Toward an Urban Ecology: SCAPE / Landscape Architecture

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A manual, monograph, and call to action, Toward an Urban Ecology points to the future of landscape architecture's role in making resilient, sustainable, and community-oriented spaces. Founded in 2005 by Kate Orff, SCAPE is a landscape architecture and urban design studio based in New York, celebrated not only for its interventions in public spaces but also for the far-reaching questions it raises and meaningful debates it engenders about the built environment, public sphere, climate change, and social and environmental justice in the age of the climate crisis. SCAPE is more than a design firm- it is a progressive and multidisciplinary think-tank, emphasizing the potential of landscape to mediate relations between communities and infrastructures. For the past ten years, the SCAPE practice has seen landscape architecture as an expanded field and as a form of activism, a zone of collective engagement. Its output takes many forms- research, teaching, built landscapes, maps, reports, and temporary installations. Through each of these, SCAPE's goal is to create and organize dialogue--then to channel the conclusions reached in concrete, meaningful actions. It has consistently sought to reveal how embedded natural processes, cycles, and systems can help shape the cities of tomorrow. Toward an Urban Ecology is an extended case study of the firm's practice, showing in detail how they construct narratives of projects, what kinds of questions they ask, and how they've engaged in a constellation of sites and issues in a way that is useful for the next generation of landscape practitioners and activists--storytellers and scientists with the power to change the world.

Reviews

"Those familiar with landscape architecture and urban design today are no doubt already aware of the originality of this practice and would likely expect this book - part manual, part manifesto, and part monograph - to follow suit. The books ambition is nothing short of reconceiving urban landscape design as a form of activism.... SCAPEs Manufestograph begins to address how we as a discipline can actually effect change. Of all the things this requiresdesign vision, enabling policies, strategic funding streams, creative partnerships, innovative maintenance strategies, feedback loops, new representation strategiesthe most important message this book imparts is the tireless advocacy that change requires, and which SCAPE is able to model. I want to be doing this. We all should be doing this. SCAPE has got something important going. And we have to believe it will make a difference." - Journal of Architectural Education

"A beautiful book with engaging full-page color photography that delves into Breakwaters, their Rebuild by Design project in Staten Island, and others." - The Dirt

"Kate Orff is an optimistic and creative force in the world of climate adaptive design. Her book is part monograph and part a clarion call for the need of meshing the social and environmental to deal with the future problems of our planet." - Land8

"Cities have multiple connections to the biosphere. Today they are all negative, destructive. This book shows us in great detail and with splendid clarity how we can turn them positive. It goes well beyond standard solutions as it brilliantly explores the biosphere and makes discoveries." - Saskia Sassen, Professor, Columbia University and author of Expulsions

"[This book is] a call to action on urban ecology and climate change, with landscape as the principal medium. Kate Orff's Toward an Urban Ecology is a presentation of ground-breaking projects by SCAPE, and the principles and strategies that underlie their success. Human societies cannot successfully mitigate and adapt to the stresses of climate change without a new state of mind, and landscape architects and artists have an essential role to play....required reading for landscape architects." - Anne Whiston Spirn, Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, author of The Granite Garden

Author Bio

Kate Orffs activist and visionary work on design for climate dynamics has been shared and developed in collaboration with arts institutions, governments, communities, and scholars worldwide. Since founding the New York-based landscape architecture and urban design firm SCAPE, Kate has advanced projects of all scales, including: award-winning, harbor-wide planning efforts in New York; the innovative oyster project Living Breakwaters; and pilot ecological investigations in Gowanus Bay.

She is also a Professor at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation and Director of the Urban Design program. Kate was named a MacArthur Fellow in 2017, as the first landscape architect in the Foundations history to be honored with the award. Kates work bridges design, science, and community participation to redefine the role of the landscape architect in the age of climate change. She is coauthor, with Richard Misrach, of Petrochemical America (2012) and coeditor and author of the book Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park (2011). She lives in Forest Hills, New York.