Landscape Architecture in the News Highlights (August 16-31)

Reading Forest in South Lake Tahoe, California by Todd Gilen / Todd Gilen

A Landscape Architect’s Outdoor ArtworkHarvard Magazine
“Decades later, that synthesis was part of what propelled him toward a master’s degree in landscape architecture, after 20 years as a curator, graphic-design artist, set designer, and furniture designer. ‘I got to a point in my work as an artist where I felt like I needed some traction in a way that I wasn’t quite finding in the arts,’ [Todd Gilen] says. ‘Landscape architecture has a kind of scientific rigor about it. It’s a discipline that has a basis in both science and the arts.'”

So Long, Traditional Lawn. The New Turf Trends—From Wildflowers to Fescue — 08/27/21, The Wall Street Journal
“‘I have an enormous moss garden just naturally because I don’t do anything to it,’ said Sandra Youssef Clinton, a landscape architect in Hyattsville, Md. Sixteen large oak trees provide constant shade, she said. Though fans of classic turf tell her, ‘Oh, you should get rid of that, it looks so terrible,’ Ms. Clinton finds it quite beautiful. Said Mr. Moore, ‘Even the word ‘moss’ conjures elves and fairies and deep forest.'”

Good News: The Most Popular Material on Earth Is Great for Storing CO2 — 08/27/20, Fast Company
“Our Earth is heating up because of all the carbon dioxide in the air. But even if we can suck that much CO2 out of the atmosphere, there’s still a problem: What do we do with all of it once it’s recaptured? The short answer is, put it into products. The longer answer is, put it into the right products. Specifically, concrete.”

Study Suggests Bike Lanes Do Not Lead to Displacement, Gentrification — 08/27/21, Bike Portland
“The installation of new bike infrastructure in neighborhoods does not lead to displacement of people of color, and low-income areas received more “hard” facilities like buffered or protected bike lanes than high income areas, according to a new study published in July by Elsevier.”

After Years of Failure, California Lawmakers Pave the Way for More Housing — 08/26/21, The New York Times
“Suddenly zoning reform has been thrust to the top of the urban agenda. Cities including Charlotte, N.C.; Minneapolis; Portland, Ore.; and Sacramento have moved to allow multifamily buildings on lots previously limited to single-family houses. The issue is now starting to attract higher-level attention: In the past two years 10 states, including Connecticut, New Hampshire, Montana and North Carolina, have considered bills to reform local zoning rules.”

In Fire Scorched California, Town Aims to Buy the Highest At-Risk Properties — 08/23/21, NPR
“The idea is to connect the burnt out lots to the town’s existing park land. That’s good for adding more recreation but it could also work as a fuel break. Efseaff’s department could strictly manage forests like this with the hopes that the next wildfire might slow down here and give firefighters a chance.”

In a Warming World, Consider the Mist Garden — 08/19/21, Bloomberg CityLab
“Designed by landscape architects Quennell Rothschild & Partners, the new mist garden features 504 evenly spaced fog nozzles atop a new plaza that fills in the 310-foot pool end to end, even keeping the original 1964 stone coping. The new plaza’s edges are paved in a pattern of overlapping triangles, a nod to the Art Deco architecture of the park’s first World’s Fair in 1939, as well as Manhattan landmarks like the Chrysler Building and Rockefeller Center. Concrete lounges make it possible to simulate a spa day in the middle of Queens’ largest park.”

How a Pioneering Garden Designer Inspired Vogue’s Fall Fashion Fantasy — 08/17/21, Vogue
“‘Should it not be remembered that in setting a garden we are painting a picture?’ So asked Beatrix Farrand in her 1907 Scribner’s essay ‘The Garden as Picture.’ A pioneering American landscape architect whose career spanned the Gilded Age, the Roaring Twenties, the Great Depression, and two world wars, Farrand wrote, ‘The two arts of painting and garden design are closely related, except that the landscape gardener paints with actual color, line, and perspective…while the painter has but a flat surface on which to create his illusion.'”

Landscape Architecture in the News Highlights (August 1-15)

ASLA Smart Policies for a Changing Climate. NatureScape, Orange County, California / Jodie Cook Design, Inc.

Is Artificial Turf Right for You? 3 Things to Consider Before Installing a Fake Lawn — 08/12/21, Architectural Digest
“According to San Clemente landscape designer Jodie Cook, although grass requires potable water and turf doesn’t, that’s too narrow a comparison. Other elements of the water cycle are a major issue. Plants, even grasses, create water themselves. ‘When you put turf down and replace a living plant, you’re removing moisture from the environment,’ she explains. ‘You’re removing atmospheric water.'”

Native Land Acknowledgments Are Not the Same as Land — 08/12/21, Bloomberg CityLab
“The growing practice of acknowledging Indigenous land ancestry is a positive change, but tribal stewardship must be the end goal.”

The Senate Infrastructure Bill Includes $1 Billion to Address Devastation Caused by Freeways. Experts Say It’s Not Enough — 08/11/21, Fast Company
“The latest edition of the Congress for New Urbanism’s Freeways Without Futures report highlights 15 projects that it says are primed for a transformation, including Interstate 244 in Tulsa, Interstate 5 in Seattle, and Interstate 980 in Oakland.”

Your Garden May Be Pretty, but Is It Ecologically Sound? — 08/11/21, The New York Times
“Some gardeners react to any mention of ecological landscaping — the merging of environmental science and art — as if it were a compromise or concession meant to limit their creativity. Darrel Morrison, a landscape architect who has been practicing and teaching this philosophy for some five decades, begs to differ.”

Study: Protected Bike Paths Saved Lives During COVID — 08/10/21, Streetsblog
“In a report released today, researchers from the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety dug into the nuances of America’s (still-ongoing) pandemic-era bike boom by scrutinizing the spatial and temporal distribution of pre- and post-lockdown bicycle trip counts and crash counts in the city of Arlington, VA.”

Using Nature to Combat Climate Change — 08/09/21, CNN
“Landscape architect and founder of SCAPE Kate Orff describes how regenerative living infrastructure can help mitigate the devastating impacts of climate change.”

The Seas Are Rising. Could Oysters Help? — 08/02/21, The New Yorker
“A great deal of [Kate] Orff’s work addresses the inescapable fact that the Atlantic Ocean is rising, and coming for the land. She’s the founder of the design firm scape, the director of the Urban Design Program at Columbia University, and the first landscape architect to win a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant. She’s also at the forefront of an emerging approach to climate resilience that argues we should be building with nature, not just in nature.”

New IPCC Report: There Is Still Time to Limit Climate Change

The United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) released the first major report as part of its sixth assessment of global climate science — the first significant analysis of research since 2014, covering more than 14,000 studies. Its core finding: global warming of 1.5°C (2.7 °F) over pre-Industrial Revolution levels is inevitable over coming decades, but if we act now, we can stave off further, more dangerous warming of 2°C (3.6°F), or, even worse, 3°C (5.4°F), which is what the world is now on a trajectory to experience. As climate reporter Andrew Revkin notes, humans are currently adding “40-billion-plus tons of greenhouse gases to the atmosphere each year (and rising).” The IPCC argues that limiting warming to 1.5°C is only possible if the world’s governments accelerate efforts to reduce emissions by transitioning to renewable energy and net-zero communities and transportation systems. “Achieving global net-zero carbon dioxide emissions is a requirement for stabilizing carbon dioxide-induced global surface temperature increases.”

In this first comprehensive analysis of physical sciences, which was approved by 195 governments, the IPCC states that “many of the changes observed in the climate are unprecedented in thousands, if not tens of thousands, of years.” Analyzing the IPCC’s findings, The New York Times reports that “the last decade is quite likely the hottest the planet has been in 125,000 years. Atmospheric levels of carbon dioxide have not been this high in at least 2 million years.”

Changes in global surface temperature relative to 1850-1900 / IPCC

To date, the report finds, “emissions from human activities are responsible for approximately 1.1°C (2°F) of warming since 1850-1900.” If the world can achieve “immediate, rapid and large-scale reductions in greenhouse gas emissions” in the near term, climate change could be stalled at a 1.5°C increase. And 1.5°C of warming, while dire, will be far less destructive than 2°C.

“For 1.5°C of global warming, there will be increasing heat waves, longer warm seasons, and shorter cold seasons. At 2°C of global warming, heat extremes would more often reach critical tolerance thresholds for agriculture and health.” A 2°C temperature increase would force almost unimaginable adaptations and migrations.

High-level findings from the IPCC highlight the need to rapidly reduce greenhouse gas emissions but also scale up climate adaptation efforts and plans to retreat from soon-to-be uninhabitable areas. Landscape architects not only help communities reduce emissions by planning and designing low-carbon transportation systems and applying Climate Positive Design; they also engage with communities on nature-based adaptation and retreat plans.

Jackson Street Reconstruction Project, Saint Paul, Minnesota / Bruce Buckley Photography for Toole Design

According to the IPCC, warming is occurring across all parts of the planet, but most in the Arctic and on land.

With every increment of global warming, changes get larger in regional mean temperature, precipitation and soil moisture / IPCC

The impacts of climate change also already go beyond warming to include “changes to wetness and dryness, to winds, snow and ice, coastal areas, and oceans.” Climate change is intensifying the water cycles, which will lead to more intense rainfall and flooding but also more intense drought. In higher latitudes, there will likely be more rain, while it will decrease in the sub-tropics, which will get even hotter.

Model of precipitation and soil moisture changes / IPCC

This is where landscape architects can plan and design nature-based solutions. In areas of higher flooding, landscape architects plan and design green infrastructure or sponge city approaches that safely retain stormwater; in areas experiencing drought, they design sustainable landscapes that collect and reuse water and reduce water use.

ASLA 2020 Professional General Design Honor Award. Deep Form of Designed Nature: Sanya Mangrove Park, Sanya City, Hainan Province, China. Turenscape
The University of Texas at El Paso Campus Transformation, El Paso, TX / Ten Eyck Landscape Architects

The IPCC finds that the high end of temperatures and heatwaves have increased due to human-driven greenhouse gas emissions. “It is virtually certain that hot extremes (including heatwaves) have become more frequent and more intense across most land regions.”

Research has found that the parks landscape architects plan and design can reduce nearby community temperatures by at least 6°F degrees. Communities with streets lined with shade trees are also up to 10°F cooler during the daytime.

ASLA 2011 Professional General Design Honor Award. Contrasting Shade: Building a Sustainable Urban Grove at Central Wharf Plaza, Boston, MA. Reed Hildebrand / Charles Mayer Photography

Seas, which have risen 8 inches over the past century, are expected to continue to rise, causing more frequent and severe flooding in low-lying areas and increased erosion and coastal habitat loss. “Extreme sea level events that previously occurred once in 100 years could happen every year by the end of this century.”

This is where landscape architects and planners are helping communities either manage retreat and relocation or become far more resilient to flooding through nature-based approaches. Landscape architects, planners, and ecologists are also helping to create room for coastal species at risk to migrate and adapt.

ASLA 2019 Professionl General Design Honor Award. Hunter’s Point South Waterfront Park Phase II: A New Urban Ecology, Long Island City, NY. SWA/BALSLEY and WEISS/MANFREDI with ARUP/ Vecerka / ESTO

Since 1993, the rate of warming in oceans has doubled, and oceans will continue to experience “more frequent marine heatwaves, ocean acidification, and reduced oxygen levels. These changes affect both ocean ecosystems and the people that rely on them.” Coastal and indigenous communities at risk will need further support from landscape architects in adapting their way of life and livelihoods.

The IPCC indicates that the loss of seasonal snow cover, glaciers and ice sheets, and Arctic sea ice is expected to accelerate. Artic sea ice is at its lowest levels since at least 1850. The temperatures of Arctic and Boreal permafrost have also increased, heightening risks of releasing billions of tons of stored carbon dioxide and methane, a potent greenhouse gas. Landscape architects can help increase the health and resilience of Artic ecosystems by reducing man-made impacts that further disturb these soils.

Lastly, the IPCC finds that the effect of climate change in cities, where 56 percent of the global population now resides, “may be amplified, including heat (since urban areas are usually warmer than their surroundings), flooding from heavy precipitation events, and sea level rise in coastal cities.”

With the help of landscape architects and planners, cities are applying resilient green infrastructure or sponge city approaches that combat both increased heat and flooding at once.

ASLA 2009 Professional General Design Award of Excellence. Buffalo Bayou Promenade, Houston, Texas. SWA Group / Bill Tatham
ASLA 2009 Professional General Design Award of Excellence. Buffalo Bayou Promenade, Houston, Texas. SWA Group / Tom Fox

Explore expected regional impacts through IPCC’s new Interactive Atlas, which includes fact sheets and technical summaries. Also, learn more about landscape architects’ solutions to climate change.

Kongjian Yu Defends His Sponge City Campaign

An example of a true sponge city project. Sanya Dong’an Wetland Park, Sanya, Hainan Province, China / Turenscape

Two recent articles in the American media — one from The New York Times and another from The Christian Science Monitor — raised questions about the efficacy of China’s sponge city concept in the face of climate change. As storms become more powerful and release more water faster, the flood control mechanisms of Chinese cities are being overrun. News stories have focused on recent dangerous flooding in Zhengzhou, a city of 12 million on the banks of the Yellow River, which killed more than 300 people and trapped others in tunnels and subways. The articles questioned whether nature-based solutions, rooted in the sponge city approach, can handle the increasing amounts of stormwater inundating Chinese cities on rivers and coasts.

In a Zoom interview, Kongjian Yu, FASLA — founder of Turenscape, one of China’s largest landscape architecture firms, and creator of the sponge city concept — said, “first of all, Zhengzhou is not a true sponge city. There has still been way too much development and grey infrastructure.” And many Chinese cities have been using the term “sponge city as a political slogan” and a way to attract central government funding, given the deep support for the approach from Chinese president Xi Jinping.

He believes the benefits of the sponge city approach, which involves designing and constructing city-wide systems of ponds, wetlands, and parks that retain stormwater, have been proven. “Since ancient times, Chinese cities along the Yellow River with monsoon climates have used ponds to manage flooding and stormwater. So we know these approaches worked for over 2,000 years because these cities survived.”

ASLA 2010 Professional General Design Honor Award. Tianjin Qiaoyuan Park: The Adaptation Palettes. Tianjin City, China / Turenscape
ASLA 2010 Professional General Design Honor Award. Tianjin Qiaoyuan Park: The Adaptation Palettes. Tianjin City, China / Turenscape
ASLA 2010 Professional General Design Honor Award. Tianjin Qiaoyuan Park: The Adaptation Palettes. Tianjin City, China / Turenscape

Chinese cities today are required to maintain 30 percent of the city as green space. Another 30 percent is dedicated to community space. For Yu, this means there is more enough space to create more ponds and water-absorbing parks that can capture vast amounts of water. “In 60 percent of the land in cities, we can use nature to retain water so it doesn’t drain away. In China, we have a saying — ‘water is precious, don’t let it go.’ There is plenty of space to be used to retain water.”

ASLA 2012 Professional General Design Award of Excellence. A Green Sponge for a Water-Resilient City: Qunli Stormwater Park. Haerbin City, Heilongjiang Province, China / Turenscape

Yu outlined the key components of the sponge city approach. Stormwater should be captured using green infrastructure at its source, where it falls. Sponges should be evenly distributed and permeable so they can absorb water instead of shifting it somewhere else. “If properly designed, it’s a democratic water management system” made up of very local solutions.

Yu claims that with the story of Zhengzhou, the “media is seeking conflict and targeting something that isn’t a sponge city. Sponge cities can only solve the problem. We need more sponges, not less.”

Despite a recent video of a talk he gave, which he says has been viewed by more than 100 million Chinese citizens, there still needs to be more public education about the benefits of sponge cities. “Some of the public still doesn’t understand the sponge city concept, and some may find it a waste of money. Furthermore, some civil and hydrological engineers in China have been attacking the sponge city, nature-based approach because it takes away their jobs.”

If a sponge city is working as it should, “there would be no flooding. People forget when they don’t have disasters.”

When asked about NYC’s new approach to handling sea level rise-induced flooding in lower Manhattan, which will involve constructing a sea wall along with large-scale cisterns to store water, he said: “cisterns are unsustainable.” The concrete cisterns “have to be huge and therefore expensive and high maintenance.” Furthermore, this approach wastes water, which is a “living resources and when combined with plants and soils creates more natural resources.”

Yu calls for greater capacity building among the landscape architecture and civil engineering professions in China and elsewhere in the sponge city concept. “The issue in China is that some designers and engineers are building parks but not building in the stormwater management capacity needed.” In China, stormwater is still the responsibility of civil and hydrological engineers.

To address issues with the design and implementation of sponge cities, Yu will be hosting a summit with the leadership of the civil and hydrological engineers at his research and educational campus. “We will have a high-level discussion aimed to bridge the gaps.”

Furthermore, Yu’s team is publishing a new book in Mandarin — Performance Study of Designed Ecologies — that includes real data about sponge city projects. In addition to his videos, he has also produced a textbook for China’s thousands of mayors, who he said are on board with the approach.

“Flooding in the era of climate change presents an opportunity for landscape architects. We have an opportunity to build up our approach. Landscape architects can solve these problems — not with concrete pipes and cisterns — but with nature.”

ASLA 2020 Professional General Design Honor Award. Deep Form of Designed Nature: Sanya Mangrove Park, Sanya City, Hainan Province, China. Turenscape

Getting Real About Sea Level Rise: Landscape Architecture, Policy, and Finance

A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation: Uniting Design, Economics, and Policy / Island Press

By Kristina Hill, Affil. ASLA

Over the next hundred years, average global sea levels are expected to rise faster than they have in the last 8,000 years. By 2050, storm surges and high tides could flood homes, subways, and roads that are currently one or two feet higher in elevation than the homes, subways, and roads that have already flooded over the last twenty years in New Orleans, New York, Zhengzhou, and Boston. Hundreds of millions of people living in coastal cities and rural areas will be affected, even if communities stop burning fossil fuels completely today.

Adaptation to climate change is essential. But do landscape architects and planners understand the most important impacts of higher seas, assuming the goal is to design for adaptation without accidentally blowing it? And how will communities prioritize and achieve the social goals of adaptation in a systematically unequal society? Who will pay, who will benefit, and how can communities take the first steps? As this figure based on innovative planning in the UK reveals, there’s a long lead time before coastal communities can live in safety, so those first steps need to happen now.

ONE Architecture and Urbanism

Carolyn Kousky, Billy Fleming, ASLA, and Alan M. Berger, the editors of the new book A Blueprint for Coastal Adaptation: Uniting Design, Economics and Policy, set out to answer these questions. In their introductory essay, they make the claim that landscape architects and planners already have most of the tools needed to help communities adapt. The challenge, in their view, is the lack of action. They close the last paragraph of their introduction with the (overly?) triumphant claim that if we start now, “the future is ours.” Ouch. Remind me who “we” are? And is it a good thing for anyone to claim possession of the future, which will have its own claims? I realize this introductory chapter is a pitch, not a research paper, and the chapters themselves are far more self-reflective. But I want to start by putting this review in context, simply because the book is so important.

As a scholar and designer in the field of landscape architecture, I ask myself every day whether design professionals have the synthetic understanding needed to advise urban decision makers to act. For example, while the authors in this anthology consider flooding driven by saltwater, rainwater, and rivers overflowing their channels, not a single essay grapples with the risk that shallow coastal groundwater will rise through the soil and/or move laterally into river channels in response to rising seawater. Recent research indicates that groundwater-driven flooding may cause more water-related failures of urban infrastructure and buildings than seawater and that it will add to river and rainwater flooding. If landscape architects and planners haven’t considered the compounded physical and ecological risks created by rising coastal groundwater, it’s premature for us to give professional advice on adaptation.

To be “professional,” our advice has to go beyond selling a proposal. That advice has to reflect the shared knowledge of a field, or it won’t meet the standard of professionalism; at that point, we might as well be selling used cars. If we recommend spending billions of dollars to use levees to keep the sea out, our shared knowledge tells us that we will also need to pump the rainwater and groundwater out from behind the levees and design the protected district to be resilient to catastrophic failures of coastal structures. Levees and movable gates won’t keep coastal land from flooding by themselves, especially where the rock or sand under a city is very permeable.

The upshot is that the mantra of “sponge cities” or “sponge wetlands” won’t work in high groundwater conditions, because the “sponge” will already be full of groundwater. The really bad news is that changes in the elevation or flow direction of coastal groundwater could end up sending us to a dystopian ‘80’s theme party. New flows of groundwater can mobilize soil pollution that was capped in the 1980’s or 1990’s and carry it under buildings where people will be exposed to old pollution in new ways. Most cities don’t even have maps of their shallow water table. Rising groundwater will corrode and shift building foundations, fill old sewer pipes and basements, corrode electrical conduits, and make extreme shaking more likely in an earthquake. Groundwater management must be part of any viable climate adaptation strategy.

The ambition of the editors to consider the trifecta of hurdles in funding, policy, and design is what makes this book eminently worth reading. Although no one confronts coastal groundwater impacts, the authors in this book provide a robust set of useful ideas, many of which have been tested in practice.

On the design side, Matthijs Bouw, associate professor of practice at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, presents useful examples from his professional design experience in New York and Boston clearly and intelligently.

ONE Architecture and Urbanism

It was (and is) hard for a European firm to encounter and adjust to the state of American infrastructure. Adaptation is made more difficult by the fact that American cities coast on bridge and pipe investments made 100+ years ago and have cultivated a strategy of neglect since then. Bouw’s description of a more abstract ideas competition in San Francisco is less effective than his other examples, but together his experiences allow him to sincerely observe that adaptation with equity is in doubt in the U.S., where we continue to live under the long shadow of systemic racism and growing economic inequality.

Karen M’Closkey and Keith VanDerSys, co-founders of PEG office of landscape architecture, use their experience in the same California ideas competition as the basis for an argument that adaptation will also be a housing problem, as lower-income renters will need new options. They do an excellent job of bringing in the bigger national picture, suggesting policy avenues and making it clear that the gravity and scale of the housing problem is impossible to solve with design tools alone. All of these design chapters are well-referenced and thoughtfully written.

Susannah Drake, FASLA, founder of DLANDStudio, and Rafi Segal, associate professor of architecture and urbanism at MIT, describe their proposals for coastal New Jersey and Long Island and Jamaica Bay, New York, more in the style of a manifesto or a competition submission. They have an interesting core of ideas and intriguing claims, but without a critical frame, deeper references, or details, the chapter reads more as a point of departure than a fully-reasoned landscape architecture strategy. For example, their image of dense housing inserted at the edge of a marsh reveals the fundamental conflict between human housing needs and the needs of coastal ecosystems.

Rafi Segal & DLANDstudio

There is no question that putting housing in that location would degrade the quality of the habitat for the egret shown in the image. As we get real about climate, we also need to face the fact that real tradeoffs result from developing coastal ecosystems. This proposal shows an opportunity for landscape architecture to lead adaptation through an ambitious use of land form as an armature for adaptation, instead of concrete and steel walls.

The same site, Jamaica Bay, is also the subject of a proposal in another chapter led by Catherine Seavitt Nordenson, ASLA, professor and director of graduate landscape architecture program at the Spitzer School of Architecture, The City College of New York, which is also provocative but isn’t presented with enough detail to understand how the ecosystems of the Bay would not suffer from introducing new tide gates or how higher groundwater would be managed at the edge of the Bay. As in the Segal and Drake proposal, some separation (physical, temporal or behavioral) would be needed between marshes and lagoons that are managed for housing or recreation and marshes and lagoons that are intended to support diverse ecosystems. It’s a complex landscape, so perhaps this is considered but not described.

On the planning and finance side, several chapters deserve particularly careful reading. Joyce Coffee, founder of Climate Resilient Consulting, and Sarah Dobie, a PhD student at the Taubman College at the University of Michigan, describe strategies at the municipal scale, contrasting the retreat by attrition that is occurring in a small town in Louisiana with Miami Beach’s efforts to raise its streets to adapt in place. Their frank and clear presentation stresses the glaring differences between a community whose tax base and land area are shrinking and a city where a growing population and continued investment is expanding its capacity to adapt in place. It’s not as clear that they have translated the cases into recommendations, which raises the question of whether we know how to prioritize the goals of adaptation. What outcomes are acceptable and to whom?

Thomas Ruppert, a coastal planning specialist at Sea Grant Florida, examines the genuinely frightening prospect that abandoned coastal properties will cause pollution hazards and concludes that current legal tools are insufficient to prevent this dystopian outcome. Carlos Martin, senior fellow at the Urban Institute, makes a spirited case for public funding for adaptation as public works, and Allison Lassiter, an assistant professor at the Weitzman School of Design at Penn, describes the risks of sea level rise for urban drinking water in Philadelphia, which draws its water from the tidal Delaware River, along with New York. Fadi Masoud, assistant professor and director of the Centre for Landscape Research at the University of Toronto, and David Vega-Barachowitz, director of urban Design at WXY architecture + urban design, take a speculative approach to zoning, describing environmental overlay zones as a strategy for implementing incremental change and making it clear that designers should understand the history and legal context of zoning before altering it.

The real stand-out chapter in this section is by Shannon Cunniff, scientific advisor at Stone Living Lab, and her co-authors. They present environmental impact bonds as a new financing tool that has already been used in Washington D.C., Baltimore, and Atlanta, and considered in many others. To the extent that cities continue to rely on private capital to pay for adaptation, or simply to accelerate innovative pilot projects, impact bonds are a very useful strategy. Taking this one chapter seriously could make the difference between kick starting adaptation or failing by delay.

Reprinted with permission of Quantified Ventures

Overall, the book has a strong emphasis on conditions and strategies in the Mid-Atlantic and Gulf coasts. This is a limitation for translating some of the design ideas to the west coast, because different regions have different problems (earthquakes vs. hurricanes, karst geology vs. granite, etc.). The book also doesn’t include innovations from design or financing that have been adopted in California or the Pacific Northwest, outside of the rather abstract recent ideas competition in the San Francisco Bay area. But it’s strong on arguments for the East coast and Gulf.

The editors have taken a light-handed approach. Each chapter is encountered on its own without a broader synthesis or set of recommendations at the scale of a section or the book, leaving the reader challenged to identify gaps and draw conclusions by themselves. For example, in spite of the editors’ hopes, it’s not clear that any of the authors have a strategy for increasing social equity in U.S. cities while adapting to flooding. In that sense, some of the limits in this anthology reflect the genuine boundaries of what has been tried and even proposed. To achieve greater equity, several of the authors seem to conclude that we will need more radical strategies.

Everyone should read this book to see how the field of landscape architecture might help cities adapt to a changing climate, particularly with new federally-funded infrastructure investments. Each chapter of this book reaches beyond the conventional limits of our professional knowledge, by degrees or by leaps. But the most important bar this anthology has set for other books about adaptation is to place questions about funding and policy side-by-side with design proposals. For setting that bar higher, we should all thank the editors. Every future book on this topic should accept that challenge and rise to it. Without progressive new policies that can direct the sources and uses of funds for adaptation, even the best designs for adaptation will only reinforce the unequal status quo.

Kristina Hill, Affil. ASLA, is the director of the Institute of Urban and Regional Development and associate professor of landscape architecture & environmental planning and urban design at the University of California at Berkeley College of Environmental Design. She is writing a book about adaptation to sea level rise.

World’s First 3D-Printed Steel Bridge in Amsterdam’s Red Light District

3D-printed bridge in Amsterdam / Joris Laarman Lab, Adriaan de Groot, via Design Boom

It’s not often that a queen and a robot team up to unveil a new project. In the heart of Amsterdam’s seedy red light district, Her Majesty Queen Máxima of The Netherlands pressed a button that enabled a small robot to cut the ceremonial ribbon, opening up the world’s first 3D-printed steel pedestrian bridge to traffic. The new bridge, which spans a historic canal, will be in place for two years while the historic bridge is renovated.

Queen Máxima, dressed in an elegant shade of Holland’s orange national color, was there to highlight new Dutch design and technology. The 40-foot-long, 6-ton steel bridge was designed by Joris Laarman, a Dutch architect, and MX3D, a local robotics company, in partnership with Arup, the global engineering firm.

3D-printed steel bridge in Amsterdam / MX3D, Jande Groen

According to Dezeen, the bridge’s “curving S-shaped form and balustrades with lattice-style perforations” were designed with parametric modelling software. The steel bridge form was constructed using a 3D printing technique called “wire and arc additive manufacturing,” which combines robotics with welding, reported AP News.

In a local factory, custom robots with arms that can weld forged the structure, slowly building layer after layer. In an interview, Laarman said: “by adding small amounts of molten metal at a time, we are able to print lines in mid-air.”

Robotic welders / MX3D

The team claims that the approach is hyper-efficient because the form uses minimal materials. MX3D co-founder Gijs van der Velden told Dezeen that a robotic approach enables “significant weight reduction and reduced impact for parts manufactured in the tooling, oil, and gas and construction industries.” But another architect calculated that the stainless steel in the bridge includes at least 27.7 tons of embodied carbon.

3D printed steel bridge in Amsterdam / MX3D

The Alan Turing Institute and Arup incorporated a network of sensors that will collect data on its performance with changing environmental conditions and foot and bike traffic over the next two years. Researchers at the Imperial College of London hope to analyze the stream of data to create even more efficient structures.

Micha Mos, a city councillor in Amsterdam, told AP News the city hopes the new bridge will change the vibe in Amsterdam’s red light district. “This may attract a new kind of visitor, one who is more interested in architecture and design, which will help change the way the neighborhood is perceived.”

Also check out: In 2019, China claimed to build the world’s first 3D-printed concrete bridge. Hopefully, the next 3D designer will seek to build structures out of carbon-sequestering materials.