About this course
This seminar will explore topics in climate change adaptation and mitigation within the field of landscape architecture and related design fields. We will review discourse on climate change adaptation and mitigation and specifically how design professions are retooling and engaging at ever increasing scales to rebuild broken and fragmented landscape systems. Students will study the histories and geographies of sea level rise, fire, flooding, storms, energy extraction, biodiversity loss, climate migration, deforestation, and agriculture that necessitate the scales of design intervention employed and envisioned today to regenerate, repair, and rebuild human-ecological systems around the planet. Further, we will probe these design interventions relative to concepts of the planetary, grounding, landscape relations, and belonging in order to examine the political and personal aspects of climate design in addition to the practical. In this process, we will explore our current capacities and limitations for engaging, living within, and designing across conceptual and geographical scales to build a sense of purpose and participation as well as to chart new potential practices for our creative work. Readings, discussion, writing, drawing, and other creative making will be used to explore and express responses to this complex subject. While the seminar will use a disciplinary lens of landscape architecture, many topics will not be discipline specific and can be applied and exercised through other design fields.
4 credit hours