Towards a Holistic Landscape: Understanding, Repairing, and Sustaining Systems

Abstract

Landscape interventions are often designed through a human-centric lens that does not always consider the essential role that more-than-human elements, alongside other underrepresented elements, have in the holistic landscape. This research examines how systems-based thinking can shift peoples’ perceptions of how we view and understand the landscape. Systems-based thinking is organized at its most basic level into elements, interactions, intentions, and resulting function, which in this case are the processes and forms shaping the landscape. I hypothesize that through systems-based thinking and design, people can understand the landscape system holistically and consider how humans interact with and understand the landscape system around them.For this investigation, I develop a landscape biography methodology to examine how a landscape system has been altered due to design interventions, critical narratives, and human and more-than-human relationships within that system. Storytelling through design along with ecorevelatory design and community engagement serve as a framework to measure the landscape literacy, ecological literacy, and place attachment people have with these systems. Storytelling through design concentrates on how past land narratives are seen through the latest design interventions and help inform site users of system narratives. Landscape literacy measures the effectiveness of people understanding those narratives, including people–place connections, social injustices, and elemental relationships in the system. Ecorevelatory design offers an approach to make visible to visitors the once-invisible and incorporates more-than-human elements at the forefront of the intervention. This design strategy leads to ecological literacy and human understanding of the critical role that more-than-human elements play in the landscape. Community engagement inclusively builds system relationships and extends learning between human and more-than-human elements in the landscape throughout the design process. Place attachment demonstrates human-element connections by caring for the land, sharing the memories people have with the land, and exhibiting pro-environmental behaviors. Three case studies – Sweetgrass in Seattle, Hunter’s Point South in New York City, and Menomonee Valley in Milwaukee – illustrate the critical roles of this framework in understanding landscape narratives, repairing conditions for more-than-human elements of a system, and sustaining healthy system relationships for the future. Systems-based design demonstrates the need for a holistic function as the primary objective of design interventions; relationships and interactions between elements are crucial in achieving a holistic system.