At last I got round to finishing my blog posts – Part 4 and 5 of Sustainable Landscape Architecture Series.
Although I believe that standards such Sustainable Sites and certification such as LEED AP can contribute to advancing landscape architecture and creating sustainable landscapes they also become a crutch that we point to and say it meets X,Y,Z criteria then it is sustainable. The problem is they may be ‘sustainable’ for when the standard or certification was formulated but as we all know technology, education systems and people change.
I believe that to create sustainable landscapes you have to analyse and evaluate the landscape in the moment in time and then with all the information at hand you then formulate an approach to create a sustainable landscape. Beginning with a certification or standard as the starting point for sustainable landscape design is fraught with the danger of creating a landscape that meets your expectations as a designer (and the certification organisation) as a sustainable landscape but fails miserably to meet the expectations of the users and thus the user don’t use the space and thus the space is not sustainable as no one is using it. This is true of many urban spaces, of course natural forests or spaces are inherently sustainable ecosystem although they are rarely used. So there in lies a conundrum. Many spaces we create attempt to replicate a natural ecosystem so we view them as sustainable but if we create a space of materials and plants that may not be ‘natural’ or an ‘ecosystem’ is it still not sustainable if the usage rate of the local community is high. I think that in an urban setting sustainable landscapes need to used to be sustainable, if they aren’t used you have basically wasted, time, energy in construction, energy bound in materials and so on to create a space that may be technically seen as sustainable. This is were I basically take issue with certification and standards, they often are not flexible and usually out of date as soon as we publish them.
To create a sustainable landscape we have to realise that as designers we need to assess and truly understand the landscape before we lift a pen, click a mouse, or swipe a tablet. Standards and certification assist and sometimes lead the design direction in the creation of sustainable landscapes but its the designer and the design process that create the best sustainable landscapes.