“So there is a new task—to understand the way the world works, regulate behavior in response to this knowledge, restore the earth, green the earth, heal the earth.”—Ian L. McHarg (1992, p. vi) preface to the 1992 edition of Design with Nature
Abstract
American landscape architect Ian L. McHarg developed an ecological planning theory and method for analyzing biophysical and sociocultural landscape characteristics and for evaluating these to determine suitable land uses. McHarg’s classic 1969 text, Design with Nature brought ecological planning to a mass audience, and his suitability analysis method was widely adopted. The theory, however, was neglected, as McHarg himself noted in his preface to the twenty-fifth anniversary edition of the book. A half-century later, there remains a need for theories that address the fit between humans and their environments, especially given ongoing environmental concerns marked by complexity and uncertainty. A fresh look at McHarg’s ambitious theory reveals it to have considerable depth, with much of its scientific foundation retaining relevance. It is unique in its capacity for connecting planning and design to ecology and evolutionary biology. In particular, energy, order, and disorder; adaptation; health; creativity; and human agency were addressed by McHarg, and these concepts remain integral to environmental problem-solving today. Using McHarg’s writings as the basis for a detailed analysis, we explore the meaning and significance of McHarg’s parallel constructs: syntropic fitness–health and entropic misfitting–morbidity and death. The theory is placed in the historical and contemporary contexts of environmental planning and the science of ecology. Criticisms of McHarg’s theory are addressed, and outdated aspects are identified. We connect relevant parts of the theory to socio-ecological practice through clear explanation of abstract concepts and identification of themes important for resilience planning and adaptive design.
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Notes
Xiang (2017, p. 2244) uses the phrase scholar-practitioner to describe scholars who create new knowledge to inform socio-ecological practice. According to Xiang, McHarg is an exemplar of a scholar-practitioner who cultivated a reciprocal relationship between professional practice and scholarship. Xiang (2019, p. 7) defines socio-ecological practice as “human action and social process” aimed at producing “secure, harmonious, and sustainable” living conditions. Xiang includes these professional domains within socio-ecological practice: “planning, design, construction, restoration, conservation, and management” (2019, p. 7).
Note that Design with Nature was originally published in 1969. The 1992 edition is cited here. The value of the 1992 edition is that it contains McHarg’s own retrospective account of the legacy of the book, written in the preface. The remainder of the text of the 1992 edition is the same as the original.
Suitability can be defined as “the fitness of a given tract of land for a particular use” (Ndubisi 2002, p. 35).
The Canadian ecologist C.S. Holling (1973) originated the concept of ecological resilience, the ability of an ecosystem to absorb a shock and persist. Davidson et al. (2016) provide a lexical analysis of the evolution of the concept, addressing the various meanings attributed to the use of resilience in combination with the terms ecological, urban, socio-ecological, disaster, and community.
In this paper, adaptation policy, planning, and design refers to practice that is based on the concept of adaptive capacity, defined by Chapin et al (2009, p. 241) as “capacity of social-ecological systems, including both their human and ecological components, to respond to, create and shape variability and change in the state of the system.”.
The Dictionary of Energy (Cleveland and Morris 2014) defines the Second Law of Thermodynamics as stating that “any system that is free of external influences becomes more disordered with time, i.e., it tends toward a state of greater entropy,” and entropy is defined as “a measure of the disorder or randomness of a closed system.".
Turner (2017, p. 12) defines homeostasis as “a state of internal constancy that is maintained as a result of active regulatory processes.”.
Niche construction theory is the theory that organisms actively modify their own niches through their metabolism, choices, or activities. According to Odling-Smee et al. (1996, p. 641), “niche construction regularly modifies both biotic and abiotic sources of natural selection in environments and, in so doing, generates a form of feedback in evolution that is not yet fully appreciated by contemporary evolutionary theory.”.
Adaptive management was defined by Stankey et al. (2005) as an approach to natural resources management that accounts for uncertainty by employing iterative learning-by-doing with assessment that accounts for nested scales within a larger set of systems, or adaptive framework.
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Acknowledgements
The genesis of this paper was a course, called Design With/In Nature, that the authors co-taught in 2016. The course benefitted greatly from the contributions of invited lecturers, several from architecture, who were colleagues and collaborators with the authors.
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Bryant, M.M., Turner, J.S. From thermodynamics to creativity: McHarg’s ecological planning theory and its implications for resilience planning and adaptive design. Socio Ecol Pract Res 1, 325–337 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42532-019-00027-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42532-019-00027-1