Guest Editors’ Introduction to the Special Issue

The challenges of 2020 and 2021 may destine those years to be some that school children learn about in social studies classes as marking a turbulent event in history. These were challenging years, but they also presented opportunities for learning, change, and growth. An action or event that creatively re-directs the future could be a catalyst or a disruption, and might depend on the observer’s position. The cycle of change and re-invention can feel oddly familiar to landscape architects, even if the wavelength of that change begins to oscillate more dramatically. Landscape architecture has long managed a tension between the creative and rational cycles of Lyle’s (1985) alternating currents. However, nothing could have prepared landscape architecture practitioners, administrators, educators, and scholars for the disruptions of the last few years.

The norms for landscape architecture have been adjusted several times since the profession was established. As CELA returned to its annual meeting cycle in 2021, practitioners and academics recalled universal upheavals that had preceded the global pandemic as a universal disruption but not the only one. Practitioners and educators remember many prior disruptions that include computer-aided revolutions in almost all aspects of practice, teaching, and learning: space observation of the earth, satellite-guided positioning and land measurement, and a growing awareness of the need for authentic responses to calls for equity and social change. All of these have been disruptive or catalyzing to the trajectory of landscape architecture.

This volume assembles articles by eight authors who provide scholarly reflections on how disruption may evolve into positive change. These authors presented papers and panels for the CELA 2022 theme track Evolving Norms: Adapting Scholarship to Disruptive Phenomena. The articles relate to past landscape architecture norms and recent responses to change, including technological advancements resulting from the COVID-19 crisis, whose impacts are likely to shape the future of the field. The authors have documented disruptions, alternatives, adjustments, projections of future trajectories, and speculations that have affected and will continue to affect the academy and practice. The issue cannot hope to encompass every disruption and perspective. Instead, it brings together an overall theme that disruption can be “a positive stimulus.”

In a retro-speculative essay, Joan Iverson Nassauer writes that the discipline of landscape architecture should recognize landscapes as transdisciplinary objects within socio-environmental systems and learn from other disciplines to promote change. Nassauer argues that the “two cultures” problem, in which science is perceived as limiting creativity, inhibits the field’s potential to credibly support sustainable and equitable landscape design and planning innovations. Synthesizing common words currently used in landscape architecture, N. Claire Napawan, Linda Chamorro, Debra Guenther, and Yiwei Huang pose the question, “How might landscape architecture change if we embrace alternative readings of the term ‘landscape’ itself?” The team explores words that suggest a disruptive context and promotes the use of “alternative terms” to convey the evolving norm of a more inclusive worldview. Zhifang Wang offers a theoretical framework to organize new design norms for sustainable practice. Focusing on the changing norms of landscape architecture in China, Wang discusses four phases of change in landscape practice that can be applied worldwide. These design evolutions have occurred in response to societal disruptions and complex socio-political situations.

In the context of landscape architectural education and administration, Ming-Han Li, Sadik Artunç, Terry Clements, and Diane Jones Allen reflect on the disruption caused by the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic as a training moment for the discipline that makes it more adaptive to both anticipated and unexpected changes. They share various pandemic-related adjustments, creative changes, and lessons learned from the perspective of educators and administrators in the field. They speculate on the prospect of change to landscape architecture instruction, research, and scholarship in the immediate and longer-term future. Among the contributors who are landscape architecture educators, Noah Billig and Tori Kjer discuss adapting to disruptions that affected landscape architecture studio instruction and practice. The pair advocate for being open to infinite possibilities that disruption may create for valuable environmental and social resiliencies over time. The educators Phillip Fernberg and Brent Chamberlain examine recent literature on artificial intelligence (AI) and suggest how the future advancement of AI may disrupt current tenets and establish new norms for landscape architecture education and practice.

In a cross-analysis of case studies, Lynne Manzo, Daniel Williams, Christopher Raymond, Andrés Di Masso, and Natalie Gulsrud examine disruptions to place and people-place relationships that cause instability and insecurity. They propose that people and communities need assistance in responding effectively to change and disruption, and they offer suggestions for negotiating disruption by reanchoring and reauthoring our understanding of landscape architecture education, practice, community, place, climate, nature, and each other.

Susannah Abbey calls on designers to support spatial justice by reappropriating, and renegotiating the use of, streets, parks, and plazas. Abbey explores case studies for democratic place-making strategies that respond to social disruptions caused by COVID-19; natural disasters; human displacement; rapid economic, technological, and demographic change; and controversial policymaking. She advocates for designers to engage in true public participation, creating loose space and revising places to support spatial justice. Mary Padua advocates for an emergent “reconciliatory landscape” and retrospective justice to resolve the cultural disruption of the “institutional norm of nonaction.” Padua calls for a reconciliatory landscape commemorating individuals of African descent who worked, lived, died, and were buried on the grounds of Clemson University. Padua explains that such a sacred act would be a significant disruption to Clemson University’s current cultural landscape.

This special issue is a first of sorts, possibly a disruption all its own. As the CELA conference track cochairs, we invited authors to intentionally link the content of the CELA annual meeting to a special issue of Landscape Journal. This is not the first time conference papers have become published manuscripts in Landscape Journal, but this issue is a thematic link populated by educators and practitioners of different ranks and geographies. The collective intent is to help landscape architecture anticipate future disruptions and convert them into catalysts for positive change.