animals into playing roles — from fables and films to renders of biodiversity and art — tracing how these projections tame, abstract, or estrange, and how synurbists and artists unsettle the human–animal divide.
Scientific research into animal behaviour still rests on many deeply ingrained assumptions about what is deemed to be “natural” human behaviour. For example, men—males—are assumed by nature to be more dominant and aggressive than women—females. And if men are violent, then the violent behaviour of other male animals in the wild can supposedly be explained […]
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 […]
How do we represent territories whose histories, economies, and ecologies have been shaped by centuries of extraction, yet are still often perceived as peripheral or empty? 1. Introduction In his book Norrland, journalist Po Tidholm opens with a poem that captures a long-standing reality: northern Sweden has long been a site of resource extraction— iron […]
The book, Thinking Through Soil: Wastewater Agriculture in the Mezquital Valley, by Montserrat Bonvehi Rosich and Seth Denizen, came out last week, published by Harvard University Design Press. It is an enormous study, partly conducted through the Thinking Through Soil studio course at the GSD, Department of Landscape Architecture, and with the help of the […]
Landscapes of Retreat, a book by Rosetta S. Elkin, is informed by land-based practice, observation, and paying close attention to the multifaceted changes occurring in landscapes and their impact on communities. The second edition of this award-winning book (originally published in 2022), which gained considerable attention within the landscape architecture community, has been released this […]
In December this year, the European Union’s Deforestation Regulation will start to apply to medium and large operators and traders. For micro and small enterprises, the same rules will apply next year. This means that if a commodity, such as cattle, cocoa, coffee, palm oil, soya, rubber, or wood, and products derived from those commodities, […]
Reports of global warming, biodiversity loss, rising anti-democratic states, heatwaves, wars, and sea-level rise are enough to make anyone discouraged. In these times, hope is crucial—it’s the difference between envisioning a positive future and resigning to the present. Hope drives action, while hopelessness paralyzes. It rejects the status quo and aspires for change, making it vital for progress. Hope can grow and strengthen, but it can also fade.
Mnemosyne walks on a Forest Wall What if rural areas took center stage in the movement for resilient, secure communities—getting the same attention as urban environments? What if seawalls and groynes weren’t just lifeless barriers but thriving ecosystems, forests, walking routes for storytelling, art trails and canvases for culture and nature? The growing impact of […]
Converting grey infrastructure into green socialstructure leads to more inclusive, adaptable, and environmentally resilient public spaces that serve both ecological and social functions. The benefits extend beyond aesthetics – these transformations drive economic growth, improve public health, and mitigate the effects of climate change.
So, the real question is not whether cities can do this. The question is: Why aren’t they?
The book Forest Urbanisms brings together underlying ideas, the concept of forest urbanism, and global practices and research that engage with forests through a critical and nuanced lens. Using the world is forest as the guiding principle, the authors put the forest in a central role of the spatial organization across regions, scales and quantities – from a solitary tree to an interplay of buildings and trees. This expanding notion of forest expects new morphologies and typologies of forest urbanism. The authors open the controversies regarding humankind’s relations to forests and offer thinking tools past the greenwashing paradigms.
Forests are ecosystems, usually acknowledged as spaces with the least human intervention, however, not many of us have been in touch with a virgin forest and its feralness. For most, forest means recreational or urban woods in the vicinity where we stroll and unwind or a mountain forest where we hike or climb. People growing […]
Collectively, all humans experience 8 billion days in 24 hours. That is about 22 million years lived in one day.
When one starts to think about time in that way, it seems inevitable to envision the collective impact of human life on Earth.
At a moment when another “inanimate natural entity”, the Taranaki Maunga, a mountain in New Zealand, is granted personhood, The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia, is holding an exhibition, Reimagining Birrarung, Design Concepts for 2070, on the future of Yarra River, it’s catchment area and people, envisioned by landscape architects. The exhibition […]
The inaugural lecture, given by Joost Emmerik when he assumed his position as Head of Landscape at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2022. The text particularly excels in embedding doubt into the teaching process. It is the doubt about nature, our entanglement with it, and the values and politics that drive the design process. It is about passing knowledge to others and questioning it meanwhile – a much more pertinent and productive teaching paradigm for times of uncertainties and change.
Del Tredici’s argument is that these spontaneous plants are “de facto native urban flora” considering the novel conditions produced by humans. It is an argument against perceiving spontaneous vegetation including invasive, non-native plants and plants considered as weeds, to be less worthy. Labelling a plant “invasive” or “weed”, says Del Tredici, gives people the licence to blame it for ruining the environment and to get rid of it.
Daniel Ganz is a founder of a renowned office based in Zurich, Ganz Landschaftsarchitekten, whose work received many recognitions by opening the field into diverse directions resulting in unusual designs. In 2021, the monograph Ganz – Contemporary Swiss Landscape Architecture was published, presenting the reader with 10 works outlined by key themes like pleasure, labour, […]
This article by Kelly Shannon and Donielle Kaufman was first published on 9 January 2018. With the recent fires around Los Angeles, we are bringing it into focus again in early 2025 as it sheds light on processes and hidden corners of the context that brought about California’s ‘wildfire epidemic’.
What do we actually know about the ground on which we stand, and how does it relate to our landscape projects Interventions on the surface of the landscape affect the underground as much as they are conditioned by it. Many processes pass through the grade of the ground, relating to water, energy, ecology and vegetation, with trees bridging above- and below grade. Organic matter is created in the ground, carbon is captured and stored there, and it is the habitat of various species. If we, as landscape architects, aim to incorporate ecology and hydrology into project development, the design phase must incorporate a thinking of above- and below grade as one.
The Dutch Landscape, The Ultimate Guide for Study, Professional and Personal Use by Alexandra Tišma[1] and Han Lörzing[2] is a “text-book” and a thorough yet very accessible guide on landscapes in the Netherlands – described from many angles and scales, historical, geographical, geological and biotic layers, cultural landscapes, from development, and planning to conservation – […]
Planet City is a worldbuilding project by Liam Young, envisioned as a multilayered city, occupying as little as 0,02 percent of Earth’s surface yet hosting all of the human population. Planet City is testing the Half-Earth idea by Edward O. Wilson, where we put aside half of the planet, to keep biodiversity. We spoke with Liam Young about the idea and the exhibition he curates, Visions of Planet City.
In the talk, Lydia Kallipoliti – #architect #educator #researcher #thinker – presents her newly published book Histories of Ecological Design: An Unfinished Cyclopedia, followed by a Q&A where we talk about the intentions of writing the book, about how the “waste speaks of the incomplete perception of the World”, the psychological profile of ecological designers and […]
When we speak of Nature in cities, the question we want to stress is, is nature in cities natural or in fact an artefact? When we speak of natural processes, they of course take place but apart from spontaneous nature, left to random succession, emerging in spaces that Gilles Clément calls the third landscapes, there […]
It is exciting to read “Blue Skies”, the new novel by T.C.Boyle, and at the same time to dedicate oneself to the opulent work of Adrian McGregor. While Boyle’s protagonists in Florida and California are at the mercy of the manifold violent effects of climate change and the reader abandons all hope after reading, the […]
Urban biodiversity? Yes, please! Nevertheless … … Due to the transitional phase of our understanding of nature in the light of the Anthropocene, there are still some important notions, contradictions and misunderstandings that need to be addressed. To do so, we will operate with terms like nature, ecology, biodiversity, landscape, and aesthetics, and we’ll focus […]
Liam Young is together with Kate Davies running the Unknown Fields project. They travel around the world and explore landscapes behind objects we used on a daily basis: materials for our phones, fabrics for clothes, lithium for batteries … We caught Liam in Ljubljana, where he was narrating Unknown Fields film live.
During all the media coverage—particularly in the United States—of Hurricanes Harvey (Category 4, 17 August-1 September), Irma (Category 5, 30 August-12 September), Jose (Category 4, 5-22 September) and Maria (Category 5, 16-30 September), the flooding and subsequent trail of destruction in Houston and southeast Texas, South Florida and the Caribbean, there was ceaseless talk of […]
