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"People tend to discount the activist legacy of McHarg. He's often framed as a technocrat, but there's a long, consistent thread of advocacy and activism in his work."

It’s not enough that Portland, Oregon, or Berkeley, California, get to zero carbon emissions by 2050. Or the entire state of California, for that matter. Or even the entire United States. The entire world must eliminate (or offset)carbon pollution by 2050.

This article discusses two models of environmental simulation that emerged in landscape architecture with the rise of the environmental movement in the United States: Ian McHarg’s (1969) ecological method and Carl Steinitz and Peter Rogers’s (1968) systems analysis model of urbanization and change.

While each city has a very different set of reasons for its water woes, ranging from pollution to poor infrastructure to poor planning to desertification and drought, they all share a common challenge: Climate change will likely make the task of providing water harder, the populations thirstier, and the people angrier, even as many of the cities grow.