Toward an Urban Ecology: SCAPE / Landscape Architecture

Kate Orff, 2017 MacArthur Fellow, has an optimistic and transformative message about our world: we can bring together social and ecological systems to sustainably remake our cities and landscapes. Part monograph, part manual, part manife­sto, Toward an Urban Ecology reconceives urban landscape design as a form of activism, demonstrating how to move beyond familiar and increasingly outmoded ways of thinking about environmental, urban, and social issues as separate domains; and advocating for the synthesis of practice to create a truly urban ecology.
 
In purely practical terms, SCAPE has already generated numerous tools and techniques that designers, policy makers, and communities can use to address some of the most pressing issues of our time, including the loss of biodiversity, the loss of social cohesion, and ecological degradation. Toward an Urban Ecology features numerous projects and select research from SCAPE, and conveys a range of strategies to engender a more resilient and inclusive built environment.

• Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory
• Petrochemical America by Richard Misrach and Kate Orff
• Planting in a Post-Wild World: Designing Plant Communities for Resilient Landscapes
• Cartographic Grounds: Projecting the Landscape Imaginary
• The New Landscape Declaration: A Call to Action for the Twenty-First Century
• Phyto: Principles and Resources for Site Remediation and Landscape Design
• Design with Nature
• Landscape as Infrastructure: A Base Primer
• Thinking the Contemporary Landscape
• Responsive Landscapes: Strategies for Responsive Technologies in Landscape Architecture