Living Urban Watershed, Reconfiguring Charlestown through the localized retention of urban stormwater, Lucas Dobbin
The Department of Landscape Architecture holds an abiding commitment to climate mitigation and adaptation through its curriculum, faculty research, and design culture. We stand at the frontier of carbon drawdown and the urgent demand for climate adaptation in all of our work together. Historically, we contend that existential demands for adapting threatened or damaged natural systems in cities propelled the emergence of landscape architecture practice as urban reform in the United States in the 19th century. Today, these demands remain crucial drivers in our work—but with ever greater urgency in the face of extreme aridity and heat, mega-fires, flooding, sea level rise, excessive carbon emissions, and other risks to life and prosperity. In response, we are educating a generation of activist practitioners, theorists, advocates, and more—a virtual army of climate warriors who will lead the charge for regenerative, adaptive ways of reimagining a just and sustainable world.
Achieving these goals requires a community of learning committed to deeper analysis of the patterns of change and the role of design in reducing carbon emissions and adapting to climate risks. Climate by Design is the foundation of our commitment to building this community. It is a required course for MLA degree candidates and is open to other GSD and Harvard students interested in the climate crisis and design. The course is built around critical questions and interrogates existing systems of knowledge. What is climate change? What are the design strategies that respond to or anticipate these changes? How effective are they? Whom do they serve? And on what terms?
The effects and burdens of climatic change are unequal, contributing to increased social and economic disparity and often exacerbating historic patterns of inequity. The impacts are multiple and diverse, as are the many cultures and communities that must respond and adapt. To develop design tools that respond to these conditions, we need to understand not only the science but also the political, social, economic, and cultural contexts on the ground where design projects and movements are rooted.
Through a series of lectures by GSD faculty and external experts across various fields, this course introduces students to the science of climate change and explores the range of paradigmatic design responses. Throughout the semester, students work in teams to develop and analyze a case study, advancing methodologies for critical assessment and visual representation. The studies consider social, cultural, and aesthetic dimensions, environmental function, economic deployment, and political engagement. They are organized around 9 key themes and situated in different geographical, political, economic, social, historical, environmental, and climatic contexts. These exemplary cases are a means to understand and articulate the evolving role of landscape architecture in a changing climate.
Examples of these themes and student analysis of specific cases can be explored below.
The Swansea Bay Tidal Lagoon is a U-shaped breakwater proposed on the southwest coast of Wales. The project would be the world’s first tidal lagoon power plant, with hydro turbines located within the breakwater that generate electricity as the tide rises and falls in the lagoon twice a day, thus generating electricity four times each day with the cycles of the tides.
Baolis, or stepwells are underground reservoirs in which water can be stored, close to the level of groundwater to ensure a constant supply of water during the dry season, one of two monsoon seasons across the Indian subcontinent. While stepwells are utilitarian, they also have significant religious, social, and cultural significance.
The Ashland Forest Resiliency Stewardship Project is an ongoing collaboration since 2010 between the Lomakatsi Restoration Project, the City of Ashland, The Nature Conservancy, and the United States Forest Service. The project covers 7,600 acres of land to support, preserve and restore wildlife habitat, water quality and a healthy forest ecosystem.
To restore the desertified Badia, a rainwater harvesting plan was developed using the Vallerani micro harvesting technique. The technique uses the Vallerani plough, in which a tractor digs small water harvesting pits on the contours of hillside slopes, creating water retention and infiltration of surface runoff. These micro catchments are planted and serve as fodder for livestock.
The Chagga Homegardens are a multistorey agroforestry cropping system cultivated by the Chagga people on kihamba, ancestral land on the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Over 100 crops exist within the Homegardens. They transform the existing forest and create a rich, biodiversity model of agroforestry land use with a management model that is passed down across generations.
TransMilenio is a bus feeder system, with 104 stations and 1,000 buses, moving 43,000 passengers per hour. The system was adopted in place of a Transportation Master Plan, including a metro system and elevated highways. The mayor rejected the metro plan as it would only serve residents in the city’s center, offering mobility to wealthy residents while neglecting the city’s periphery. The additional funds saved by operating the TransMilenio were used to build 155 miles of bike lanes in the city that now move 5% of the city’s population.
In 2011, Copenhagen was struck by a 1,000-year storm event, a Cloudburst, that flooded the city with three feet of water, causing over $1 billion damage across the city. The city engaged in a planning period to create the Cloudburst plan with the idea of Blue-Green solutions. These solutions are low-tech, on the surface, not engineered underground, and interactive.
Alameda Creek is the largest tributary to San Francisco Bay, and is arranged around a creek constituency from the headwaters to the downstream baylands, including living and constructed infrastructural elements, like upstream dams and downstream sills. Scape Studio’s Public Sediment: Unlock Alameda Creek, proposes that sea level rise adaptation must happen upstream, and uses the creek to deploy sediment to downstream Baylands to protect tidal ecosystems and increase public access to the creek and bay.
Pleistocene Park is dedicated to restoring the grazing ecosystems of the Arctic. The warming of the permafrost, a permanently frozen layer of ground that circles the planet’s northern latitudes, would release the same amount of greenhouse gases as all other anthropogenic emissions combined. Grasslands absorb less heat than the forests and scrub that have grown over time. Reintroduced large herbivores would continue to maintain the grassland, ensuring that it does not transition back to the forest. At the same time, they trample snow in the winter, deepening the permafrost and locking carbon dioxide in the soil.
The climate crisis is here now and for the foreseeable future. For designers who shape the built environment, there is an urgent need to respond to the changing climate with greater understanding, sophistication, and imagination. To do so requires a community of learning committed to deeper analysis of the patterns of change and the potential roles designers may play in reducing carbon emissions and adapting to the many changes the future will bring. We must ask critical questions and interrogate existing systems of knowledge. What is climate change? How can designers approach it? What are the design strategies? How effective are they? Whom do they serve? And on what terms?
From Off-Shoring to Near Shore: Littoral Landscapes at Work This studio will explore the complex environmental and social interests of multiple forms of landscape labor—people at work in working landscapes—through the design of regional frameworks and localized sites in coastal Massachusetts.
Near-Future City Urban Assemblages Encoded for Change This is the fourth and final semester for the core Landscape Architecture sequence. It questions ways in which we can design urban assemblages for the city during moments of deep and rapid transformation. The assemblages are explored as a basic “DNA” of the city in which urban, landscape and ecological elements are intertwined to imagine new ways of habitation for both human and non-human constituencies.