Long-Term Plans: To Build for Resilience, We’ll

Need to Design With—Not Against—Nature

M ov i n g aw ay f r o m i t s e a r l y exc l u s i ve f o c u s o n n a t u ra l d i s a s t e r s ,
resilient architecture and design tackles the much tougher challenge
o f h e l p i n g e c o s y s t e m s r e g e n e ra t e .

by Stephen Zacks (https://www.metropolismag.com/author/stephenzacks/)

January 8, 2020

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Design With Nature Now revisits Ian McHarg’s eponymous 1969 book and takes stock of current
practices and projects of resilience in landscape design the world over, such as AECOM’s Weishan
Lake National Wetland Park in Shandong, China.
Courtesy AECOM

Thirty years ago, as a high school student at the Cranbrook

(https://www.metropolismag.com/uncategorized/an-outsize-in uence/) boarding school in
suburban Detroit, I wrote a research-based investigative report on the environmental crisis
for the student newspaper. I had been encouraged to do so by a faculty adviser, David
Watson, who lived a double life as a radical environmentalist writing under the pseudonym
George Bradford for the anarchist tabloid Fifth Estate (https://www. fthestate.org/). His
diatribe How Deep Is Deep Ecology? (https://www. fthestate.org/archive/327-fall-
1987/how-deep-is-deep-ecology/) questioned a recurring bit of cant from the radical
environmental movement: Leaders of groups like Earth First! frequently disparaged the value
of human life in favor of protecting nature.

Today, we hear some version of this more and more: Earth will continue to exist; nature will
rebound, with or without people. It is resilient, we are not.

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Resilience’s rise as a framing discourse in the United States emerged out of the devastation
(https://www.metropolismag.com/architecture/sustainability-glossary-resilience/) Hurricane
Sandy visited on New York City. Major weather events have continued to rack U.S. coastlines
in the years since, as they have cities and countries elsewhere. In response, architects and
engineers have devised plans for building littoral berms, mounds, and other arti cial barriers
to absorb the beating destined for coastal cities. The suggestion is a humbling one: Human
habitats must be forti ed because they, like ourselves, are vulnerable to the caprice of much
larger planetary forces.

Just as LEED set the standard for green-building best practices in architecture, so do The Sustainable
SITES Initiative and RELI for landscape design. In 2016, the James Corner Field Operations
(https://www. eldoperations.net/home.html)–designed Chicago Navy Pier received SITES Gold
certi cation for retro tting the century-old pier.
Courtesy Sahar Coston-Hardy

Of course, these projects take as their prerequisite levels of investment and political nerve
that don’t yet exist. America’s network of “gray” infrastructure has long been in decline and is
barely able to support expected behaviors, let alone repel storm surges. When Hurricane
Harvey ooded Houston, storm management systems were easily overwhelmed. Freeways
terminated in rivers; subdivisions half-disappeared under a thick layer of muddy brown.
Similar images surfaced this past September, when Tropical Storm Imelda—the fourth “500-
year” storm event in as many years—emptied more than 40 inches of rain onto the Houston
region. While municipalities have enacted measures to combat extreme rainfall and ooding,

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they cannot keep pace with the storms; as a partner of the design rm re:focus partners
(http://www.refocuspartners.com/) told the New York Times in October, “Implementation is
going to take way longer than a single hurricane season.”

But even assuming the necessary infrastructure were in place, the militaristic insistence on
repelling and withstanding “nature” reveals itself to be a pathology: It overrides concerns
about ecology, landscape, or sociology that otherwise inform the best resilient practices and
policies being developed today. Indeed, it is hard to disentangle this shriveled conception of
resilience from notions of self-suf ciency, discipline, and steely bodily strength. “Gray” and
“green”—or, rather, “blue”—infrastructures begin to look very similar.

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Designed by Koning Eizenberg Architecture, the Arroyo affordable housing complex in Santa Monica,
California, also features on the list. The development, which takes its name from an erstwhile arroyo,
provides excellent housing in a city in dire need of it and scored high in categories including
“affordable and clean energy” and “reduced inequalities.”
Courtesy John Pitt

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An expanded concept is needed and exists, says Frederick R. Steiner, dean of UPenn’s Stuart
Weitzman School of Design and co-editor, with Richard Weller, Karen M’Closkey, and Billy
Fleming, of Design With Nature Now
(https://www.lincolninst.edu/publications/books/design-nature-now) (Lincoln Institute of
Land Policy, 2019). The book, like the eponymous exhibition and symposium it draws on,
revisits the Scottish-American landscape architect Ian McHarg’s 1969 monograph and
ampli es its latent strategies of remediation, renewal, restoration, and regeneration. Aspects
of resilience, a concept that had yet to acquire its new meaning in McHarg’s time, resonate
with each of these approaches. But there are differences as well, says Steiner, who nds
“regeneration” the better umbrella term. “Regeneration involves recovery and rebuilding,” he
notes, but it also “improves ecosystems by contributing to ecosystem services rather than
depleting them.”

Even assuming the necessary infrastructure were in place, the

militaristic insistence on repelling and withstanding “nature”
reveals itself to be a pathology.

In 2015, Steiner cofounded The Sustainable SITES Initiative

(http://www.sustainablesites.org/), which certi es landscape projects similarly to the way
LEED certi es building projects. Among SITES’s “guiding principles” are the mandates to “do
no harm,” “design with nature and culture,” and “provide regenerative systems as
intergenerational equity.” This last point helps properly situate resilience—which Steiner (like
many in the elds of ecology and landscape design) characterizes as “bouncing back to an
original state”—within a wider agenda of regeneration. (Meanwhile, the RELI standard,
developed by the global architecture rm Perkins and Will
(https://www.metropolismag.com/tag/perkinswill/), and steered by the U.S. Green Building
Council since 2017, locates “regeneration” among a horizontal tier of ve so-called
metapatterns, along with resilience, restoration, sustainability, and wellness. The parallel
arrangement implies that these rubrics are complementary and conceptually coterminous.)

Following both McHarg and his mentor, the landscape architect John Lyle, Steiner
understands regeneration as “creating something new grounded in the deep structure of the
place.” While resilience is certainly inherent in the “deep structure” of landscapes, so are
biodiversity, ecosystem feedback, redundancy, change, and ephemerality. Drawing on new-
and urban-ecology studies, a regenerative framework not only admits these properties but
seeks to enhance them.

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In November, the Center for Sustainable Urban Development at Columbia’s Earth Institute launched
the results of its Local Projects Challenge, a selection of 100 global projects based on criteria ranging
from increasing energy ef ciency to building resilient urban communities. The Paul Pholeros
Foundation’s community sanitation center in Bhattedanda Village, Nepal, was cited for its
attentiveness to “good health and wellbeing,” “clean water and sanitation,” and “decent work and
economic growth.”
Courtesy Eric Staudenmaier

The pages of Design With Nature Now are ush with regenerative examples. The Great
Green Wall aims to combat deserti cation in the African Sahel through continent-wide tree
planting. In North America, the ongoing Yellowstone to Yukon Conservation Initiative is
creating a wildlife corridor extending from northwestern Canada to Yellowstone National
Park by linking protected areas, improving conservation practices, and building animal-safe
highway overpasses and underpasses.

Not only do these projects share in a broader enterprise of reversing ecological degradation,
but they also point to the centrality of regulation in achieving this aim. For instance, the L.A.
River master plan was prompted by a 2010 ruling by the Environmental Protection Agency
that subjected the channelized river to the guidelines of the Clean Water Act. Yu’s initiative
was greatly assisted by the Chinese Ministry of Ecology and Environment and the Chinese

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Ministry of Culture. Regulatory mandates, not voluntary resilience measures (e.g.,
certi cation systems like SITES and RELI, or competition-based exercises like Resilient by
Design), are the teeth behind ecological regeneration.

Courtesy Eric Staudenmaier

For architect Anna Rubbo, senior scholar at the Center for Sustainable Urban Development
(CSUD) (http://csud.ei.columbia.edu/) at Columbia University’s Earth Institute, the 193-
nation Paris Agreement is one such framework. “If you’ve got so many countries making a
commitment to this, it’s a good idea to get behind them,” Rubbo says, emphasizing that the
climate emergency does not recognize borders. “Because of the breadth of the goals, they
provide a framework that can be very powerful.”

The United Nations’ 17 sustainable development goals (SDGs), adopted by the Paris
Agreement, informed CSUD’s latest initiative to promote design projects around the world
conforming to these aims. The criteria of the Local Projects Challenge range from self evident
factors, such as increasing energy ef ciency, to the deeper social ones driving the climate
crisis, such as providing access to fresh water and building resilient urban communities. (The
most up-to-date thinking on resilience transposes the concept from disaster scenario to the
realm of socioeconomics.) The nal report, released in November, casts a wide net, pointing to
100 building works from Tanzania to Nepal, New York to Los Angeles. For example, the
Koning Eizenberg (https://www.kearch.com/)–designed Arroyo complex demonstrates how
SDGs and other mandates don’t hamper but elevate design. The project, a 64-unit affordable
multifamily housing development by the Community Corporation of Santa Monica, California,
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features thermal rooftop panels to heat water and high-ef ciency cooling to conserve energy.
The landscaped courtyard also sports an irrigation system and drought tolerant plants to
conserve potable water. Crucially, the development will link up with the new Expo light-rail
line upon the latter’s completion.

OLIN and Gehry Partners’ plans to restore the Los Angeles River.
Courtesy OLIN

It’s true that the literature underpinning SDGs emphasizes resilience over regeneration, while
subsuming both under the more nebulous (and marketable) rubric of “sustainability.” Perhaps
a focus on the Paris Agreement is moot, given the Trump administration’s recent move to
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withdraw from it. Instead, the Green New Deal, argue its proponents, offers the best hope for
putting the United States on the fast track toward economic and climate resilience. It
promises to do this through a ten-year period of national mobilization propelled by massive
public investment and innovative legislation. Funding would be allocated for “community-
de ned projects and strategies”; new construction would be regulated according to ecological
mandates; and existing buildings would be retro tted with energy-ef cient technologies.

For the moment, the Green New Deal exists only as a hazy resolution, but its importance lies
in its ability to galvanize activists and designers alike. There is, moreover, no reason why SDGs
cannot be folded into such a “deal,” as the CSUD itself suggests. Which is to say, the Green
New Deal is open to further articulation. The current document, for instance, mentions
regeneration only in relation to agricultural practices. But extending the concept to ideas
already incubating in the realm of architecture and landscape design—one thinks of “sponge
cities” and, yes, the fascination with arti cial berms, mounds, and barriers—is necessary, says
Iñaki Alday, the new dean (https://news.tulane.edu/pr/tulane-names-renowned-global-
architect-new-dean) of Tulane’s School of Architecture. He advocates “[recovering] the
connection to our geographic elements—to our rivers, to our topographies, to our forests or
agricultural lands that surround the city,” and we might add, contra the Earth First! activists of
yore, to ourselves.

Show Caption

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You may also enjoy “If You Are Serious About Sustainability, Social Equity Can’t Be Just
Another Add-On. (https://www.metropolismag.com/architecture/social-equity-
sustainability/)”

Would you like to comment on this article? Send your thoughts to:
comments@metropolismag.com

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