Fight or Flight: Space Colonization and the Future of Landscape Architecture

This seminar will examine the future of landscape architecture concerning the two forces that are likely to shape it well into the future: an increasingly uninhabitable Earth, and the evolution of humanity as a space-faring species.

The parallel tracks of space flight, colonization, and environmental protection and conservation will be analyzed and discussed. The former is about FLIGHT: the search for territory and resources beyond the confines of home, region, nation, and planet; the latter is about FIGHT: the counterforce to stay in place and “tough it out” in the face of peril, namely climate change, loss of biodiversity, zoonotic pandemics, and the disruptive advent of artificial intelligence.

Spacefaring will be addressed first: how it has existed in our imagination and how it has been translated into programs and associated technologies. The concern and care for the natural environment under anthropocentric and biocentric impulses will follow. Lastly, the seminar will examine how the flight-fight dichotomy informs the practice of landscape architecture, i.e.: how it should be aligned with a survival ethic and methods.