Towards a landscape approach to digital technologies

Landscape architecture has experienced a paradigm shift in the last two decades, requiring designers to respond with evidence-based design to the dynamic and temporal quality erosion of the urban ecosystem. The Green Infrastructure approach promotes the elements of biodiversity and organized systems that are part of natural capital in any urban area, be it valuable or derelict, including individual technological devices that leverage biodiversity and are integrated in the architecture. Green roofs and living walls, permeable pavements, rain gardens and other systems for the collection and management of rainwater are just some examples. By providing ecosystem services, GI promotes environmental protection, economic feasibility, health and wellbeing, equality and social inclusion. In particular, salutogenic design value creation has become central, introducing in architecture and urban design a focus on metrics, alongside form and aesthetics. Despite successful histories of early adoption in automated mapping technology, spatial analysis and Geographical Information Systems, landscape architecture demonstrates a widespread resistance to computational techniques, which has until recently limited practitioners’ ability to explore ‘landscape performance’ as part of design processes. Digital techniques can help designers to explore the ideas and concerns core to landscape architecture in the Anthropocene, such as designing with social ecological systems, working with landscapes in flux, or adapting to the extreme weather events caused by climate change. Processes of feedback, sensing the environment, managing the identified data, and visualizing climate adaptive responses represent the core design focus in the development of inclusive urban landscapes and resilient communities.