Ian McHarg - Design with Nature
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- čas přidán 12. 09. 2024
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Video of Ian McHarg at the Esri User Conference in 1997
At the 1997 Esri User Conference, Jack Dangermond honored landscape architect Ian McHarg, author of Design with Nature, with the president’s award. In this video of McHarg’s acceptance speech, he reminisces with typical humor about his seminal discoveries of overlays and chronology, the challenges of environmental planning, and the role that GIS can play.
video.esri.com/...
I was his regular bartender on Penn campus at a place called the Palladium.
Unbelievable wild genius!
I was introduced to Ian McHarg in 1978 when I was studying landscape architecture. He had a profound influence on my subsequent thinking and philosophy. I read Design With Nature from cover to cover, thence several more times.
One of his polemic sayings that stuck (in his Scottish accent) was: "Man's inordinate capacity to create ugliness". This is as true today as it was then, but with the added disaster of over-population and an ever-growing human expansion into natural ecosystems.
Here in Aotearoa New Zealand our biggest city (Auckland) has just faced an unprecedented flooding disaster with scores of houses left either destroyed or rendered uninhabitable. With climate change evident in these very floods, landslips, water and soil contamination disasters, as well as destroyed houses and roading and other infrastructure, the so-called planners and experts are now talking about the inane wording - 'sponge city'. This is one of the very things Professor McHarg had considered and urged many times: building swales, removing hard engineering infrastructure such as culverts, and stream and river diversion, as well as planting much more riparian vegetation and banning building on risky floodplains and riparian areas - in other words, largely getting rid of engineers from planning pre-eminence. Christchurch (the South Island's largest city) is adopting this concept because it had forced upon it the tragedy of the 2010 earthquakes there. So many residential areas that were 'red zoned' and uninhabitable became green space with one area left underwater and subsequently abandoned. It became a wetland in the process of restoration. All this makes sense because Christchurch is a deltaic city built on the floodplain of the Waimakariri River with the spring-fed Avon and Heathcote Rivers formed as a result of the Waimakariri going underground in parts. Both these smaller distributaries were defined by a levee system with a riparian community of harakeke (NZ flax), kanuka, kahikatea, kowhai and manatu (ribbonwood) along with many divaricating trees and shrubs. It was a wetland. This so defined the city in its early days of European settlement that there were early photographs of Carlton Mill showing these striking harakeke communities flanking the Avon. All these communities (apart from Riccarton Bush) were destroyed by the imposition of a grid system of subdivision and roading by a designer (Colonel Light) who had never even seen Christchurch - a classic example of imposed colonial 'design' by one who was ignorant of the constraints and opportunities that a site imposed on possible development and design opportunies.
This was a common problem with colonisation and the point to be made here is that it still takes place across my country. All the warnings and design solutions McHarg offered had been ignored - until the Auckland disaster when an urgent rethink was called for. Hence "sponge City". What is interesting is that the local authorities and the media have consulted engineers, but not ecologists or landscape architects. Landscape architects have, in fact, become conspicuous by their absence in recent years. Because the wheel is being reinvented it tells me that nothing is really going to change, when what they really need to do is consult Design With Nature and other works.
I'm saying here that, until we overcome our silo mentality and begin to cooperate and consult more widely, the sponge city concept will fail because it will become subverted into the vested interests of certain groups who will hijack the planning process. At the moment the whole discussion has been overwhelmed by engineers, the very last profession we should involve. Engineers will simply mean more of the same with more impermeable hard surfaces, more streams and waterways culverted, and more housing development taking place in the wrong (and risky) areas.
One thing I would like to see would be the all-embracing expertise as advocated by McHarg extended to include psychology and sociology - in other words, the kind of thing Richard Louv has been staunchly advocating in his 'Last Child in the Woods' and 'Nature Deficit Disorder concepts'. As McHarg has now sadly passed on, it will be left to other able people to take up the torch. I'm not sure there are people around who can think, advocate and plan in the holistic way that is so necessary. We certainly don't have them in Aotearoa, or, if we do, they are drowned out by the louder voices of 'business as usual'.
Had the pleasure of hearing Ian speak at a student LABASH in Morgantown, WV many years ago. He was terrific and got in the faces of the LA students from the stage and yelled….”Do You Know Who You Are!”……..he was adamant about students realizing our responsibility to society for designing an environment for human use that took into full consideration the ecology of the site. Got my copy of Design With Nature signed that day😀.
Took a random urban planning class in the 2000's and my teacher offhandedly referenced this gentleman Ian McHarg in a lesson on economic planning vs environmental planning as it pertains to city development and efficiency. Did a bit more research and used this method to look for places to live based on circling areas on a map. Avoiding flood planes, traffic, industrial pollution, and scarcity of resources. while contrasting areas on a map with amenable weather, good soil, and lower average cost of living. It genuinely helped me discover a place to live that has everything I love as well as fewer than average things I hate haha. Crazy how this idea made such an impact on my decision making process to this day. Thanks Ian:)))
To whatever degree your comfortable sharing, I’d love to know where you ended up living.
It was hilarious back in 1988 when I attended Penn LARP to see the foreign students struggling to understand him. I struggled myself but owe a huge part of my learning to Professor McHarg.
Such a huge personality.
He is so romantic! love him!
wow, incredible!