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120 Complexity Ethos + Strategies: Nonlinear Landscape Praxis Blake Belanger Kansas State University, Department of Landscape Architecture / Regional and Community Planning, Manhattan, Kansas, 66502, USA (e-mail belanger@ksu. edu) Abstract At the end of the twentieth century and into this century, complexity theory and nonlinear dynamics have surfaced with increasing frequency as a means to understand the world and describe the ways in which it works. Applications of these theories can be found in many fields, including landscape architecture and urban design. While a theoretical dialogue on this topic is ongoing, the bridge between theory and praxis is still developing. The author investigates this association through a literature review of complexity theory and contemporary landscape architecture theory. The objective of this paper is to present a foundation for landscape architectural praxis based upon a complexity ethos and four practice strategies: deciphering, scripting, framing and stewardship. Keywords Landscape architecture, complexity theory, complexity ethos, deciphering, scripting, framing, stewardship Complexity Ethos Across a broad range of disciplines, complexity theory and nonlinear dynamics are emerging as a means to understand the world and how it works. Initially led by physicists and philosophers, applications of complexity theory are being explored in many areas, including geography, social science, economics, computer programming, and city planning [1]. The existing body of work represents a broad range of methodologies and approaches, including empirical studies, computer modeling, and descriptive texts building upon predecessors’ findings. Applications to landscape architecture have also surfaced, often in the context of landscape urbanism or ecological urbanism (Allen 2001, Berrizbeitia 2001, Connolly 2004, Corner, Allen 2001, Corner 2003, Corner 2004, Hill 2001, Hill 2005, Wall 1999). Landscape architecture and urban design scholars concentrating in this area acknowledge the value and relevance of understanding complex systems and nonlinear dynamics, yet a clear framework for practice is still emerging. This paper adds to the current body of work by presenting an ethos and four practice strategies that engage complexity and nonlinear dynamics. My previous investigations into contextualizing landscape architecture within the emerging dialogue of complexity theory and nonlinear dynamics propose a foundational perspective, which I call a complexity ethos. Our world may be understood in terms of complex systems that are constantly changing and co-adapting to one another, forming a single aggregation of matter and energy unraveling through time. Ecologies, economies, social organizations, and cities are all examples of complex systems that interact with their component parts and one another (Johnson 2001). In this context, landscape is simultaneously matter and process, non-scalar, relational, and always unfolding. It is a single matter-energy, as well as encoded cultural traditions and knowledge aggregating through time, influenced more by relationships between complex systems than the systems themselves [2]. When landscape is understood as relational, situational and multidirectional, any single set of rules for practice becomes quickly outmoded and inadequate. Alternatively, working strategically within an ethos provides a broad foundation for visceral decision-making [3]. Taking action from an informed perspective is an approach that liberates a designer from the limitations of a rule-set, and promotes intuitive decision-making. A complexity ethos acknowledges the relationality, fluidity and complexity of the contemporary global landscape and supplants traditional thinking in several ways. Landscape architects may begin to think of landscape not in terms of scale, but rather in terms of relations; not in terms of media and process, but rather in terms of media is process; not in terms of control, but rather in terms of responding to feedback and adapting through time. Shifting away from traditional paradigms of permanence, control, and totalizing organizations will allow landscape architects to begin to think in terms of bottom up, actorcatalyzed landscape and cities (Belanger 2009). This perspective raises questions about the nature of landscape architectural practice. How might landscape architects identify influential and pertinent landscape relations for a particular place? How might landscape architects engage complex systems as creative design agents? Once understood, how might these discoveries influence significant practice decisions, such as site organization and programming? How might landscape architects engage landscape projects to be adaptive and culturally relevant over time? These four questions are addressed by the following four reflexive strategies, which operate within a complexity ethos. They provide a scaffold for practice, and are called deciphering, framing, scripting, and stewardship [4].
121 Deciphering The goal of deciphering is to understand the complex and aggregated influences that appear, disappear, and reappear in a place. Always elusive and forever changing, influences are internal and external forms and forces, building the history of a place, as well as creating seeds for many potential futures. They are relational, as opposed to scalar, meaning their effect is not associated with size or locale, and is not limited to the legal boundaries of a site. Deciphering is an alternative to positivistic and reductionist modes of thinking – all too common in conventional practice – that construe a site as a cleared, “muted ground” [5] upon which developers and their designers intend to act (Beauregard 2005). The primary shortcoming of this perspective is that sites become simplified, rationalized and reduced, with a narrow or singular ambition to provide a canvas for something new. Alternatively, deciphering reveals the complex systems, relations, and aggregated narratives embedded in every site, providing a foundation, point of departure, and framework for design action. In addition to understanding the complex and interwoven logics of a place, deciphering is a means for revealing a multitude of latent orders that would provide an armature for organizing new materials and programs. This approach is substantiated by the work of accomplished landscape architects and is very different from the notion of site as “muted ground” [6]. The designer seeks to not only record the forms present, but to also understand the forces that created them. Activities of visiting, researching, mapping, cross-mapping, datascaping, and analyzing are coupled with intuitive and artful abstractions and interpretations. Deciphering allows the designer to engage the rich aggregated influences with which every site is endowed, and sets the stage for site design through the strategies of scripting, framing, and stewardship. Scripting Scripting begins with understanding the potency of specific processes working in a place, and continues with engaging them as active agents of design. Sites are open to flows and fluxes of larger systems that move through, upon, and over them, such as weather, social patterns, information exchange, wildlife movements, and hydrological systems. Nonlinear dynamics provides insights into the often surprising effects of emergent phenomena that occur as a result of random interactions between complex systems. Through systemic interactions, seemingly benign design decisions on a site may have profound consequences in surprising locations. Although it would be impossible to predict all of these potential occurrences, the strategy of deciphering brings to light the systems at play, providing the information required for scripting. Scripting enables a designer to become a process architect: to actively add to or to edit away from the systems that are present and/or introduce new systems or catalytic agents. The Dutch design firm Vista practices a form of deciphering and scripting, which they call “process design”. They seek to “unravel and manipulate the underlying processes in the landscape as well as the infrastructure that forms them” (van Gerwen 2004: 233). Roel Van Gerwen uses the analogy of building a pile of sand on the beach: “you can form a mound of sand with a bucket and a shovel, then the mound will disappear with the wind over time. The alternative is to place a large stick in the ground where the wind will instantly form a pile, reshaping the pile every time the wind changes its direction. In this analogy, placing the stick is less exhausting, gives a less predictable result and is highly dynamic” (van Gerwen 2004: 233). Framing Framing sets the organizational and programmatic parameters for a site and strategically evolves alongside scripting. Framing introduces geometries that first respond to the armatures and influences uncovered during deciphering, and second sponsor newly scripted processes [7]. Recent shifts in ecological thinking parallel concepts in complexity and nonlinear dynamics and support the relationship between scripting and framing. These new theories focus on nonequilibrium ecologies and the relationship between material/spatial patterns and the processes that they influence (Hill 2001, Hill 2005, Cook 2000). The notion of integrated pattern and process organization can be understood to apply to many complex systems relevant to landscape architecture. For example, Michael Batty has determined that bottom-up, self-organization of complex systems is fundamental to the order of urban spatial patterns (Batty 2005). The aggregate patterns we observe in ecological and urban systems alike are more influenced by localized events and system interactions than single totalizing decisions. Yet these patterns exist within an infrastructural framework. Patterns of vegetation and wildlife evolve because of a material framework including geomorphology, topography, solar orientation, and gross hydrological systems. Cities grow and change within a framework that includes these conditions as well as infrastructures comprised of streets, transit systems, utilities, and green corridors. Frameworks are enduring while the patterns that result are temporal, adaptive, and always changing. Framing organizes the physical structures that sponsor the emergence of self-organizing systems and their related patterns. An example of scripting and framing is the „Virgin Pool of Earth“ by landscape artist Alan Sonfist. The site work is located in a contaminated and toxic landscape near the Love Canal in New York. Sonfist created a “seed cat- Papers
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