– not just the places that we immediately recognize as designed.
More importantly, he pointed the way toward a new kind of making,
one in which humans anticipate the social and environmental
implications of our incessant attempts to adjust nature and adjust
to nature. We now admit that we have remade nature, irretrievably
and ominously. However, Jackson concluded with the promise of “a
new kind of history” (p. 157) that affects not only nature, but ourselves.
In this essay, I describe how landscape can be the medium
as well as the method for design that aims toward that new kind of
history.
As defined by Jackson, landscape refers to both a conceptual
field that examines how humans affect geographic space, and to
literal settings: real places. I follow Jackson in claiming both the
analytical and experiential implications of the word, and this essay
describes how it is the pairing of the experiential and the analytical
in landscape that enables it to be a catalyst for synthesis in science
and for insight in urban ecological design.
Urban ecological design is the subject of this essay because it epitomizes
the inherent contradictions and potentials of landscapes
made by people. Ecological is the pivotal term in the phrase. The
struggle to understand nature adequately to intelligently intervene,
since we inevitably will intervene, underpins Jackson’s declaration
that “. . .the new ordering of time should affect not only nature,
it should affect ourselves” (p. 157). This essay rests on the belief
that science is fundamental to intelligent intervention, and ecological
refers broadly to the socio-environmental sciences that can
provide knowledge to inform action. The term design is used to
mean “intentional landscape change” (Nassauer & Opdam, 2008, p.
636) and encompasses change affected by design professions like
engineering, landscape architecture, and planning; change affected