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. The book depicts a range of participatory and science-based strategies through the lens of SCAPE’s practice, featuring projects, collaborators, and invited essays on urban ecological design.
The themes of Revive, Cohabit, Engage, and Scale serve as the framework for the book. These chapters provide forward-thinking and celebratory design provocations that can catalyze chance and arm the reader with a way of thinking and acting ecologically across systems. Combining design, research, art, and environmental knowledge in order to advance landscape architecture as a form of activism, the practice has yielded a synthetic vision of landscape, infrastructure, and community. We hope that it will inspire you to synthesize everything that you know, to marshal your own personal talents, and to work toward an urban ecology.
Landscape Architecture Magazine (LAM) book review by Elissa Rosenberg, available here.
