Penn’s Sylvania

The Campus as a Landscape

This book tells the story of one of the most beloved campus landscapes in America as told by the designers and historians charged with its care.

William Penn envisioned Philadelphia as a “greene country towne.” Perhaps nowhere has this ideal been realized more than the University of Pennsylvania campus. Indeed, the very meaning of Pennsylvania—“Penn’s Woods”—alludes to this idea. Trees, especially, along with other plants, have played an essential role in establishing the character of the Penn campus in West Philadelphia from its inception onward. Indeed, Penn’s urban campus achieved standards of professional practices deemed important for arboreta and botanic gardens in 2017 and was awarded a Level I Accreditation by The ArbNet Arboretum Accreditation Program. As an official arboretum, the campus contributes a botanical collection to the University’s educational purpose.

Penn’s Sylvania analyzes and celebrates the development of the university as a green space, with noted landscape architects, designers, architectural historians, and photographers providing their perspectives on the campus and the specimens housed within. Renowned historian Witold Rybczynski traces the evolution of the campus idea from the tower to the green, while acclaimed landscape architect Laurie Olin highlights some of the memorable individuals responsible for greening Penn’s campus. Catherine Seavitt explores the rich heritage of the pawpaw, a favorite species of the native people of the Philadelphia region, and Susan Weiler details the latest iteration of Woodland Walk, one of the campus’s main arteries. Lara Roman, Theodore Eisenman, Robert Lundgren, and Chloe Cerwinka describe the coordinated efforts required to maintain an arboretum, and Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa captures the landscape’s defining features in his stunning photography.

Illustrated by nearly fifty of Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa’s stunning photographs as well as color photographs, archival drawings, blueprints, maps, plans, and diagrams, Penn’s Sylvania not only showcases the critical importance of trees to Penn’s urban campus but also introduces the people responsible for establishing and conserving its rich botanical heritage.

This book is available for purchase through the University of Pennsylvania Press and on Amazon.

Fight or Flight: Space Colonization and the Future of Landscape Architecture

When we lose direct access to nature, we lose ourselves. As the planet degrades, Ignacio Bunster-Ossa asks: what is the price of survival?

By Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa, FASLA

Vice President, Landscape Urbanism and Resiliency at the Collaborative

Published January 16, 2026, For the University of Texas at Austin, School of Architecture

If a SWOT analysis were conducted on human society today, Strengths, Weakness and Opportunities would be overwhelmed by perceived Threats with climate change and AI at the top of the list, closely followed by space colonization. The goal of this essay is to address these threats while attempting to clarify what matters most and why.

To start, the most urgent threat to discuss is climate change. The world is on track to surpass the 1.5^o centigrade atmospheric warming threshold outlined in the Paris Agreement within three–to–five years, and some estimates predict a 3^o global temperature increase before the end of the century. My grandchildren are likely to experience permanent coastal inundations, more frequent and damaging storms, recurrent and more prolonged heat waves, sustained droughts and wildfires, and higher exposure to disease vectors. To these effects must be added food supply disruptions and costly infrastructure repairs. Poor communities will wither; rich communities will hail resilience.

Secondly, the intellectual, biological, and material consequences of AI have begun, looming darkly in our daily lives and in our collective imagination. In Ray Kurzweil’s futurist nonfiction The Singularity is Nearer: When we Merge with AI, the author posits cataclysmic impacts from the deployment of AI-facilitated nanotechnologies in the form of “Gray-goo,” the notion of “self-replicating machines that consume carbon-based matter and turn it into more self-replicating machines, causing a chain reaction that could potentially turn the entire biomass of Earth into such machines”.¹ In this nightmarish and perhaps not-so-distant future of AI-generated biotechnology, there is added peril of these cellular machines going rogue and generating new virus strains. In present day, we are witnessing the impacts of AI in milder but still menacing ways: the realignment of the labor force and erosion of education at large. Need to take a language elective? No need, just put on Apple earbuds with instantaneous translation. Goodbye, foreign language teachers.

Lastly, we must critically understand the desire for space colonization held by the earth’s most affluent humans. Elon Musk has set his sights on Mars. Humanity must become a space-faring civilization, as a “life insurance for life collectively,” he believes.¹ He sees the Sun eons from now getting brighter and hotter, burning the atmosphere, and boiling the oceans—climate change in extremis. He also sees space colonization as insurance from home grown threats, such as nuclear annihilation. Jeff Bezos is equally enthusiastic about space, albeit for different reasons. Instead of terraforming other planets, Bezos envisions an orbital world populated by billions, supported by a moon and asteroid-based extraction economy. Doing so, he believes, would spare humanity the torment of living on an afflicted planet with ever diminishing resources.²

The good news is that, historically, every juncture portending doom has begotten a countervailing force. In 1942, Isaac Asimov offered a set of “AI” safeguards known as the Three Laws of Robotics (appearing in the short story, Runaround):³

More recently in 2017, the Future of Life Institute held a conference at the Asilomar Conference Center in Monterey, California, to discuss the benefits of AI. Participating scientists, economists, philosophers, and industry leaders (Elon Musk among them) drafted 23 principles to guide the development of AI.⁴ First on the list was this: “The goal of AI research should be to create not undirected intelligence, but beneficial intelligence.” Another one states that “If an AI system causes harm, it should be possible to ascertain why.” The last one states that “Advanced AI could represent a profound change in the history of life on Earth and should be planned for and managed with commensurate care and resources,” referring, presumably, to the immense consumption of energy, water, and rare earths required to build and operate AI data centers.⁵

From a climate standpoint, a significant countervailing force can be attributed to Alexander von Humboldt. He is arguably the first scientist to note the impact of human action on climate, specifically how deforestation alters temperature, affects water supply, and abets flooding. But Humboldt did more than usher in concerns about human action upon the environment—he noted nature’s inherent aesthetic appeal.⁶ After arriving in Venezuela in 1799, he wrote:

“What trees! Coconut palms, 50 to 60 feet high; Poinciana pulcherrima, with a big bouquet of wonderful crimson flowers; pisang [banana tree] and a whole host of trees with enormous leaves and sweet-smelling flowers as big as your hand. As for the colours of birds and fishes—even the crabs are sky-blue and yellow!”

Humboldt effectively released nature from its utilitarian prison by recognizing the power of biophilia two centuries before E.O. Wilson popularized the term.

Humboldt’s wide-eyed capture of colorful crabs (they were crayfish) occurred a few years after two people for the first time stepped into a hot-air balloon near Paris and rose, untethered, hundreds of feet before an amazed crowd. Escaping gravity (Flight), and marveling at and seeking to protect the Earth’s biota (Fight) have marched in lockstep opposition ever since. An extraordinary synchronicity occurred in the late summer and early fall of 1962. On September 12, in a speech at Rice University, John F. Kennedy committed to having a man set foot on the moon and bringing him back alive within a decade. On the 23^rd day of the same month, The Jetson’s animated TV program aired its first episode, fanning the fantasy of a high-tech life aloft with flying cars and robotic servants. On the “Fight” side, Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring was published four days after The Jetson’s television appearance. A week later, the World Wildlife Fund, an organization devoted to conserving the most vital natural places on Earth, opened its first office, in Morges, Switzerland. By all indications, “Flight” is well ahead in the race. Every 38 hours on average, a rocket shoots into space from somewhere around the globe.⁷ In contrast, more than 600 square miles of forests are lost annually.⁸

It may seem odd to pair space colonization with climate change and AI as a convulsing agent, but of the three spokes of the wheel of doom, I find it to be the most harmful. Common to both space industry juggernauts is the vision of space as a survival antidote, a form of life-saving vaccine with rockets acting as the proverbial syringe. But this is a chimera, and it engenders a false and damning sense of security about our place on the universe—and on Earth. As explained by physicists John D. Barrow and Frank Tipler in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle (1986), there are evolutionary forces at work superseding humanity’s spacefaring impulse.⁹ Their argument, supplemented by other sources, is this:

From these points we can conclude: 1) the human brain evolved specifically to advance an understanding of the Universe (if it were otherwise, we would still be adhering to a pre-Ptolemaic view of Earth); and 2) a species with higher information processing power can be expected to emerge to further advance such understanding. Ancient civilizations used mechanical devices, such as the Greek Antikythera from the first century BCE, to calculate astronomical positions, eclipses, and calendar cycles, and humanity has since relentlessly sought higher computational power. Today, AI surpasses the capability of human brain through machine learning and generative algorithms (e.g.: IBM’s Watson). Physical robots can already reason and act autonomously toward defined outcomes (e.g.: Google’s Gemini Robotics). Self-replicating robots—called Von Neumann Probes after the celebrated 20^th century mathematician’s vision of self-reproducing machines scanning the far reaches of the solar systems for minerals—cannot be far behind. Space-faring robots such as the AI-equipped Mars Rovers are credible progenitors of such self-replicating “organisms.” With AI, we have, in effect, began the next step in the evolutionary ladder. This may be a sobering conclusion, but it makes total anthropic sense. To further explore and understand the Universe, organisms capable of withstanding eons in the vacuum of space are a necessity. The human body and psyche are not remotely capable of meeting such a demand; Von Neumann Probes will be, as Barrow and Tipler argue in The Anthropic Cosmological Principle. AI may pose evolutionary pains for humanity, but fear not: its mission is ultimately not Earth-bound.

We may one day see people living in orbit, on the moon, or even on Mars, but they will be a handful of hardy space workers waiting for robots to replace them. For better or worse, Earth is the only place humanity will ever inhabit. We can also forget about encountering Earth-like organisms in our own or other planetary systems. Barrow and Tipler place the odds at less than 10.¹⁰ Belief to the contrary, they posit, comes from the “expectation that we are going to be saved from ourselves by some miraculous interstellar intervention.”¹⁰ In other words, Earth contains all the life humanity will ever know.

The question then arises: what kind of home must we have to survive as a species? In 1969, coinciding with Neil Armstrong’s “Giant Leap for Mankind,” Ian McHarg offered an answer. He was aware of the stakes. In Design with Nature, a view of Earth from Apollo 8 headlines the chapter entitled The Earth as a Capsule. In it, McHarg imagines a visiting astronaut studying ecology to cope with the planet’s biota. “We can use the astronaut as our instructor: he too is pursuing the same quest. His aspiration is survival—but then so is ours,” he wrote.¹¹ The McHarg Center at the University of Pennsylvania sustains the clarion by promoting research on the future of <all life on Earth. And yet, wild flora and fauna continue to be ravaged. It is not a winning formula. As Richard Weller asserted in The Landscape Project, “we are clinging by our fingernails.”¹² To keep us from falling into the abyss, a massive reaffirmation of biodiversity as condition for our survival must take place. The United Nations Sustainability Goal 15 (Biodiversity and Ecosystems) firmly states the intrinsic value of biodiversity, recognizing the “negative impact that [its degradation] has on food security, nutrition, access to water, health of the rural poor and people worldwide.¹³ COP 15, held in Montreal in 2022, advanced this goal by calling for the conservation of 30 percent of the planet’s land, water, and seas. The target is an improvement over the currently achieved 17 percent but well short of E.O. Wilson’s more compelling “Half Earth” target.

But wildlife conservation is not enough. From a survival standpoint, suffusing cities with nature is critical. And yet, the UN’s same sustainability goal fails to advance access to nature or nature-based design as objectives. The Sustainable Cities and Communities Indicators for Resilient Cities report (International Standards Organization 37123) commendably addresses ways to standardize ecological restoration and service, applied to the scale of forests, mangroves, and floodplains. The Global Program on Nature-Based Solutions, funded by the World Bank, is similarly focused on the larger domain of ecosystem services. But they equally fail to address the restorative and biophilic benefits of urban flora. There is ample research backing such health benefits: just ask Eugena South, a teaching doctor at Penn Medicine and Faculty Director of Philadelphia’s Urban Health Lab. Dr. South and her colleagues have documented how urban vegetation reduces stress and anxiety, gun violence, chronic ailments such as diabetes, and helps deliver healthier babies.¹⁴ With such evidence on hand:¹¹

Yes, retrofitting and maintaining cities loaded with vegetation would be expensive. But what is the price of survival?

From Apollo 8, Jim Lovell observed: “The Earth from here is a grand oasis in the vastness of space.” He could not have predicted that fifty-seven years later the “oasis” would have to be 1.8 times larger to sustain humanity, and not simply from a resource standpoint.¹⁶ Lovell’s words are biophilic in meaning: they echo Humboldt’s love-filled reflections about nature’s beauty. When we lose direct access to nature, we lose ourselves. When we degrade the planet, we fray the tie to the womb that birthed us. Severance will kill us.

Notes

1. Ray Kurzweil, The Singularity Is Nearer (Viking, 2024), 275.
2. Elon Musk has often stated in interviews the need to colonize Mars as insurance against humanity’s demise. Here’s an example: https://www.space.com/astronomy/mars/eventually-all-life-on-earth-will-be-destroyed-by-the-sun-elon-musk-explains-his-drive-to-colonize-mars. He appears convinced that people will be willing to pay hundreds of thousands of dollars for the privilege of colonizing Mars and dying there.
3. Isaac Asimov, “Runaround,” in I, Robot (New York: Doubleday, 1950), 40.
4. Jeff Bezos became interested in space while at Princeton University where he attended lectures by Gerard O’Neill. O’Neill is author of The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space (1976) a pioneering book on the subject. Bezos’ mission in space is closely aligned with O’Neill’s, which argues for expanding access to resources and industrialization beyond the confines of Earth. https://www.nbcnews.com/mach/science/jeff-bezos-foresees-trillion-people-living-millions-pace-colonies-here-ncna1006036
5. The AI Principles can be found here: https://futureoflife.org/open-letter/ai-principles/
6. See Douglass Botting, >Humboldt and the Cosmos (1973), p.76. For a critical analysis of Humboldt’s views of nature and human impacts on it see also Andrea Wolf’s The Invention of Nature (2015).
7. See Space Stats: https://spacestatsonline.com/launches/
8. See the UN Food and Agriculture Organization FRA 2020 Report: https://www.fao.org/interactive/forest-resources-assessment/2020/en/
9. Barrow and Tipler include mathematical formulas to back their argument. For a non-mathematician, the formulas are impossible to decipher, but the book’s Introduction and Chapters 9 and 10 offer accessible explanations.
10. Barrow and Tipler, Anthropic Cosmological Principle 598.
11. McHarg, Design With Nature, 95.
12. Richard Weller, “Introduction,” in The Landscape Project (Philadelphia, PA: Applied Research and Design Publishing, 2022), 10. Weller lamented the rare involvement of landscape architects in global conservation efforts. His concerns were not anecdotal. At a recent international conference held in Panama on Latin American voluntary conservation, ecologists, biologists, educators, activists, non-profit administrators, and landowners outnumbered the few landscape architects in attendance, including me.
13. See: https://www.unep.org/news-and-stories/story/cop15-ends-landmark-biodiversity-agreement
14. See: https://naturesacred.org/research/the-healing-power-of-nature-how-green-space-is-improving-health-and-wellbeing-in-cities/. Dr. South’s findings support the work of Nature Sacred, a non-profit organization based in Annapolis, MD, devoted to creating restorative landscapes in urban areas, especially in disadvantaged communities. See: https://naturesacred.org/
15. The Aurelia Institute, based in Cambridge, MA, is pioneering the automated assembly of habitable orbital pods with “space gardens.” See: https://www.aureliainstitute.org/space-garden. NASA is also actively researching growing plants in space, https://www.nasa.gov/exploration-research-and-technology/growing-plants-in-space/
16. See: https://www.footprintnetwork.org/

Works Cited

– Asimov, Isaac. “Runaround.” In I, Robot, 33–55. Doubleday, 1950.
– Barrow, John D., and Frank J. Tipler. The Anthropi;font-size:1.1em;font-weight:500; Cosmological Principle. Oxford University Press, 1986.
– Botting, Douglas. Humboldt and the Cosmos. Sphere Books, 1973.
– Kurzweil, Ray. The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge with AI. Viking, 2024.
– McHarg, Ian L. Design with Nature. Published for the American Museum of Natural History by the Natural History Press, 1969.
– Weller, Richard. “Introduction.” In The Landscape Project. Applied Research and Design Publishing, 2022.
– Wilson, Edward O. Half Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life. >W.W. Norton Company, Inc., 2016.

This article is part of a series of essays exploring topics inspired by “Landscape First” hosted at The University of Texas at Austin in the spring of 2025 with the generous support of the Still Water Foundation. All opinions, views, and provocations expressed are solely those of the authors and do not represent the official positions, policies, or perspectives of the School of Architecture.

Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa heads the Landscape Urbanism and Resilience practice at the Collaborative.

Link to the Source Article.

One Giant Leap: Colonization and the Future of Landscape Architecture

By Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa, FASLA

Vice President, Landscape Urbanism and Resiliency at the Collaborative

Published January, 2022, For the Landscape Architecture Magazine

Humanity has had a long-standing fascination with space travel. In Greek mythology, Apollo daily rode a gleaming chariot to pull the sun across the skies (hence the naming of NASA’s moon-landing program). Two millennia later, Jules Verne popularized the idea in Western culture with his 1865 book From the Earth to the Moon, a story that borrowed from artillery to lift people out into space. Then came Georges Méliès’s celebrated 1902 film, A Trip to the Moon. Inspired by Verne’s story, the film’s classic scene depicts a bullet wedged into the eye of a face-like moon. The Wright Brothers’ pioneering Kitty Hawk flight occurred one year after the Méliès film, and humanity has not stopped since in advancing better and more efficient ways to take to the skies and beyond.

The profession of landscape architecture emerged about the same time as space travel was taking an increasing hold in the Western public imagination. The construction of New York City’s Central Park was in full swing when Verne’s book came out, and Frederick Law Olmsted Jr. and others established ASLA in 1899, closely preceding the release of Mèliés’s film. To this writer, it is tempting to believe that rapidly industrializing societies, full of “can-do” bravado, saw the salutary proposition of recasting the landscape in the same way that stepping out of the bounds of the planet offered promise and hope for a better world. It has never been more urgent to examine this apparent conflation—improving our lot here on Earth while at the same time seeking to escape it.

My fascination with the subject of space dates to adolescence. Stanley Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey was awe-inspiring. Released in Cinerama, the 1968 film was impressive as much for its mystifying story as for the view of Earth from outer space.

Apollo 8 reached the moon that same year, sending back vivid images of Earth that rendered the film’s comparatively bleached depiction of the planet flat and lifeless. Still, the two feats—Kubrick’s masterpiece and Apollo’s lunar circumnavigation—melded fiction and nonfiction with an aura of inevitability. As with many young people back then, imagining life as an astronaut became my dream.

In the early 1970s, every student learning design was familiar with R. Buckminster Fuller. Fuller had invented the geodesic dome, a highly economical structure devised to enclose a living space. Technological efficiency was his mantra. His book Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth was a must read. But so was Ian McHarg’s Design with Nature. Both treatises were published in 1969, the year Neil Armstrong pronounced “one giant leap for mankind” from the Sea of Tranquility. The first-edition cover of McHarg’s book was all I needed to dive in: It depicted a polluted, grim world as an orb. Inside, a full-page photograph of Earth from space introduces the chapter titled “The World is a Capsule.” What more could an aspiring astronaut who instead would become a landscape architect—attending McHarg’s program at the University of Pennsylvania—ask for? McHarg equated the ecological design imperative with that of an astronaut who must learn the Earth’s “operating manual,” that is, its ecological intricacies, to survive. This is the message in “The World is a Capsule.” In his words, “We can use the astronaut as our instructor: he too is pursuing the same quest. His aspiration is survival—but then, so is ours.”

Fuller’s and McHarg’s teachings entwine the promises of technology and environmentalism to create a better, more sustainable world. But one might go back to 1962 to observe the beginnings of such entwinement. The Jetsons made their television debut that year, coinciding with the first meeting among world leaders to discuss the importance of protecting the world’s endangered species. The Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora was drafted a year later, but didn’t take effect until the mid-1970s. Over time it has accorded protection to more than 30,000 plant and animal species. At no time in history had the fantasy of living above the surface of the planet, complete with robots and flying cars, been matched by the urgency to protect the life down below.

These seemingly opposing ideals, that is, the design of space habitats supported by life-sustaining landscapes, became a matter of serious research in the mid-1970s. A pioneering figure in this quest was Gerard K. O’Neill, a Princeton University physicist. His milestone book, The High Frontier: Human Colonies in Space, was published in 1976. The work details the means and methods by which humans could build town-like orbital stations, complete with parks and cropland. It remains a classic. A course on space colonization was available at the University of Pennsylvania in 1979, and McHarg enthusiastically allowed this student to take it for credit toward a Master of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning degree. The High Frontier was our course textbook.

Then came Biosphere 2. Currently owned by the University of Arizona, the 1991 facility was built to show how humans could survive in an enclosed ecology, such as O’Neill posited. Nothing could enter or escape the geodesic-like research structures, including air, water, food, and waste; everything had to be recycled. The experiment collapsed in 1994, and interest in space colonization lay dormant for years.

Today interest has returned propelled by the technology entrepreneur Elon Musk’s SpaceX company and its goal to colonize Mars, and by Amazon founder Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin and its vision to build orbital environments for millions of people. Bezos is a Princeton graduate and in the mid-1980s was one of O’Neill’s students; in 2018, Bezos received the Gerard K. O’Neill Memorial Award for Space Settlement Advocacy. Renderings of Bezos’s proposed space colonies depict towns and cities with flowing streams, meadows, and wilderness parks, the likes of which would have made McHarg smile. A corollary of Bezos’s space-bound visions is the transformation of a far-less-populated planet Earth into an ecological preserve.

Why all the fuss? Why the drive to go into space and over time relocate a portion of humanity—if not all of it—into orbit and/or another planet? There are three usual explanations. First, space travel and exploration are part of the quest to find humanity’s place in the universe and, thereby, explain our own existence. Second, space initiatives induce technological advancements that benefit all of society, such as those that occurred with the Apollo program. Lastly, humans are by nature exploring creatures, and space is, well, the final frontier.

There is, however, a fourth and more profound reason, and that is, as McHarg says in Design with Nature, the survival of our species.

O’Neill believed as much. He was familiar with the environmental scholar Donella Meadows’s landmark book, The Limits to Growth (1972), and he saw space colonization, in the face of scarcity and pollution, as the only way for humanity to grow and thrive. He wrote: “In the modern view space will become a rich, new, Earthlike environmental range for humanity, bathed in continuous free energy.”

O’Neill had worked closely with NASA in the initial ideation of space colonies. According to recent statements from the space agency, the drive to make humanity a multiplanet species has been revalidated by the emergence of COVID-19 and “man-made catastrophes” (read: climate change). To Musk, Martian colonies simply may be essential to reduce the risk of human extinction.

But the poet Vicente García-Huidobro perhaps said it best. In 1931, well before the advent of rocketry, he wrote an epic poem called Altazor, or a Voyage in a Parachute. The title of the work combines the terms for altura (height) and azorado (bewildered), neatly pointing to what critics view as the work’s overarching theme: the inescapable fragility of the human condition.

“Oh yes I am Altazor, the great poet, without a horse that eats birdseed or warms its throat with moonbeams, with only my little parachute like a parasol over the planets.”

The words reference a precarious existence, lacking in earthly comforts and sustenance, destined to be adrift in space—drifting, as it were, toward nothingness.

García-Huidobro might just as well have been referring to COVID-19. At the onset of the pandemic, the world faced fear and uncertainty—we were adrift without a parachute. Like McHarg’s imagined astronaut, there was an imperative to understand the nature of the virus: how it escapes its natural habitat, how it seeks a human host and attacks the immune system, and how from there it either kills or can be neutralized. It does not escape notice that a medical syringe and the Saturn V rocket that propelled astronauts to the moon, scaled to the same height, are proportionately similar. Both can be seen as essential instruments for survival.

This comparison suggests a fork in the road: Does humanity escape (the rocket) or hunker down (the syringe)? Do we dare forgo space and instead fix the land we presently occupy?

For the profession of landscape architecture, the choice is clear: We must fight to make the Earth a livable planet in the here and now. We must, in effect, become astronauts on our own planet, gaining and applying deep knowledge to the systems that support and sustain life. The world today is at the threshold of lasting and irreparable change. The planet is experiencing the greatest wave of extinctions since the disappearance of the dinosaurs—up to 150 species each day. COVID-19, too, has caused suffering and death. And as the World Health Organization affirms, a degradation in the health of ecosystems can only increase the chances of future zoonotic pandemics; further suffering of the population from animal-transmitted disease is sure to come. Piled on top of this is the near certainty that a decarbonized future will not be possible before the atmosphere heats up beyond 1.5 degrees Celsius from preindustrial levels, as the Paris Agreement predicts will happen by 2040 if current rates continue. In the face of such crises, the response of our profession must be decisive. There simply should be no planned or designed landscape that does not measurably advance humanity’s odds of survival—on this planet.

We must rigorously apply climate-positive design at all scales of practice, from gardens, streets, and plazas to parks, greenways, and waterways—making it all artful and beautiful, a thing to love. In practice, we must provide nature-based resilience focused on flood control, heat abatement, air and water quality, habitat restoration, and food security, prioritizing communities with the greater need. We must promote the growth of the urban forest as vital green infrastructure, but also as a vital source of health-inducing biophilia. We must sustain activism toward the protection and expansion of forests, peatlands, wetlands, and other critical natural habitats, especially to protect biodiversity and buffer the advance of disease vectors.

And we should do so with knowledge and use of advanced technology and information in every aspect of the work, including planning, design, construction, and monitoring. Let shame be cast upon planned or designed landscapes that do any less than this.

Any form of settlement in space, whether in orbit or in Mars, must be forced to meet absolute standards of self-sustainability, based in rigorous systems and biological expertise. Life in space depends on it. Why would anything else apply to habitation on Earth?

Link to the Source Article.

Improving the Ben Franklin Parkway demands smarts and art, not costly engineering | Opinion

The redesign should include public artists and an explicit recognition of the city’s diversity of neighborhoods.

By Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa, For The Inquirer

Published Aug 4, 2021

On July 14, three acclaimed teams of designers presented preliminary ideas about how to transform the Benjamin Franklin Parkway into a “21st century” public space. Two issues deserve critical consideration: mobility and public art.

At the core of the design effort is the city’s aim to make the Parkway into a “More Park, Less Way” destination for Philadelphians and visitors to enjoy on a year-round basis. True to this aim, all three teams presented a long-term, vehicle-free vision for the Parkway. Ideas ranged from “disengaging” the Parkway from the Schuylkill Expressway access roadways, to widening the existing tunnel at the foot of the museum steps to accommodate two-way traffic, to creating a “ring-road” just for traffic, freeing the Parkway for pedestrians. These ideas may be worth exploring. But they are misguided.

Full disclosure: I was part of one of the teams that submitted qualifications in response to the city’s request for proposals to reenvision the Parkway, but not among the finalists. The opinions expressed here are my own and reflect what I have long wanted to see in the redesign.

It’s clear the Parkway needs to do a better job of managing traffic and protecting cyclists and pedestrians. But any new design should forego solutions that demand substantial and costly roadway engineering, and focus instead on traffic management that is flexible, based on intelligent — and green — technologies.

The technology exists today, and will only improve in the coming years, to manage traffic — pedestrian and vehicular — through “intelligent” monitoring and programming systems. These technologies would monitor traffic patterns, allowing officials to close or open Parkway lanes for vehicular traffic, change their direction, and increase or restrict volumes according to, say, rush hour demands, planned mass gatherings, and every form of usage in between. City-based alerts similar to weather alerts could be instituted to advise motorists of traffic restrictions or changes on the Parkway. We could enlist Google and Apple and other mapmakers to show desirable routes outside the Parkway when the area is inundated with pedestrians (similar to roadway construction advisories). These would be “soft” vs. “hard” improvements, potentially costing far less than a wholesale reconfiguration of the roadways.

The three selected teams also touched on art and culture. This is an essential element of any plan, given that public art is a defining Philadelphia quality.

Philadelphia’s Percent for Art program — which stipulates that any new projects or major renovations set aside 1% of the budget for site-specific art — is the oldest in the nation. It was pioneered in 1959 by the Philadelphia Redevelopment Authority to integrate site-specific works, nearly 400 of which have been installed. To these are added many more by the city Percent for Art program, also initiated in 1959, to say nothing of the thousands of murals implemented by Mural Arts Philadelphia. In the past decade, the PRA’s Percent for Art program (of which I am a committee member) has developed specific guidelines to advance community engagement and education as an integral part of commissioned works and to gain community input in the art itself.

How can communities help create art for the Parkway? For starters, all three teams should include on the roster a public artist or public art consultant to help answer the question. More importantly, there should be an explicit recognition of the city’s diversity of neighborhoods. Philadelphia is composed of many different neighborhoods — with more than 150 neighborhood names, in fact. As the city’s preeminent common ground, the Parkway should manifest such diversity as a part of its physical signature. Artists could work with each neighborhood to determine how their history and culture could find expression on the Parkway, revealing in the process how the place can best be programmed and managed for all. Distinct works could then emerge over time — a grand art project — cementing the spirit of the city along the length of the corridor and all its adjoining spaces. The Parkway would become a must-visit hub of public art, supplementing the institutional offerings that frame it and contributing further to the city’s burgeoning creative economy.

The three selected teams proposed many good ideas to activate the Parkway. All of them can coexist alongside smartly managed traffic and community-based public art.

Ignacio F. Bunster-Ossa heads the Landscape Urbanism and Resilience practice at the Collaborative.

Link to the Source Article (Subscription required).