Connectivity and Sustainability: Perspectives from Landscape and Urban Design

Abstract

If you ask people about what we who work on urban landscape and urban design do, most will say that we deal with planting. And we do. But that vision belongs to the 1900s, when landscapers were reduced to shrubbing up a site around an architect’s building. However, since the 1980s, because of the growing interest in the health of the planet, landscape has dealt with soil, air, water, microclimate, wildlife, and (unexpectedly) cities, places of concentrated human habitation. So landscape has moved far beyond plants. Most important of all, we now understand that all the elements of a landscape are interdependent; without dealing with the interconnectedness of all its parts, it is not possible to maintain the health of any of them. But the interdependence goes even further. Landscape’s scope reaches beyond the insects, birds, and other creatures that plants attract, and beyond the microclimatic effect of a particular planting. Landscapes can also have a cumulative, mitigating effect on the pattern of heat islands – where temperatures are dramatically higher than in areas of open land – of entire urban areas. The microclimate of a landscaped building is connected to that of the whole city.