Resilience denotes the capacity of landscapes to absorb disturbance, adapt, and continue functioning without collapsing into another regime. Originating in ecology (Holling, 1973), it emphasizes cycles of disturbance and renewal rather than equilibrium. In policy and design, resilience often becomes a normative ideal, mobilized to justify adaptation to crisis rather than systemic change. Landscapes that are resilient may still perpetuate social or ecological injustice. The concept thus oscillates between technical measure, political tool, and aspirational metaphor.
Skin-to-Skin Architecture is about rethinking how we design cities and buildings, not just as objects we use, but as spaces that touch us back. Inspired by the power of skin-to-skin contact in neonatal care, where a caregiver’s touch stabilizes, calms, and connects, we ask: what if our built environment could do the same? In Skin-to-Skin, […]
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.
The interview with Chloe and Michael Humphreys focuses on the work of The Landscape Studio. They began working in Nairobi in 2014 and in the years, their practice produced numerous private and public projects across Africa, that in essence and with minimal material means, embody the beauty of the locality. Embracing constraints is their design […]
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 […]
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’.
We spoke with OMGEVING about their participation in the international open call to devise a new masterplan in České Budějovice in Czeck Republik. What are the key features of this master plan? The zoning plan will be ambitious in its visions, flexible for the future, unambiguous and simple for decision-making in the territory, and realistic […]
Bridges allow the landscape to flow underneath – or as in recent endeavours, in land bridges or ecoducts, nature flows over. In the latter, a bridge adjoins disconnected landscape portions created by cuts in the terrain. In any case, bridges form connections and links when a river or other barrier needs to be crossed. As […]
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 […]
The Harvard Graduate School of Design organized a two-day conference titled Forest Futures: Will the Forest Save Us All? It is open to the public and available via streaming. Planetary survival in the Anthropocene crucially depends on the stewardship of resilient forest ecosystems worldwide—at the scales of wilderness, planted forests, metropolitan tracts, and the urban […]
Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory and Inter-Programme Collaboration Director at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is Chair of the Landscape Research Group (LRG), a Non-Executive Director of the digital arts collective Furtherfield, and an advisor to the Centre for Landscape Democracy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He is also […]
Today’s most urgent topic for all professional groups everywhere must be how to give our planet and its inhabitants possibilities to survive. Never before has the professional field of landscape architects shifted its goals so quickly, as we have seen only over the last few years. The focus for landscape architecture nowadays is clearly sustainability. […]
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 […]
Katarina Bajc is a landscape architect, currently working as a researcher at HafenCity University in Hamburg.
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 […]
