Toward an Urban Ecology: Scape / Landscape Architecture

A manual, monograph, and call to action, Toward an Urban Ecology points to the future of landscape architecture's role in making resilient, sustainable, and community-oriented spaces.

Kate Orff, 2017 MacArthur Fellow, has an optimistic and transformative message about our world: we can bring together social and ecological systems to sustainably remake our cities and landscapes.

Part monograph, part manual, part manife-sto, 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.

In purely practical terms, SCAPE has already generated numerous tools and techniques that designers, policy makers, and communities can use to address some of the most pressing issues of our time, including the loss of biodiversity, the loss of social cohesion, and ecological degradation. Toward an Urban Ecology features numerous projects and select research from SCAPE, and conveys a range of strategies to engender a more resilient and inclusive built environment.

Kate Orff's activist and visionary work on design for climate dynamics has been shared and developed in collaboration with arts institutions, governments, and scholars worldwide. Since founding the New York-based landscape architecture and urban design firm SCAPE, Kate Orff has advanced projects of all scales: from award-winning, harbor-wide planning efforts and groundbreaking work for the NYC Coastal Protection Plan, to on-the-ground ecological investigations such as mussel pilot installations in the Gowanus Bay. She is the Director of the Urban Design Program at the Columbia University Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation.

She joined the MacArthur Fellowship Program - Class of 2017, as the first landscape architect in the Foundation's 36 year history to be honored with the award. Kate's work bridges design, science, and community participation to redefine the role of the landscape architect in the age of climate change. She is coauthor, with Richard Misrach, of Petrochemical America (2012) and coeditor and author of the book Gateway: Visions for an Urban National Park (2011). She lives in Forest Hills, New York.