Cyborg landscapes: Choreographing resilient interactions between infrastructure, ecology, and society

Abstract

Contemporary challenges of climate change, population growth, resource scarcity, and environmental decline prompt designers to envision new relationships between nature and culture. Infrastructure design and adaptation are key to addressing theses issues. This article argues for the formulation of a landscape approach that integrates biotic and abiotic systems to envision more dynamic interactions among infrastructure, ecology, and urbanism. Conceptualized as cyborg landscapes, this approach embraces notions of change, adaptation, and feedback to create hybrid infrastructures of human and non-human systems, of living and non-living entities, across a range of spatial and temporal scales. Three examples illustrate that the profession is already (knowingly or unknowingly) working within this framework. Designed as co-dependent socioecological networks, these projects transform and choreograph landscape processes across multiple spatial and temporal scales. They promote an aesthetic that is predicated on relationships between dynamic things and systems. By stressing co-evolutionary processes between human agency and ecological systems, cyborg landscapes aspire to create multifunctional landscapes that do not simply operate in the present, but learn from experiences in order to adapt and grow smarter.

• Cyborg landscapes
• infrastructure
• socioecological systems
• climate change adaptation
• regional planning

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kees Lokman

Kees Lokman is an assistant professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of British Columbia. He holds degrees in planning, urban design, and landscape architecture. His writing and academic research, which focus on the intersection of landscape, infrastructure, and ecology, has been published in various journals, including Topos, the Journal of Architectural Education, Landscapes Paysages, and New Geographies.

Kees is also the founder of Parallax Landscape, a collaborative and interdisciplinary design and research platform that explores design challenges related to water and food shortages, depleting energy resources, climate change, and ongoing urbanization. Parallax Landscape is the recipient of numerous design awards and recognitions.