Ecosystems as Infrastructure: A New Way of Looking at Climate Resilience

When people think of landscape architecture, small-scale recreational spaces like urban parks, gardens, and golf courses may come to mind. MacArthur “Genius Award” winner Kate Orff has a grander and more ecologically ambitious vision.

Orff, director of Columbia University’s Urban Design Program, believes that architects should do more than just create beautiful spaces: They also need to work with nature to create resilient living environments that both help to knit human communities together and protect them against the ravages of climate change. 

SCAPE, the New York City-based design firm that Orff founded in 2007, is currently working in Louisiana on a project that will counter sea level rise and land loss in the Mississippi River Delta. SCAPE has also partnered with the Atlanta Regional Commission to create a 125-mile-long trail and greenway along the Chattahoochee River, which aims to bring racially diverse communities along its banks together, based on their shared love of the river.

In an interview with Yale Environment 360, Orff said that it is not enough simply to restore natural systems to their former condition. “There is no ‘pure nature’ that’s outside of us, untouched up there in the foothills somewhere,” she said. “We’ve ‘made’ the world what it is already, so now we need to take a very, very strong hand in the remaking. … A big part of climate adaptation may simply be unbuilding what we’ve already built.”

Yale Environment 360: What is the role of landscape architecture in an era of climate change?

Kate Orff: Since I went to school in 1997, the world has radically changed, and so have our views on what is necessary and important. So what I’ve done is taken the tools that I’ve learned as a licensed professional landscape architect — horticulture, grading and drainage, shaping the ground and the earth. But I’ve used them with a very different purpose.

One goal of mine is to think of landscape architecture not as a top-down thing where I impose my vision, but much more as a community-driven way to channel many voices. The second goal is to focus on the impact of climate change and to shift the whole profession towards large-scale climate adaption projects.

e360: You set up SCAPE to engage in these kinds of ecological projects.

Orff: That’s right. SCAPE is a private design practice, so we have conventional projects like waterfront parks and gardens, but we also do really large-scale resilience and adaptation planning.

One example is that we worked with Louisiana’s Coastal Protection and Restoration Authority on a massive plan that essentially looks at the state and helps guide investment and projects for the coastal region.

Louisiana has lost about 2,000 square miles of land to anthropogenic factors like sea level rise. We’ve been helping to develop a master plan for coastal restoration and risk reduction that combines marsh creation with bottomland reforestation, sediment diversions, and related landscape restoration and job-creation strategies.

e360: So basically you are looking at this large region and proposing what to do in various parts of it?

Orff: Yes, so that it all comes together. Often we are only responding in a piecemeal way. We have system collapse, but we address it with single limited projects here and there. What we are trying to do is integrate many local projects into a larger-scale systemic approach, into a larger-scale resilience plan.

e360: You’ve been quoted as saying: “There’s no more natural nature. Now it’s a matter of design.” What did you mean by that?

Orff: We humans are profoundly impacting the planet. There is no “pure nature” that’s outside of us, untouched up there in the foothills somewhere. We’ve “made” the world what it is already, so now we need to take a very, very strong hand in the remaking. It is a matter of design in the sense that it requires work, intention, design, funding, political skills. It’s not a naive or nostalgic attempt to restore the past. Instead, it’s layering up natural systems to reduce risk, building this hybrid future of stewarded nature.

e360: We’ve tried to control nature with big infrastructure projects. But that can backfire, can’t it?

Orff: For decades, infrastructure has been constructed as “single-purpose,” often designed by engineers to isolate one element of a system and to solve one problem. For example, on Staten Island, during Superstorm Sandy, a levee designed to keep water out was overtopped, resulting in a “bathtub effect” that trapped water inside a neighborhood rather than keeping it out and resulted in several deaths. We try to lock natural systems in place. But, of course, that is not the way that natural systems respond, and it is wholly insufficient for a climate-changed environment where we’re experiencing more intense rain in many regions, where we are facing more extreme heat, where sea levels are rising. The old rules, frankly, no longer apply.

e360: One region that you’ve thought a lot about is the Mississippi River. You’ve proposed a Mississippi River National Park. How would that work?

Orff: We need to think more comprehensively about the American landscape. We used to do that — even if it was Route 66, which went across the country, or when we set up the National Park System. There was a time when we were thinking at a bigger scale. Now we are so polarized, so fragmented, that we’re only able to think about the next thing that is immediately possible in a small area.

So the Mississippi River National Park was an idea that proposed a larger vision, connecting the river back to its floodplain and connecting its stakeholders — from the Iowa pig farmer to the Louisiana shrimper — and, in my mind, ultimately reducing the risk that some of these communities would be facing.

e360: The national park framework would be a way of bringing the river back to a healthy state?

Orff: The national park framework, as flawed as that might be, is a way to pull together these lands for recreation and climate adaption purposes and to bring the river back as a living system. Because right now it is not. The river is fragmented and exists in the lower Mississippi as a pollution drain, and the upper river all runs behind constructed levees so when we do have a flood it is just massive.

e360: On a somewhat less ambitious scale, you have a project in the Atlanta metropolitan area called the Chattahoochee RiverLands, a 125-mile-long bikeway and greenway that passes through both white and Black communities. You’ve said that such projects can help bring polarized communities together.

Orff: For this project, we cut through red tape, charting a path of access through a mosaic of public and private lands. It’s a radical effort to stitch together a historically fragmented public realm that showcases the river’s ecology and history. Beyond its physical footprint, the goal of the RiverLands is to raise public awareness, improve connections and access, address a long legacy of environmental racism, expand mobility for underserved communities, and build on a strong regional legacy of water resource conservation and protection.

It is also about bringing people together from communities that don’t always have much interaction — and that is already working. Rivers have such power to bring people together, to link up disjointed places, and bring life back into cities.