Learning Landscapes

The landscapes we create are crucial places to learn about natural systems, ecological processes, and the changing planet. Every park, waterfront, and plaza carries traces of the human and ecological forces that shaped it, and design can bring these stories to the surface. At SCAPE, we use environmental signage, interpretive tools, educational curricula, and exhibitions to share explicit and implicit landscape lessons, embedding education in the built environment. Our work aims to inspire generational change and bring voices of all ages into a conversation about long-term environmental and community stewardship.

The systems at work within a landscape are often invisible to the average person. When you experience a landscape, it can be difficult to understand how ecological processes are occurring or how human activities have shaped a place over time. Thoughtful interpretation embedded into sites can make these relationships legible to a broad audience and unlock new readings of the everyday environment.

Environmental signage may be the most direct of these tools. Images, narrative, and surrounding context weave a site’s ecological present into a shared future. Along the Gowanus Canal, interpretive signage grounds the Sackett Community Hub site in its post-industrial context, mapping more than 200 years of transformation of the former tidal marsh ecosystem. A tide clock tracks water levels today and connects residents to the history and future of the neighborhood. Read more about Transforming New York’s Harbor.

The interpretive signage at Bruce Beach in Pensacola, Florida narrates the site’s rich social, industrial, and recreational past. Placed along the water’s edge, the signs trace the site’s marshy beginnings to its reopening as a public park, documenting the significance of the beach for Black, Indigenous, and Creole members of the Pensacola community. Signage content was created in collaboration with local historians at the University of West Florida Historic Trust and a community advisory group, a process that built trust with the community and paralleled the park design effort.

Interpretation doesn’t have to be read. During the design process, on-site experiences serve as an entry point into long-term landscape stewardship. Group events, site walks, and interactive activities encourage lived experience with a site, fostering a deeper understanding of the landscape.

Playful guides and manuals can inspire excitement and action in people of all ages. During the Living Breakwaters design process, SCAPE and MTWTF created an oyster-gardening manual for New York City schools. The manual describes the New York Harbor School’s techniques for raising urban oysters for Billion Oyster Project. Now used in classrooms throughout Staten Island, this small pamphlet helps students participate in harbor restoration while expanding the research and stewardship base for future large-scale ecological infrastructure.

Education can also be built into the program and form of a landscape. No matter the scale, every landscape is full of complex systems that enrich the environment. SCAPE designs educational spaces for people to immerse themselves in these natural systems, learn through observation, and become active stewards over time.

Cultural institutions can act as hubs for landscape education. The Greenpoint Library and Environmental Education Center in Brooklyn combines a traditional library program with ecological education across three stories. Each level of the urban landscape provides space for hands-on learning about the geological, ecological, and cultural history of the site.

In larger parks, we design learning pockets that place ecosystems front and center. The Pollinator Lab at Tom Lee Park in Memphis, Tennessee turns planting design into the subject of an outdoor classroom. A wooden platform frames relationships between host plants and insects, enabling activities like insect scavenger hunts and plant identification. Read more about Parks that Welcome.

To scale up our impact and foster generational change, SCAPE designs site-specific landscape curricula as an overlay to our work. Ready-to-go lesson plans and hands-on activities are a crucial resource for local educators who don’t have the capacity to develop these from scratch. Students visit the site throughout the school year and learn about the landscape and ecological systems within their community.

SCAPE also supported the Louisiana Environmental Action Network on its Environmental Justice Curriculum for Louisiana K-12 schools, advancing the organization’s larger mission of sharing environmental knowledge across the state. The curriculum fills a crucial gap in youth environmental education, teaching the history and evolution of Louisiana’s profoundly altered and vulnerable landscape. Building on Petrochemical America, SCAPE created an interactive mapping exercise that traces environmental justice through the geographic, economic, and social history of the Lower Mississippi River.

Exhibitions provide an opportunity to share landscape lessons more broadly, beyond the site. We work with institutions and curators to engage diverse audiences in conversations about landscape, ecology, and urbanism.

In 2019, SCAPE developed an exhibit for the New York Historical Society’s Hudson Rising, an exhibition exploring 200 years of ecological change and environmental activism along the Hudson River. A custom-built installation and projected animation tells the story of Living Breakwaters, enabling people to experience a new landscape-forward approach to resilience.