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.
Lokman, K
Cyborg landscapes: Choreographing resilient interactions between infrastructure, ecology, and society
Journal Of Landscape Architecture