Gardening the Bay: Participatory Frameworks For Ecological and Economic Change
Climate change is something that is ever present in the modern day and how we view it is something very important. Frederick Law Olmsted introduced new conditions to be understood. The climate crisis is not a static, delimited condition to be solved; it is a condition that is constantly produced by complex and interrelated human behaviors. The New York Times reported, on the one hand, that “warming could conceivably exceed 10 degrees by the end of this century" with extended periods of heat, increased inundation, flooding events, and more extreme risks, and, on the other hand, that Americans are not only "outliers in views on climate change," more so than people in any other rich nation, but are also skeptical that climate change is an important issue. Climate change is both firmly in the present, with potentially dire consequences, and simultaneously not recognized nationally as a threat. New thinking about nature in cities, therefore, must be tied closely to building new physical landscapes that are activist and trans- formational and not simply a backdrop to urban life-as-usual. We need to imagine different patterns of action, generate a magnified understanding of the interconnectedness of systems and processes, be science-based, and scale up our projects in order to effect larger behavioral change for the common good
Based on the unpredictability of future water levels and severe weather such as nor'easters, hurricanes, and typhoons, the territory of operation relative to designing the landscape has moved beyond the land itself to embrace more complex and watery contexts. We have evolved from building along the waterfront to building and sculpting terrain within the water itself. With how rapidly the water is rising, designing within the water itself will no longer seem like an outlandish idea but instead become the new normal when designing a coastal city or anything on the coast for that matter. It was talked about how how coastal landscapes serve as a protective, ecological infrastructure for growing cities and how these critical and endangered shallow-water ecosystems can be measured, modeled, and rebuilt.
Another hallmark of designing for nature in cities, now and in the future, is the exploration of how strategies can expand out of defined property boundaries and beyond traditional landscape architectural project modes to reach larger audiences and achieve greater effects.
