Modelling Urban Nature: Pedagogies and Tooling for Communicating Landscape Futures

When Ian McHarg published his seminal book Design with Nature in 1967, he emphasized “process as value” urging planners to integrate natural land resources into urban design. Yet today, amid climate change and urban land degradation, the built environment disciplines struggle to act upon this call. Set in Hong Kong, a subtropical city facing climate pressure, the teaching-research project outlined in this paper addresses the necessity to negotiate complexities of urban ecological processes. Developed in concurrence with a Year Three undergraduate landscape architecture studio, the project proposes an extended reality (XR) workflow and representation methodology that allows students and practitioners to both dynamically discuss and co-create urban-ecological processes and designs. Students were tasked to design a large urban park on a site in Hong Kong profoundly transformed by urban development. Following this studio brief, this project employs two case studies – one focused on hydrological dynamics, the other on plant succession – to experiment with XR-based methods that address both site-specific conditions and the temporal dimensions of design proposals.

Iñaki Abalos

Professor in Residence, Department of Architecture, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA

Orazio Carpenzano

Dean, Facoltà di Architettura, Sapienza Università di Roma, Rome

Yung Ho Chang

Professor of Architecture, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

Winka Dubbeldam

Miller Professor and Chair of Architecture at Stuart Weitzman School of Design

Brian Ford

Professor Emeritus, Department of Architecture & Built Environment, University of Nottingham, Nottingham, UK

Hsinming Fung

Professor, SCI-Arc, Los Angeles CA, USA

Carlo Gasparrini

Professor of Urbanism, Dipartimento di Architettura, Universita' degli Studi di Napoli Federico II, Naples, Italy

Marco Imperadori

Professor of Design and Technological Innovation and Chancellor’s Delegate for the Far East, Politecnico di M

Rahul Mehrotra

Professor of Urban Design and Planning, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA

Antoine Picon

Professor of the History of Architecture and Technology, GSD, Harvard University, Cambridge MA, USA

Mónica Ponce de León

Dean, School of Architecture, Princeton University, Princeton NJ, USA

Jane Rendell

Professor, The Bartlett School of Architecture, University College London, London, UK

Peter Rich

Professor of Architecture, Witwatersrand University, Johannesburg, South Africa

Michael Speaks

Dean, School of Architecture, Syracuse University, Syracuse NY, USA

Martha Thorne

Hon FRIBA, Hon COAM, Director of Strategic and Institutional Relations, the Gallery Institute, Portugal

C David Tseng

Dean, College of Humanities and Social Sciences, National Chiao-Tung University, Taipei, Taiwan

Li Xiangning

Deputy Dean, College of Architecture and Urban Planning, Tongji University, Shanghai, China

Modelling Urban Nature: Pedagogies and Tooling for Communicating Landscape Futures

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