News + Events
News + Events
Fifty years after Ian McHarg’s landmark book Design With Nature (1969), Design With Nature Now comprises three parallel exhibitions, an anthology, and a major international conference featuring leading design thinkers and practitioners from around the world.
"The revival of an activist federal design bureaucracy is necessary to the success of a Green New Deal. It also presents a unique opportunity to create alternative models of practice in landscape architecture."
Visualizing climate change is a challenge that is evident in our collective inability to process, understand, and imagine what the future world will look like on a grand scale. We are told with more regularity than ever before that certain weather events are the most severe, the most catastrophic, and the most rare. But many of us around the world—those fortunate enough to have been spared from a...
“I was a little surprised to see [Oceanix City] received so eagerly by the folks at the U.N. It says a lot about the depth of thought that was put into this proposal that the big idea is to take all of our poorest, most vulnerable people — climate refugees — and stick them on an island that’s out of sight and out of mind.”
Naomi Klein, Kate Aronoff, Kate Orff, David Roberts, Rhiana Gunn-Wright, Jane McAlevey, and many other leading voices in climate policy, organizing, and design will join us on Friday, September 13th for this landmark event. We fully expect this event to be at capacity. Reserve your seat today and make plans to join us!
Thanks in large part to the foundation Ian McHarg built, PennDesign’s Landscape Architecture Department has led the field for decades. Here’s a glimpse at how it’s staying relevant as the importance for the profession grows.
For the last few years as we've built up the McHarg Center's research agenda, we have focused on the global issue of urban sprawl in regions where it is on a collision course with high-value, biodiverse landscapes. We don't just mean cute and cuddly animals, but entire ecoregions which are threatened by rapid development. This research is now focusing on a set of 33 cities...
Dean and Co-Executive Director Frederick Steiner pens an end-of-year note for the Center:
"From northern California to the Carolinas, it’s been another harrowing year in climate news. But there have been bright spots, like the deal reached by diplomats at the UN summit in Poland to rescue the Paris Agreement. No less than the policy makers, those of us in design and allied professions have a...
But today, facing down a merciless climate timeline, when “unprecedented changes in all aspects of society” are called for, a New Deal scope of ambition is what we need. The GND can’t just be a bill or two. It needs to be the framework for politics for the next few decades.
Richard Weller co-authors a report on biodiversity with The Nature Conservancy, Matthijs Bouw participates in 'The Hackable City', and Design With Nature Now begins to take shape.