Anne Whiston Spirn
Professor of Landscape Architecture and Planning, Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Book Recommendations:
Recommended by Anne Whiston Spirn
“[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.” (from Amazon)
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 Kate Orff, 2017 MacArthur Fellow, has an optimistic and transformative message about our world: we can bring together social and ecological systems to sustainably remake our cities and landscapes. Part monograph, part manual, part manifesto, Toward an Urban Ecology reconceives urban landscape design as a form of activism, demonstrating how to move beyond familiar and increasingly outmoded ways of thinking about environmental, urban, and social issues as separate domains; and advocating for the synthesis of practice to create a truly urban ecology. In purely practical terms, SCAPE has already generated numerous tools and techniques that designers, policy makers, and communities can use to address some of the most pressing issues of our time, including the loss of biodiversity, the loss of social cohesion, and ecological degradation. Toward an Urban Ecology features numerous projects and select research from SCAPE, and conveys a range of strategies to engender a more resilient and inclusive built environment.