Landscape and Urban Planning 106 (2012) 221229

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Landscape and Urban Planning

journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/landurbplan

Perspective Essay

Landscape as medium and method for synthesis in urban ecological design

Joan Iverson Nassauer
School of Natural Resources and Environment, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48103, USA

a r t i c l e

i n f o

Article history:
Received 20 March 2012
Received in revised form 26 March 2012
Accepted 26 March 2012
Available online 4 May 2012
Keywords:
Synthesis
Planning
Sustainability
Scenario
Visualization
Transdisciplinary

a b s t r a c t
Landscape refers both to a conceptual eld that examines how humans affect geographic space and to
real places, and the word has both analytical and experiential implications. Pairing the analytical and the
experiential enables landscape to be a catalyst for synthesis in science and for insight in urban ecological
design. Emphasizing that science is fundamental to ecological design, this essay broadly interprets urban
ecological design to include intentional change of landscapes in cities, their megaregions, and resource
hinterlands. The essay offers two laws and two related principles for employing landscape as a medium
and a method for urban ecological design. The laws observe that landscapes integrate environmental
processes and that landscapes are visible. Two related principles explain how these inherent characteristics can be used to effect sustain ability by using landscape as a medium for synthesis and in a method
that invites creative invention.
2012 Elsevier B.V. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.

Landscape is not scenery; it is not a political unit. . .it is never

simply a natural space, a feature of the natural environment; it is
always articial, always synthetic, always subject to sudden or
unpredictable change. . .[Landscape] is where the slow, natural
processes of growth and maturity and decay are deliberately
set aside and history is substituted. A landscape is where we
speed up or retard or divert the cosmic program and impose
our own. . . There are many who say that the salvation of [the
landscape] depends on our relinquishing this power to alter the
ow of time and on our returning to a more natural order. But
the new ordering of time should affect not only nature, it should
affect ourselves. It promises us a new kind of history, a new,
more responsive social order, and ultimately a new landscape.
John Brinckerhoff Jackson. Discovering the Vernacular
Landscape (1984, pp. 156157).
1. Introduction
More than 25 years ago Jackson (1984) described landscape as
the eld where humans and nature joust for time. Jacksons insight
grew out of his study of vernacular landscapes, which he identied
as the product of local custom, pragmatic adaptation to circumstances, and unpredictable mobility (p. xii). By characterizing the
landscape as where we speed up or retard or divert the cosmic program and impose our own and calling for a new ordering of time
(p. 157), he underscored his claim that humans make all landscapes

Tel.: +1 734 763 9893.

E-mail address: nassauer@umich.edu
0169-2046 2012 Elsevier B.V. Open access under CC BY-NC-ND license.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.landurbplan.2012.03.014

not just the places that we immediately recognize as designed.

More importantly, he pointed the way toward a new kind of making, one in which humans anticipate the social and environmental
implications of our incessant attempts to adjust nature and adjust
to nature. We now admit that we have remade nature, irretrievably
and ominously. However, Jackson concluded with the promise of a
new kind of history (p. 157) that affects not only nature, but ourselves. In this essay, I describe how landscape can be the medium
as well as the method for design that aims toward that new kind of
history.
As dened by Jackson, landscape refers to both a conceptual
eld that examines how humans affect geographic space, and to
literal settings: real places. I follow Jackson in claiming both the
analytical and experiential implications of the word, and this essay
describes how it is the pairing of the experiential and the analytical
in landscape that enables it to be a catalyst for synthesis in science
and for insight in urban ecological design.
Urban ecological design is the subject of this essay because it epitomizes the inherent contradictions and potentials of landscapes
made by people. Ecological is the pivotal term in the phrase. The
struggle to understand nature adequately to intelligently intervene,
since we inevitably will intervene, underpins Jacksons declaration
that . . .the new ordering of time should affect not only nature,
it should affect ourselves (p. 157). This essay rests on the belief
that science is fundamental to intelligent intervention, and ecological refers broadly to the socio-environmental sciences that can
provide knowledge to inform action. The term design is used to
mean intentional landscape change (Nassauer & Opdam, 2008, p.
636) and encompasses change affected by design professions like
engineering, landscape architecture, and planning; change affected

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J.I. Nassauer / Landscape and Urban Planning 106 (2012) 221229

Fig. 1. Landscape patterns are the basis for what people directly perceive about environmental phenomena of all scales, and human experience of landscapes prompts human
actions to change landscapes.
Adapted from Gobster et al. (2007).

by real estate development or natural resource management; and

most importantly, change that stems from the local custom, pragmatic adaptation to circumstances, and unpredictable mobility
(Jackson, 1984, p. xii) of people living their lives. Urban is used
here to refer not only to cities but to their megaregions which are
tightly intermeshed in infrastructure, trade, and travel patterns, as
well as their hinterlands that feed the global supply chain (Dewar
& Epstein, 2007). By this denition, in the century when the human
population has become predominantly urban, all landscapes can
be considered urban to the degree that they are managed to provide ecosystem services. While ecosystems in cities obviously have
been radically changed for human purposes, agriculture, forestry,
mining, and transportation landscapes are arguably equally urban,
even when they appear to be countryside (Cronon, 1992).
Since the establishment of this journal, landscape planning
has evolved from addressing rural landscapes (Weddle, 1974), to
encompassing urban design and planning (Rodiek, 1992; Spirn,
1986) and doing so in the context of landscape ecology (Rodiek,
1995). Its current scope recognizes that understanding and managing landscape change to achieve and protect ecosystem services
requires not only science but ecological design, which aims to synthetically achieve ecological, social, and economic goals (Nassauer,
Wang, & Dayrell, 2009; Palmer et al., 2004). Cities, metropolitan
areas, megaregions, and the urban support landscapes of agriculture, forestry, mining, and transportation all are the legitimate
objects of urban ecological design in support of a new kind of
history.
Perhaps because landscape does have both analytical and
experiential connotations, it is a word used by many different
disciplines, which have given it different specic, sometimes contradictory, meanings. The resonance and adaptability of the word
landscape also makes it vulnerable to misuse. Spare parts are discarded when it is butchered for consumption, cutting land from
scape. But even left intact, particular uses of the word can trivialize its more complete meaning. The ecological connotations
of landscape are trivialized when landscape ecology is employed
as only an implicit metaphor. Its esthetic connotations are trivialized when landscape esthetic experiences are identied with
vaguely dened spiritual values or compartmentalized as only a

part of outdoor recreation. When images of landscapes as seen

by people in everyday life are considered to be mere illustrations,
the power of human experience to motivate landscape change is
grossly underestimated. And in vernacular speech, landscape is
often trivialized as a verb, meaning to act on the landscape by
construction or maintenance. Jackson denes vernacular landscapes very differently, to include all the spaces at all scales that lie
between obviously designed places, which Jackson dubbed political landscapes. Vernacular landscapes constitute the global matrix,
embodying a complex array of human intentions that are resilient
even where politics and planning fail. And understanding vernacular landscapes in this broad sense suggests how landscape can be
a medium and method for synthesisamong different inhabitants,
disciplines, and forms of practice. All landscapes (whether concepts
about geographic space or literal places) are visible spatial entities,
and this simple characteristic is the basis for a powerfully practical analytical and synthetic device for bringing ecological insight to
urban design.
Landscape is a visible and noticeable artifact of often unnoticed
and sometimes invisible natural and societal processes. Because
landscapes are visible, landscape can bring different people into a
common experience of environmental systems. Across all scales of
environmental phenomena, the scale at which landscape patterns
are perceived by humans, the perceptible realm, is decisive for
landscape change (Fig. 1) (Gobster, Nassauer, Daniel, & Fry, 2007).
This landscape scale links everyday experience with other environmental phenomena that are not directly perceived, from global
atmospheric processes to submicroscopic processes of soil chemistry. The perceptible realm is where humans imagine, negotiate,
and decide about design, intentional landscape change.
Ecological design of vernacular landscapes calls for innovation,
applied invention, a prerequisite for the new kind of history that
Jackson foretold. Rather than attempting to return to a more natural order, mimicking nature, or compromising between human
desires and the limits of nature, ecological design invites the
invention and realization of new, resilient landscapes that visibly
embody societal values, thoughtfully incorporate our best knowledge of environmental processes, and are adaptable to surprising
change. To achieve this, ecological design must employ ecology not

J.I. Nassauer / Landscape and Urban Planning 106 (2012) 221229

merely as a metaphor (Pickett, Cadenasso, & Grove, 2004), but as

an analytical engine that propels designers to work with dynamic
environmental and human phenomena, anticipate surprises, and
formulate synthetic normative approaches to intentional landscape
change. It must grow from knowledge that integrates science and
practice to produce landscapes that synthesize apparently distinct
societal and environmental functions (Carpenter et al., 2009; Hill,
2009; Palmer et al., 2005) and anticipate the future (Meinke et al.,
2006).
Ecological design should focus on vernacular landscapes
because places that do not bear the stamp of professional designers
occupy the largest part of the terrestrial planet, including a growing proportion of megaregions. For example, suburban and exurban
landscapes (often summarized under the pejorative label sprawl)
are the fastest growing land use in America. Squatter cities are the
predominant type dening many sprawling cities in the developing
world. Agricultural landscapes, which occupy more than 40% of the
European Union and more than 30% of the contiguous American
states, are arguably the largest urban land use, since the functional
ecosystems of cities extend to agricultural watersheds that provide
potable water and other ecosystem services, and the supply chains
of urban food processing and consumption begin in agricultural
landscapes. Such vernacular landscapes are designed in the sense
of being intentionally changed, often by people who are pragmatically using what they know to make a living, to take care of what
they own, or to manage the quality of life in their communities.
These landscapes are only indirectly affected by formal design decisions; they are not part of Jacksons political landscape. However,
professional design and science can affect vernacular landscapes if
they employ knowledge of local custom, pragmatic adaption to circumstances, and unpredictable mobility as valuable information
for science and practice.
For cities to be resilient socio-environmental systems in the
midst of global change, landscape change that is managed by professionals should achieve vernacular status. This is a formidable
goal. Even integrative science that describes functional characteristics of healthy urban ecosystems (e.g., Brauman, Daily, Duarte, &
Mooney, 2007; Pickett et al., 2001) describes ecosystem services
in ways that may seem irrelevant to people who make vernacular
landscapes (Peters, 2010). Making human-dominated landscapes
resilient requires translating science into a vernacular. Landscape
is a medium and method for this translation.
2. Two landscape laws and two principles
To show how landscape can be used for synthesis science and
ecological design, I offer two laws of landscape function and two
related landscape principles. The two laws state the obvious: that
landscapes integrate environmental processes and that landscapes
are visible. The two principles explain how landscape characteristics can be used to effect sustainability: The Landscape Medium
principle demonstrates that the process of designing a shared landscape can synthesize disparate perceptions of a landscape and its
functions. The Landscape Method principle pragmatically employs
the imaginative artice of design to produce potential innovations
that anticipate the future.
2.1. Landscapes and integration of environmental processes
Landscape Law 1: integration of environmental processes. Different
environmental processes operate in and through the same landscape, and each landscape inherently integrates these processes.
Landscapes inherently integrate different processes, indicators, and design goals (Dramstad & Fjellstad, 2011; Palmer et al.,

223

2005; Swanwick, 2009). From the standpoint of human experience, Termorshuizen and Opdam (2009) see such a strong
relationship between landscapes and ecosystem services that they
recommend adopting the characterization landscape services.
They argue that this could make knowledge about ecosystem
services relevant at more local scales, where people make concrete decisions about landscape change. This law suggests that
the common sense of 19th century naturalists and geographers who found scientic insight by eld investigation in the
landscape is relevant for addressing local and global environmental challenges in the 21st century. 21st century science is
in search of a way to integrate methods and conclusions from
diverse specialized sciences, and a focus on landscapes is one
approach.
Because they inherently integrate the effects of fragmented
analyses and decisions, landscapes can confront society with
unintended effects, consequences of human actions that do not
anticipate synthetic properties. Transportation systems, economic
development policy, housing technology and policy, agricultural
technology and policy, water infrastructure systems, construction techniques, and even ecological restoration efforts are all
replete with such unintended effects. For example, U.S. federal
policy promotes the use of smart growth techniques including distributed stormwater management systems (a.k.a., green
infrastructure) on urban browneld sites through the U.S. Green
Building Councils LEED-ND (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design for Neighborhood Development) system (U.S.
Environmental Protection Agency, 2010). However, green infrastructure systems typically enhance connectivity between surface
and groundwater, and browneld sites often have contaminated
groundwater that is not remediated as part of the redevelopment process. Consequently, browneld redevelopment that is not
attentive to the synthetic properties of green infrastructure with
contaminated groundwater could unintentionally cause the migration of contaminants to surface ecosystems. In contrast, design
and planning processes that recognize how landscapes integrate
environmental processes can identify advantageous synergies. In
another example related to green infrastructure, the City of New
York recognized that maintenance of distributed stormwater systems was essential to sustainability, and found that rights-of-way
that are already maintained by the city (as part of the transportation
system) would provide an armature to ensure adequate maintenance of green infrastructure (PlaNYC, 2008). The Landscape Law
of Integration of Environmental Processes contributes to nding
benecial synergies and avoiding unintended effects of landscape
change.
A corollary of this law is that: Landscapes function at nested scales.
This corollary is well-known and thoroughly examined as part
of landscape ecology (e.g., Allen & Hoekstra, 1987), and it should
be equally well-known by anyone determining the boundaries of
landscapes to be considered in urban ecological design. Allen and
Hoekstras (1992) recommendation to always think up one scale
and down one scale from the function of central interest remains
a good rule for experimenting with the relationship between
environmental processes and landscapes at different scales. For
example, green infrastructure must be designed as a response to
its location within a functional watershed, but also with attention
to subtleties of surface slope and texture of the landscape surface
at scales so ne as to demand that some nal design decisions be
made in the eld, at 1 = 1 scale (Hill, 2009; Walsh et al., 2005). A
key challenge for ecological design is to make the hierarchies of
ecological processes (e.g., watersheds, materials life cycles, habitats) integral to the multiple governance hierarchies (e.g., federal,
state, counties, watershed districts, school districts, municipalities) that affect ecological systems (Innes, Booher, & Di Vittorio,
2010).

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2.2. Visible landscapes and common experience

Landscape Law 2: Common experience of visible characteristics.
Landscapes are visible in everyday experience and can be made
visible in spatial representations. This makes it possible for different people to have the same experience of visible characteristics
of a given landscape.
This law emphasizes that because landscapes can be seen, different people can point to characteristics that they notice and discuss
the different meanings those characteristics convey. What the characteristics mean and how they are valued depends on many aspects
of context, and the complexity of landscape meaning and value has
been richly explored (e.g., Spirn, 1998; Treib, 1995). However, this
law establishes that with reference to visible characteristics, different meanings and values of can be described and compared, making
synthesis possible.
Landscapes are visible evidence of the integral natural and cultural processes that produce and change dynamic environments.
For some scientists or other knowledgeable viewers, landscape
appearance may be directly linked to environmental or cultural
processes that are not immediately apparent to most people. For
most people, however, the link between what landscapes mean
and how they look is self-evident. It is part of everyday life. Landscape pattern is what people notice and change as they remake
the environment to suit their needs; it denes a scale at which
people intentionally intervene to change landscapes, a scale of vernacular design. Paying attention to what people notice about the
landscape and what it means to them in everyday life will help scientists, designers, and policy-makers reach synthetic conclusions
that are useful in affecting change (Nassauer, 1992; Termorshuizen
& Opdam, 2009).
Examining and designing a single, shared landscape engages
groups with different languages and cultures (design and science,
science and society, policymakers and local stakeholders) in grappling with the same object (Nassauer & Corry, 2004). While we
might see the landscape through different disciplinary or experiential frameworks, we can point to the same locations or relevant
characteristics in a landscape or in a spatial representation of the
landscape, and describe what we see there. Used in this way, landscape functions as a boundary object as Star (2010) dened it: a
material or organizational structure that allows different people
to work together without having achieved consensus but rather
cooperating by iteratively tacking back and forth between perspectives that refer to properties of the boundary object and that
are more or less well-understood by different participants (Star,
2010).
The visibility of landscape and its faithfulness of representation
make it possible for different people to refer to what they see as they
iteratively tack back and forth, literally or conceptually pointing to
different characteristics of the landscape, and progressing toward
having a common experience and a common basis for deciding
about landscape change. This potential has been widely demonstrated (e.g., Bohnet & Smith, 2007; Hulse, Branscomb, & Payne,
2004; Lewis & Sheppard, 2006; Sheppard, 2005). In an urban example from my own work, all neighborhood residents were familiar
with the small two-block area (approximately 20 acres or 8 ha) of
Maplewood, MN, USA, where my team designed rainwater gardens
in 19951996. The small size of the project area and neighbors
familiarity with it made it possible for designers and residents to
share a visible landscape, pointing to particular locations and characteristics that everyone could see, until we reached a common
conception of what the landscape was and could be (Nassauer,
1997). If landscape representations offer apparently realistic visual
experiences, representation can advance synthesis by making novel
but relevant landscapes immediately comprehensible as well. In

a second example, which explored potential ecosystem services

of exurban landscapes, we examined landscape innovations that
hadnt yet been constructed and were somewhat unfamiliar to the
homeowners who might adopt them. Faithfulness of representation was important to help people see these novel landscape types
(Fig. 2), and we aimed for photorealistic representations that accurately simulated the appearance of the future landscapes (Nassauer
et al., 2009).
Following from these two landscape laws, are two principles
stating that landscape can be used as a medium for synthesis
and a method to promote innovation. These principles articulate
Jacksons assertion that landscapes are always articial, always
synthetic. Both the landscape medium principle and the landscape
method principle employ design, intentional landscape change.
From Jacksons perspective, design is both a shared artifact of
human interaction with the environment and the making of a new
kind of history. Design has inherent potential to produce innovations, applied inventions, and, consequently, designs can be treated
as experiments, hypotheses about interactions between human
intentions and ecological processes (Nassauer, 1999; Pickett et al.,
2004). This is important because it demonstrates how the landscape medium and method can bring innovation into the analytical
framework of science, acting as a catalyst for communication
between science and practice (Nassauer & Opdam, 2008). The Landscape Medium principle demonstrates that because landscape can
be a boundary object shared by different experts and stakeholders,
it is a medium by which they can synthesize disparate perceptions
of the landscape and its functions and move toward a common
conception for design. The Landscape Method principle uses the
landscape medium, but it employs the imaginative potential of
design to invent alternative future landscapes, and it focuses on
advancing innovation by comparing and assessing these different
alternatives for a particular place or for a particular type of place.
2.3. The landscape medium for synthesis
Landscape Principle 1. The landscape medium. Because landscapes
are visible and inherently integrative, landscape can be a medium
that synthesizes diverse environmental functions and human
perspectives. A design process that uses landscape to engage
people with diverse perspectives in manipulating this shared
medium can promote synthesis and advance synthesis science.
Any landscape is simultaneously seen and valued in many different ways. As a geographic entity with specic location and extent, a
single landscape simultaneously embodies numerous biogeochemical and ecological processes, is a home to many species including
humans, may produce materials or market goods, and is the subject
of laws and legal inquiries, capital valuations and related nancial
transactions, study by scientists of many disciplines, study by scholars of the humanities, inspiration for artists, and manipulation by
designers and builders of many disciplines. In fact, as Meinig (1979)
famously observed, there are (at least) ten ways to view the same
landscape as nature, habitat, artifact, system, problem, wealth,
ideology, history, place, and esthetic. Meinig asserted that:
. . .even though we gather together and look in the same direction at the same instant, we will not we cannot see the same
landscape. We may certainly agree that we will see many of the
same elements houses, roads, trees, hills in terms of such
denotations as number, form, dimension, and color, but such
facts take on meaning only through association; they must be
tted together according to some coherent body of ideas. Thus
we confront the central problem: any landscape is composed
not only of what lies before our eyes but what lies within our
heads. (Meinig, 1979, pp. 3334)

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225

Fig. 2. Photorealistic simulations represent landscapes that were otherwise somewhat unfamiliar to homeowners.
Adapted from Nassauer et al. (2009)

However, this principle asserts that by being attached to

the same reference object, a landscape, different views can be
exchanged, and that a design process can move that exchange
toward synthesis in relationship to some question or problem.
Sciences, the design professions, and vernacular landscape
change operate almost independently, describing and changing the same landscape in ways that may be only incidentally
related, inadequately understood, or contradictory and sometimes destructive. In metropolitan areas, development typically
undermines habitat values, reduces water quality, and increases
per capita emissions of greenhouse gases. The ecosystem services
of a landscape may or may not be immediately apparent because
many ecological processes are not visible to the naked eye or cannot be interpreted by those who are not knowledgeable about
what they can see (Hein, Vankoppen, Degroot, & Vanierland, 2006;
Nassauer, 1992). The landscape medium principle employs the
landscape as a medium to align what is visible and may have
immediately apparent value for some, with what is invisible or not

widely understood, the ecosystem services supported by a landscape (Nassauer, 1997).

While different disciplines conceptualize the meaning and value
of a landscape in different ways, and often different members
of a community disagree about proposed landscape changes, this
principle emphasizes that landscape is a medium that facilitates
synthesis. Establishing the grain, extent, and boundaries of a landscape can be contentious, depending upon the values and functions
of interest: for example, watersheds at different scales in a hierarchy, or political boundaries compared with watersheds. But once
the landscape of interest has been agreed upon, people with very
different purposes have a basis for discussing the same landscape,
even though their immediate specic conceptions, interests, and
experiences may differ. If a design process approaches the landscape as a synthetic medium, scientists and stakeholders who
may perceive different functions and services when they see a
landscape, can experiment with manipulating the landscape as a
common material. To manipulate this common material together,

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J.I. Nassauer / Landscape and Urban Planning 106 (2012) 221229

Fig. 3. Evaluative responses to place-specic designs can suggest how general

pattern rules or best management practices might be improved and also suggest
relevant gaps in scientic knowledge.
Adapted from Nassauer and Opdam (2008).

they must address gaps and contradictions among their distinct

perspectives.
Some key hallmarks of a transdisciplinary (Fry, 2001) design
process are elaborated below. These are: inclusion of diverse conceptions, development of a shared reference or boundary object
(a landscape), design by iteration, breadth of conception, and
specicity and accessibility of the design product. The resulting
transdisciplinary landscapes are synthetic products of diverse perspectives.
Include diverse disciplines or stakeholders to design a single landscape together. Since only one landscape pattern can be imposed on
a given landscape at a particular time, the differences, incomplete
understandings, misunderstandings, and synergies among diverse
disciplines or diverse stakeholders conceptions and values can
emerge and be rectied in a landscape design process. Whether
the design of the landscape is merely selecting the location and
boundaries of a place of interest, establishing the relevant characteristics of a real place, or establishing the relevant characteristics
of landscape type more conceptual than real, having diverse participants agree on a single pattern forces each to consider how the
functions of interest to them can be rectied with other functions
that they would not have otherwise considered (Berkes, 2009).
Develop a shared reference or boundary object, a common landscape, represented by a shared data set. How diverse landscape
conceptions are rectied depends on the overarching purpose of
the design: how the landscape must function in the context of a
particular research, policy, planning, or construction project, and
how it inherently does function in the context of resident communities and socio-environmental processes that may not be explicitly
addressed in the initial denition of a project. In a particular project,
shared landscape data might serve to support models of many different environmental functions and models of different economic
and cultural values (e.g., Mahmoud et al., 2009). It might help policy
makers, developers, or the ultimate inhabitants of a place anticipate
or affect landscape change (Hulse et al., 2004). When a common
landscape is employed as a boundary object between science and
practice, it can promote collaboration between these realms (Fig. 3).
Designing landscapes together across diverse participants is not
only a means of engagement, it is a means of mutual learning and

rectication of differences, at least within the frame of the selected

landscape (Albert, Zimmermann, Kneilling, & von Haaren, 2012).
In some cases where community visioning is a critical element of
landscape change, literal scale models of the local landscape large
enough so that local people can use their own hands to experiment
future alternatives may be the appropriate medium (e.g., Bohnet,
2010).
Once a landscape is designed (selected, constructed, or represented in shared eld experiences, images, and data sets),
perhaps the most direct way that the landscape medium integrates
disparate conceptions of landscape is by presenting different disciplines, professions, and stakeholders with the same landscape
representations and shared data sets, the same image or map of
a specic place. Landscapes can be represented by precise data
that support different assessments by different groups of the same
landscape (Hulse et al., 2004; Nassauer & Corry, 2004). Not all
data will be shared, but a foundation of shared data helps to promote synthesis, ensure meaningful integrated assessments and
adaptive management of a landscape, and set up the potential
use of the landscape method to generate alternative futures, as
described in Principle 2. High resolution spatial data in ne classication schemes for land cover/land use, soils, relief, and surface and
groundwater data are typical fundamentals to represent the shared
landscape in ecological design processes. For example, as part
of the Baltimore Ecosystem Study, Zhou, Troy, and Grove (2008)
employed 1 m resolution land cover data to examine the relationship between lawn appearance and lawn fertilization practices by
individual households across two small urban watersheds. Similarly, our team employed 1 m data representing 24 classes of land
cover in our integrated assessment of alternative futures for two
small Corn Belt agricultural watersheds (Nassauer, Santelmann, &
Scavia, 2007; Santelmann et al., 2001).
While different investigations query and select from a single
data set in different ways and augment it with more specialized
data in different experiments or assessments, the data set in its
entirety inherently represents a shared conception of the landscape. This is a starting point for noticing potential conicts and
contradictions, for nding synergies, and for conducting an integrated assessment of different alternatives for future landscape
change (Scavia & Nassauer, 2007).
Design a common landscape iteratively. The landscape medium
invites iterative redesign, as participants critically examine resulting landscape patterns and compositions and tack back and forth
sharing their different perspectives on what they see in the eld,
in maps, or in other images. Reviewing alternatives as landscape
representations, different disciplines or stakeholder groups occupy
a meeting ground for identifying their differences and integrating their knowledge. Errors, omissions, and ideas for innovation
can emerge even before a formal assessment or design of landscape alternatives (Fig. 4). The design process elicits participants
responses to place-specic designs, whether these designs are only
proposals or fully constructed and inhabited places, and these
responses are the basis for group discussion, negotiation, and learning. This learning can take the form of revising rules of thumb for
pattern design based on place specic response alone, new policy
ideas, or new socio-environmental research questions (Fig. 3).
Initiate the design process with relevant criteria for possible landscape functions. The emergent common landscape may embody
multiple ecosystem services and multiple societal values that
might not otherwise intentionally occur in the same place, or that
might otherwise be at odds with each other in a single landscape.
This emergent common landscape will be accessible to integrated
assessment of its environmental and societal functions if it was conceptualized with an awareness of those functions, at a scale that is
relevant to the science, policy, or design questions at hand (Doering,
Kling, Nassauer, & Scavia, 2007; Termorshuizen & Opdam, 2009).

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227

Fig. 4. An iterative design process in which different conceptions of future landscapes (termed design scenarios in this gure) become increasingly specic as transdisciplinary
groups of scientists and stakeholders critically review shared landscapes, ultimately in a precise set of land allocation models and GIS coverage.
Adapted from Nassauer and Corry (2004).

Complete the design process with an accessible, replicable, clearly

specied landscape description at the relevant scale. If the synthetic
landscape medium is described in ways that are useful to both science and society (Fig. 3), it supports translation between the two
realms. The landscape description should be sufcient to enable
integrated assessment that includes any relevant environmental
and societal functions (Scavia & Nassauer, 2007) and to establish a
baseline for adaptive management; it should be sufciently accessible to be salient to society; sufciently clear and replicable to
be credible in science; and sufciently balanced and informed to
be legitimate in both science and society (White et al., 2010; Cash
et al., 2003).
The landscape medium can contribute urban ecological design
knowledge to science and make science knowledge applicable to
urban ecological design. By explicitly promoting synthesis, the
landscape medium broadens scientic conceptions of landscape
structure and function (McAlpine et al., 2010). Especially in cities,
where virtually every place functions as part of many different
social milieus and environmental systems, the landscape method
invites science to engage local landscape knowledge and the societal values that often propel urban landscape change. It also
complements known advantages of ecosystem management and
place-based studies by bringing specic characteristics of landscapes and the design process into play.
The products can be landscapes that are generalizable patterns,
applicable to many different places of a given type, or designs that
are specic to a place (Fig. 3). The key to making design useful in
this way is to use design of generalizable patterns to link scientic knowledge of environmental or societal processes with design
proposals to change specic places. Generalizable pattern rules
explicitly make conceptual connections between the necessary
simplications of science and the innite complexity of local societal and environmental characteristics in particular places. Those
connections go two ways: allowing science knowledge to affect
local landscape change and allowing local knowledge to inform
future pattern rules and science questions. In this way, the landscape medium can powerfully complement adaptive management
as a response to landscape change.

2.4. The landscape method and invention

Principle 2. The landscape method. Because landscape representations can be manipulated as a shared medium, they invite
invention. They can be employed to imagine and represent alternative future landscapes: creative design products that embody
novel possibilities, respond to uncertainty, anticipate risk, and
promote innovation.

The landscape method takes the landscape medium one step

further to anticipate the future. It employs design process to discover
multiple synthetic design products: landscape inventions, which can
engage the sciences, design and policy disciplines, and stakeholders in generating and comparing alternative future landscapes. This
method invites creative, imaginative transdisciplinary experimentation with different possibilities for intentional change toward
alternative future landscapes (Nassauer & Corry, 2004; Steinitz
et al., 2003; White et al., 2010). The alternatives are based on hypothetical circumstances, often termed alternative scenarios, that
help to anticipate challenges to society and ecosystem services and
lead to adaptive innovations (Barton & Haslett, 2007).
Alternative future landscapes are a particular method for
employing alternative scenarios. While alternative scenario
approaches are familiar to economists and landscape ecologists
(e.g., Ahern, 1999) and in the wake of the Millennium Assessment have been increasingly employed to anticipate change in
socio-environmental systems (Carpenter & Folke, 2006), the alternative future landscape approach has specic advantages for urban
ecological design because it employs the landscape medium and
method. It always represents alternative futures as landscapes in,
spatially explicit representations based on shared data, as discussed
in Principle 1. The representations might be models, maps, or
images that demonstrate the implications of the alternative scenarios in a landscape. Such representations are not mere illustrations,
nor are they only quantitative outcomes. Rather, they are representations of integrated processes at a selected relevant landscape
scale.

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J.I. Nassauer / Landscape and Urban Planning 106 (2012) 221229

The landscape method is fundamentally creative (Ford & Gioia,

2000; Gilson & Shalley, 2004; Lyle, 1985). It allows transdisciplinary
teams of scientists, policy-makers, and stakeholders to be imaginative, speculative, or didactic in their assumptions about landscape
change, design or policy as they iterate through the design process
(Fig. 4) several times, creating a related series of design products,
alternative landscape futures. Furthermore, it is a proven means
of engaging stakeholders in affecting landscape change (Mahmoud
et al., 2009; Potschin, Klug, & Haines-Young, 2010; Shearer et al.,
2006).
Like other types of alternative scenarios, alternative future
landscapes require an adequately complete and precise description of a baseline or present situation, a number of alternative
future scenarios, and possible contextual circumstances (e.g., plausible future policies or possible changes in technologies or global
environmental phenomena) that could connect the baseline with
alternative future scenarios (Schoonenboom, 1995). Determination
of whether an alternative future is plausible should account for
societal relevance and signicance for ecosystem services rather
than only calculated probabilities of change from the present to
some future state. Using the landscape medium, selected landscape
characteristics vary among alternatives based on broader scenario
assumptions and goals. Landscape characteristics (location, conguration, composition, and management) are selected because they
are hypothesized to exhibit relevant characteristics of ecological,
economic, or cultural processes. Like other creative processes, the
landscape method succeeds best when participants have been fully
engaged in developing initial assumptions and goals for the array
of scenarios so that these understood by all as a starting point for
generating alternative landscapes. The method is also creative in
the breadth and divergence of landscape conceptions that it promotes; participants should be prepared to welcome ideas that are
not part of their discipline or their own experience. Ideas that are
novel and might initially seem unlikely should be incorporated as
alternatives are generated. Importantly, the landscape method is
exibly iterative (Fig. 4), allowing alternatives to adjust and novel
ideas to be edited as they are compared with other alternatives in
the context of project goals.
Selecting characteristics of each alternative future landscape
opens the way for different groups to describe what natural and
human processes should be represented in the landscape futures
(e.g., Albert et al., 2012; Hulse et al., 2004). Aspects of process
that may appear to be accounted for in one alternative may be
absent in others. Aiming to take a precautionary stance toward
protecting ecosystem services, some would argue that selecting
relevant ecosystem services is rst and last a matter of expert judgment by scientists who understand the environmental processes
in play. On the other hand, Termorshuizen and Opdam (2009) suggest that what they term landscape services should be determined
in a community process of selecting ecological functions that the
community values. Using the landscape method, different alternatives can reect different concerns and values, and observation and
assessment of landscape alternatives can suggest common ground.
Given a certain set of ecosystem services that exist or are desired
in a landscape, there are many possible landscape patterns that
could embody those services, and the determinative difference may
be in which landscape patterns the community values regardless of whether community members understand their ecosystem
services.
Each alternative landscape is a design product represented by a
shared data set that can be used for measuring or modeling relevant
environmental and societal functions. This enables alternatives to
be compared in an integrated assessment, as described in Principle 1. It also supports adaptive management, complementing
institutional interventions by giving decision makers and stakeholders shared visible experimental objects, alternative landscapes

that they can iteratively co-create and compare. Experimentation

with different alternative landscapes allows the design process
to incorporate uncertainty, acknowledging that there may be
many different ways to synthesize diverse perspectives and inviting landscape innovation in response to imaginative, normative,
and surprising possible futures (Liu et al., 2007; Walker, Holling,
Carpenter, & Kinzig, 2004).
3. Conclusions
The integrity and visibility of landscapes may be so commonplace that their inherent potential to prompt synthetic discovery
has been ignored or trivialized. J.B. Jacksons description of the
vernacular landscape where we speed up or retard or divert the
cosmic program and impose our own. . .with the promise of a
new kind of history jolts us out of the trivial. If we think more
closely about the landscape and are willing to learn from landscape
ecology and landscape design, we may nd an approach to urban
ecological design that invites imagination and promotes innovation
at the same time as it is rmly grounded in scientic inquiry. The
landscape laws and principles I have offered here are intended to
show that landscape is a powerful conceptual device for synthetic
thinking across disciplines in the sciences, design, policy, and practice and for collaboration among experts and stakeholders. It can
link creativity to analysis and scientic knowledge of process with
place-specic design, leading to more broadly anticipatory inquiry
in science and more intelligent design. A medium and a method that
lead participants to see and manipulate the same landscape characteristics can bring experts in different disciplines and stakeholders
with different experiences to understand the landscape as part of
a system that incorporates many different natural and human processes, seen or unseen. Looking at extensive regions or specic sites
through the landscape medium can focus the perspectives of disparate disciplines on the same object, a landscape pattern seen
by all. While different viewers are experts in different processes,
they are united in paying attention to that pattern. Anticipating the
future through the landscape method marries science to creativity,
nurturing innovation and effective adaptation to changing environmental phenomena. Not all answers lie in the landscape, but, if we
use landscape as a medium and a method for synthesis in urban
ecological design, we will be able to test a new kind of history by
the way it looks to all of us.
Acknowledgments
Work on this essay was supported by funds from the National
Socio-Environmental Synthesis Center, a Center funded by NSF
(Grant #DBI-1052875) and the University of Maryland. The essay
will appear in a forthcoming Springer Press book: Resilience in
Urban Ecology and Design (Pickett, Cadenasso, & McGrath). It beneted greatly from the thoughtful critical review of Steward Pickett,
Mary Cadenasso, Joshua Newell, Paul Gobster and Wei-Ning Xiang.
I sincerely thank them.
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