17 minute read
Teaching Net Zero
Lecturers from across the UK present their thoughts on how to teach climate action and illustrate their approach with examples from current student work.
Teaching Climate Action
While climate transition encompasses broad scale behavioural change that promotes environmental and social adaptation, it also requires identifying existing environmental components and social practices that significantly contribute to climate change resilience. For instance, while the climate emergency may seem a contemporary concern, scientific knowledge about climate change dates back to the 18th Century, while many communities have had to adapt to local climatic impacts for decades. Adaptation must be placed as a historical trajectory of insights and events, thinking forward through the past.
The Bartlett School of Architecture recently hosted an online international symposium called ‘Intersectional Climates’, celebrating climate practices that prioritise ecological, political and poetic engagement with communities, places and disciplines, and which recognise that ideas and practices must be dealt with intersectionally – that issues of inequality are inseparable from climate change and biodiversity loss. Such practices enable greater societal solidarity for tackling the Climate Crisis as we look ahead to the forthcoming UN Climate Change Conference (COP26) in Glasgow.
Two seminars, ‘Climate Change Practices’ and ‘Reinventing Planetary Practices and Imaginaries’, involved eight invited keynote speakers, including Vandana Shiva, Paul Gilroy, and visionary landscape architects Anuradha Mathur and Dilip da Cunha. These seminars preceded discussion events with students and staff which aimed to extend intersectional practices across the Bartlett’s curriculum, but also across multiple disciplines: from architecture and landscape architecture to the arts, humanities, sciences and technologies, and from within different regional communities.
Midwinter
Pin Chu Chen, MA student
Spring-winter
Pin Chu Chen, MA student
Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture (ESALA) has established ‘ESALA Declares’, providing a collaborative platform for events that confront the climate crisis, allowing staff and students to interchange ideas with figures across academia and industry. Stemming from this, a Climate Action Working Group has been tasked with identifying ways to adapt teaching practices and curriculum design to better address the climate emergency. In landscape architecture, we have mapped out areas of teaching that touch on climate action, but require a more explicit focus on this issue, allied with ecosystem design to counteract loss of biodiversity.
On the MA (Hons) Landscape Architecture at ESALA, climate awareness is introduced at a key point in undergraduate students’ learning through the year 2 ‘Landscape Armature Studio.’ This studio has an explicit focus on climate change, asking students to rethink urban planning at a river catchment, as opposed to city, scale. Students work with a network of sites, which act as spatial armatures, with the potential to form a new framework for socio-ecological resilience. The relationship with the river catchment brings climatebased issues into focus, allowing students to envision new synergies between differing environmental components, such as productive social space, hydrology, and ecosystem design.
In year 3, the Lifescape Studio asks students to consider ecosystem design and human cohabitation with other species. Students develop a strategic grasp of land use changes for a coastal post-mining site, from which they formulate a “lifescape vision.” This involves students considering how future resilience is not predicated on ecology alone, but where socio-economic interests, such as energy and food production, can coexist with environmental systems, including hydrological and habitat design. While these thematic studios place explicit emphasis on tackling climate related issues, most areas of teaching across the programme now touch on a variety of climate action and ecosystem design, which is also reflected in the two-year post-graduate Masters programme. At ESALA, the most noticeable transformation in teaching is a shift to new conventions of spatial practice, where systemic and performance related thinking increasingly underpin design studios.
At the Bartlett School of Architecture, similarly, all landscape studios grapple with issues of climate and biodiversity, and there are a handful of notable studios that engage directly. Studios mix students from both years of the programme. Studio 5’s ‘No Man’s Land’ brief brings theory to practice and the sociopolitical to the ecological by incorporating ideas from posthumanism and new materialism: “the dawn of a new school of thought”, in which a “generation of designers and philosophers are questioning the human perspective and focus altogether.” Bringing this broad and entangled thinking to ‘wastelands’ and their transformation allows an engagement with the ethics of human and more-than-human relations to land and landscape.
Studio 6, ‘Extractive Topographies’, is more concerned with the process of wasteland creation at the far north of Europe and Asia, where extractive industries shape vast swathes of landscape, and where an icy northern place is thawing and changing those processes of extraction. Eurasian borders and transhumant indigenous cultures whose livelihoods are destroyed through ecocidal practices offer further grist for thought and action.
Spring
Summer
Finally, Studio 9, ‘Unstable Ground: How Mountains Move’, inhabits the seismic landscapes of Abruzzi, which layer up an additional set of fears and risks of earthquakes, which propose landscape change on a cataclysmic timescale alongside the more slowly unfolding apocalypse of climate change. Pressing questions of drawing, making, and language to communicate this interplay of immense forces, the studio insists that landscapes of risk – “and, we contend, the climate crisis – can be considered landscape architecture problems in that they are as much a crisis of communication as they are of representation.”
A climate-neutral future will only be achieved by teaching a new generation about the values of cooperation and collaboration, while exposing students to complex environments where multiple aspects and scales of interpretation require engagement with diverse disciplinary perspectives. However, the way forward requires a broader culture change in teaching; to fight the insane culture of overwork in landscape architecture schools and in the profession, because it stops people from having ideas; to adapt curricula to more explicitly respond to the parallel emergencies of climate change and loss of biodiversity; and to collapse the wall between theory and practice. We need theoretical frameworks and modes of practice that are in and of the world, as perceptive processes of unravelling, imagining, and projecting radical yet pragmatic near-futures.
Ross Mclean is programme director of the MA (Hons) Landscape Architecture at the University of Edinburgh. He is author of Transformative Ground: A field guide to the post-industrial landscape and co-director of The Surface Agency.
Tim Waterman is Associate Professor of Landscape Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His most recent book is Landscape Citizenships, with Jane Wolff and Ed Wall, his next book, is The Landscape of Utopia
Creating sustainable futures for climate vulnerable sites
Anna Rhodes, Chris Rankin and Lisa Mackenzie
Edinburgh School of Architecture and Landscape Architecture
How as landscape architects can we tackle social and environmental issues in the context of the climate emergency and biodiversity crisis? This is a question that we hope has become ingrained in the minds of ESALA’s Landscape Architecture students and that has been posed from day one of their courses. As we approach COP26, ESALA’s graduating students and academics take a moment to reflect on a year-long journey together, and on the resulting student design projects which demonstrate how we can contribute to a sustainable and resilient future.
ESALA’s landscape architecture studio briefs are designed to raise environmental consciousness, giving students an awareness of their role in shaping sustainable futures for climate vulnerable sites through design. This year the final year student-led projects were framed by three design studio units: ‘Dear Green Glasgow’, ‘Rethinking the Urban Park’ and ‘The Cromarty Firth’. Common across the three studios, and fundamental to the ethos of the school, is an ambition to foreground understanding of territory through physical and environmental readings rather than being led by political and economic rationales.
The ‘Dear Green Glasgow’ Studio
The ‘Dear Green Glasgow’ studio was directly influenced by the opportunity to step up climate action in Scotland; to make our voices heard, take action now and more importantly to speculate on the legacy of this moment in time.
The upcoming COP26 climate conference is set to animate the inner-city banks of Glasgow’s River Clyde. An area of former shipyards once key to Glasgow’s identity and economy, the last event to activate this area was the Glasgow Garden Festival in 1988. Conceived as a regeneration tool to encourage investment in the area and to ameliorate the negative impacts of deindustrialisation the popularity of and investment into the festival offered potential to resurrect Glasgow’s riverside heritage and reconnect the city to the Clyde. Though portions of the site are economically successful, now referred to as the ‘media quarter’, today the social and environmental legacy of this area is questionable.
Beginning their investigations by considering a recontextualisation of the Glasgow Garden Festival to align with the goals of COP26, students designed show gardens to establish and highlight important landscape concerns or demonstrate the feasibility of landscape design-led solutions. Launching from the scale and locations of their show gardens, students grew their projects to reimagine Glasgow’s urban territory as living, adaptable and resilient landscape.
Specific Place.
Nikki Petrova MA4
“In a world where resources are scarce, we can no longer afford to waste them. In an ever-growing urban context, where open space is no longer easily attainable, but instead a privilege, it is unwise to make less than the most of the space we do have.
‘’This project recognises the importance of neighbourhood parks for local people, the wider city and for ecology. It is a project, which tries to understand why certain parks are more loved than others, and what it is that makes a place “specific”. It aims to apply this knowledge to three physically similar, though contextually different settings to enliven and enrich them. Through long-lasting, sustainable design with a high focus on tangible use, Specific Place aspires to positively transform the places, which have the greatest and most immediate impact on the outdoor life of locals.’’
Grounded.
Benjamin Jones MLA
“‘Grounded’ transforms the site of Glasgow Airport into a saltmarsh public park, restoring contaminated land, reconnecting communities of humans and non-humans to the landscape, and creating a dynamic and resilient space that will protect communities from the effects of the climate crisis – and allow them to react to future changes. This is facilitated by the creation of Y.our Land, an app that empowers citizens to monitor, nurture, and advance the formation of their landscape over the next 200 years and beyond. The project taps into the unrivalled carbon storage potential of saltmarshes, utilising the remediating ability of sediment and marsh vegetation. Glasgow Airport acts as a catalyst for the creation of a wider saltmarsh network to protect and reconnect communities of humans and non-humans well into the future.”
Carbon Farming Meshwork.
Lucy Elderfield–Sheehy MLA
“The Allt Graad river network encapsulates the entangled complexity of the Anthropocene. The Carbon Farming Meshwork project outlines a route map for the local community to reclaim and re-inhabit this land whilst enhancing ecological carbon sinks.
The proposal explores four threads: ‘Wild Carbon’ delineates reduced human intervention and reintroductions of ecosystem engineers, such as beavers, to restore self-regulating riparian woodland and peatlands. ‘Carbon Commons’ explores shared ownership among human and non-human communities within silvopasture and silvoculture commons. ‘Cultivated Carbon’ utilises regenerative agricultural practices and paludiculture to enhance soil carbon and provide economic value to the local community. ‘Carbon Lore’ fosters common knowledge creation through Carbon Trail Observatories and rituals of care, such as micropropagation of sphagnum moss distributed via drone across remote peatlands to restore degraded blanket bog.”
The Glasgow Neurons.
Alex Tsz Yin Yung MLA
“This project analyses and critiques Glasgow’s dominating car culture that deprives the vitality of other living organisms. The car culture and infrastructure in Glasgow, as a mark of the Anthropocene, involves significant exploitation of nature and subsequently the opportunities of the city’s inhabitants to thrive – to express their vitality. Informed by theories of degrowth and recovering landscape, ‘The Glasgow Neurons’ project demonstrates ecocentrism as a manifesto landscape.”
‘Intelligent Wilderness: Creating resilience in the climate crisis’.
Kate Saldanha MLA Winner: ECLAS Outstanding Masters Student Award 2021
‘At the heart of this project is an openness to the unpredictability of nature and the current climate that we are now in. The Intelligent Wilderness looks at how to replenish natural resources lost to industry through a strategy of wilding to help the return of biodiversity, natural systems and processes to the landscape. This project embraces modern technological advancement, suggesting the creation of a Critical Zone Observatory Network. This technological infrastructure is designed to monitor and diagnose the changes occurring in the surroundings as it undergoes the process of wilding and sustains the impacts of climate change. This landscape of the Intelligent Wilderness offers a profitable future without deteriorating the wealth of resources from which it is built.’
solutions. Launching from the scale and locations of their show gardens, students grew their projects to reimagine Glasgow’s urban territory as living, adaptable and resilient landscape.
‘Rethinking the Urban Park’ Studio
Gunther Vogt has stated, ‘To this day creating a contemporary kind of park remains one of the most difficult tasks for our profession’. The great urban parks of the 19th and 20thC have their roots in a desire to positively affect public health through access to open space and fresh air, combined with the promotion of an idealised vision of ‘nature’. The MA4 studio asked how the park for the 21stC and beyond should be conceptualised and designed, in the current context of climate breakdown, health inequalities and biodiversity loss. The student work developed in this studio demonstrated the vital role that landscape architects can play in reimagining tired and often under used local spaces that nonetheless remain full of potential in positively contributing to the physical and mental health of citizens. With ideas deeply rooted in place students developed speculative and imaginative proposals focussing on both the regeneration and retrofitting of several existing parks and how underused spaces could be reimagined as parks for the future.
‘The Cromarty Firth’ Studio, The Black Isle, Highland Region
Few disciplines deal with socioenvironmental issues through the range of scales that landscape architects necessarily deal with in the practice of their daily working lives.
Understanding the landscape entity of a Firth within its national territory allowed students to engage with overlapping landscape scales (often highly complex and difficult to comprehend) whilst maintaining the touchstone of a readable spatial unit in a region.
The studio supported the students in identifying both social and environmental forces that act upon a landscape, ultimately leading to landscape change. This ability was considered critical not only to the ethos of the studio but also in laying the groundwork for the contribution that early career landscape architects can make as they enter the profession. The studio challenged existing planning methods that often prioritise control and designation over means of understanding space as dynamic and fluctuating. In taking this position, the studio brief requested imaginative project scopes that were inherently open in their intent. The speculative design futures authored by the students represented issues of community, economy, politics, ecology and empowerment.
Anna Rhodes and Chris Rankin are lecturers in Landscape Architecture. Lisa Mackenzie is a senior lecturer in Landscape Architecture.
Futureproofing food landscapes in a world of volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity
Peter Hobson, Saruhan Mosler and Poone Yazdanpanah
Writtle University College
Factors driving human-induced climate change are complex, and in most cases are deeply linked. In particular, growth in human population, the global economy and the way we produce food.
Large swathes of tropical forest are cleared annually to make way for farmed beef cattle and palm oil – two products that feature high in retailed ‘luxury-end’ food. In simple terms, food and forest are inextricably linked. Current expansion and production in one are causing rapid decline in the other; and without forests our capacity to provide enough food for a growing population is greatly diminished. At the same time, as forests are being cut down to create more land for food, 1 billion people in the world remain food insecure (Lal, 2010).
The future of food is uncertain. How we produce, distribute and consume food is going through fundamental changes, which yields huge uncertainty, but also amazing opportunities. In the UK, the ambitions of the National Farmers Union (NFU) to achieve net zero greenhouse emissions by 2040, ten years ahead of the UK government’s own plans, synchronises with a defining moment in the UK’s agricultural policy through the introduction of the Agricultural Bill. This forms the impetus for radical change. Sustainable food production and mitigating environmental degradation are now firmly centre stage of UK strategies and targets for meeting the sustainable development goals.
Writtle University College is transitioning much of the curricula it delivers at higher education towards interdisciplinary theory-topractice models of student learning with a focus on concepts of social and environmental sustainability. Specifically, the Masters in Landscape Architecture incorporates landscape ecology and environmental science
Grow Social: A new food-led community urban centre in New Cross and Telegraph Hill London.
James McGarath, MA student
‘Grow Social’ is a proposal for a new community-led urban farm located near New Cross and Telegraph Hill in Lewisham, South London. This project demonstrates how cities can use derelict spaces to establish sustainable and resilient systems to produce nutritious food for local communities. The UN sustainable development goals to tackle food insecurity (SDG 2), promote healthier lifestyles (SDG 3) and to create sustainable urban environments (SDG 11) were instrumental in the development of Grow Social. The project proposes a mixture of monoculture and polyculture planting, including an orchard, protected and unprotected cropping, and a forest garden. Key resources required for growing produce are to be managed through rainwater harvesting, solar panels, on-site composting, and nitrogen-fixing planting. The design supports an activity program to engage with local communities to educate and create awareness about growing, harvesting, production and cooking food. This program ranges from teaching unskilled people agricultural and cookery skills to weekly gardening sessions with local primary school children.
Tiny forests for human wellbeing: “A new Design Model for Urban School Settings to Restore Nature Connectedness”.
Keely Williams, MA student
Trees in the urban landscape contribute to our mental and physical health by providing contact with nature. The aesthetic and cultural value of trees are well recognised by communities, as is their importance in improving air quality, in reducing surface water flooding, mitigating the urban heat island effect and supporting biodiversity. The UK Government recognises the socio-environmental benefits of many more trees and woods in our towns and cities, and it has pledged in its manifesto a commitment to plant 50,000 urban trees across the country.
The project Woodland Wellbeing applies the concept of ‘Tiny Forest’ to Cathedral Primary school playground located in the city of Chelmsford, to help tackle problems related to health and wellbeing, and also as part of a broader green infrastructure plan to reduce the effects of climate change (Fig 4 and 5). The thinking behind the proposed design concept builds on the UN sustainability goals 3, 4, 11, 13 and 15. By utilising the ecosystem service benefits of a ‘Tiny Forest’ in a school playground, it is anticipated gains will be made in heat and noise reduction, cleaner air, carbon sequestration, flood mitigation, and nature-based health improvements.
1 IUCN (2021) Bonn Challenge approaches target to restore 150 million hectares of degraded land. https://www.iucn.org/news/secretariat/201609/bonn-challenge-approaches-target-restore-150million-hectares-degraded-land
Peter Hobson is Professor of Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainability, Centre for Economics & Ecosystem Management. Saruhan Mosler is Senior Lecturer, Landscape Architecture, School of Sustainable Environments and Design. Poone Yazdanpanah is Senior Lecturer, Landscape Architecture, School of Sustainable Environments and Design.
