ENVIRONMENTAL JUSTICE A GROWING CONCERN AMONG LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTS

Environmental justice, which is about the fair distribution of environmental benefits and costs, is a “growing concern” among landscape architects across the globe, said Kurt Culbertson, FASLA, Design Workshop. For example, in ASLA’s 2016 Student Awards, 68 percent of the award-winning designs focused on environmental and social justice.

At the ASLA 2016 Annual Meeting in New Orleans, global perspectives on the subject were offered by Kongjian Yu, FASLA, Turenscape; Senator Kamel Mahadin, ASLA, MK Associates; and Mario E. Schjetnan, FASLA, Grupo de Diseno Urbano.

Good intentions for people and the environment can lead to bad results if they are pursued in an unfair way. Yu focused on villages demolished to create an urban greenbelt around Shanghai. In the name of “good will,” 100 square kilometers, comprised of thousands of villages surrounding the city, were demolished to make way for another population explosion in Shanghai, which has expanded 4 times in 20 years.

Villages were demolished and parks were built, but to what end? “Goodwill may not necessarily lead to a good or justifiable result,” said Yu.

Green space is central to the equitable growth of cities, said Jordanian Senator Mahadin, who was a landscape architect before becoming a politician.

The Jordanian city Aqaba, which has grown by over 180,000 people in recent decades, has handled it’s growth successfully, in part because it is one of the “few cities in the Middle East with a master plan that holds green space” as important.

The master plan holds that the Port of Aqaba – the only one in Jordan – should not be further developed, but held for the people. “Cities are not painted by landscape architects or architects, they are painted by the people.”

Mahadin made a pitch for more landscape architects to push for environmental justice through politics. “Lead by example.”

“Landscape is a human right,” Schjetnan argued. Landscape has the ability to de-marginalize people and integrate them into society.

Preserving landscape is especially critical in developing-world cities, which are “not developing, so much as developing too quickly through accelerated growth. Four-fifths of the world is like this,” he added, “neither developed nor undeveloped – just growing too quickly.”

In Schjetnan’s Mexico City, and many other exploding cities, landscapes are deteriorating due to worsening problems with congestion, natural resource depletion, water and air pollution, especially for those communities with lower incomes.

In the developing urban world, many more landscape architects and designers, particularly from minority groups, are needed if the goal is more just cities.