Landscape Expertise in Climate Adaptation

Abstract

This article maps out landscape architects’ expertise in multidisciplinary, comprehensive climate adaptation discourse. Systemic frameworks and process-driven approaches in contemporary Landscape Architecture discipline can become a powerful tool for harnessing unprecedented solidarity for climate actions across fields. However, landscape expertise is still largely ignored or marginalized in real-life climate discourse dominated by policymakers, scientists, and engineers. This study addresses this gap in understanding landscape expertise through design research projects over the past two decades. The article theorizes a body of landscape architecture projects in the past two decades, and proposes three terms—spatialize, synthesize, and speculate—for describing the landscape expertise in multidisciplinary, comprehensive climate adaptation projects. „Spatialize” refers to landscape architects’ capacity to construct knowledge through strategically displaying „data” through critical cartography. „Synthesize” is the ability to envision multispecies entanglement by combining cultural, ecological, historical, biological, and political lenses through material practices. „Speculate” means to understand landscape design as a long-term practice with repeated operations, and, thus, to design is to deploy a speculative framework that generates knowledge through practice.