"Rosalea Monacella is a faculty member of the Landscape Architecture Program at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. Her expertise is in the careful indexing and shifting of dynamic resource flows that inform the landscape of the city. Her design research practice explores the notion of the ""thickened ground"" through a careful and rigorous investigation of an expanded ecology of economic, ecological and social systems that shape the metabolic and material flows of the city. Speculating on alternative near-future cities and how they might respond to climate change, changing resource flows and ecologies of energy. Bridget Keane is a lecturer in the Landscape Architecture programme at RMIT University. As a landscape architect/academic, her research and practice are concerned with landscape as a dynamic material system and considers ways in which global systems impact local landscapes through speculating on alternate futures of how we might live in response to issues of climate change, ecologies of waste and the effects of extractive industries."
Where has this collection been? The provocative voices gathered here offer both comprehensive and timely strategies for landscape architectural education yet to be presented together. Expansive yet precise, the authors-who represent a variety of disciplines and fields- deftly entangle intellectual frameworks with innovative studio pedagogies that engage the challenges and opportunities of the climate crisis. This body of design studio research will surely catalyze new modes of action by both academics and professionals that focus on making a just and healthy world, not simply saving it. Julia Czerniak, Professor of Architecture, Syracuse University; Creative Director, CLEAR RLA ASLA This book is a milestone in the world of landscape architecture education. Our planet is experiencing rapid change, and scant lessons can actually be gleaned from history at this stage. The question is rather how to direct studio teaching towards the unknown in a decisive and proactive way. With a broad array of experts in ecology, plant physiology, materials, sensing and digital processes, this reader offers design solace in an unforeseeable age. Christophe Girot, Professor of Landscape Architecture, ETH Univeristy Zurich At this fluid moment when we are contemplating the future of education in landscape architecture, this collection provides a rich and provocative field of approaches on which to draw. While apparently anachronistic in the 21st Century research university, studios are represented in their flexible ability to address complex issues across geography and society. We need this collective reflection to shore up our commitment to the studio form as well as to explore tomorrow's problems. Professor Elizabeth Mossop, Dean, Faculty of Design Architecture and Building, University of Technology Sydney This rigorously organized yet wonderfully diverse book is a resource for academic practitioners in creating new design studio pedagogies to address the symptoms and systems of the climate crisis and an unpredictable future. For students, it reveals insight into potential learning tools and methodologies. Thirty-three contributions are organized around five 'threads' of inquiry, which build an ethical momentum underpinned by new values. Alex Wall, Design Critic in Landscape Architecture, Graduate School of Design, Harvard University