The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of ecological ideas and ecological thinking in discussions of urbanism, society, culture, and design. The field of ecology has moved from classical determinism and a reductionist Newtonian concern with stability, certainty, and order in favor of more contemporary understandings of dynamic systemic change and the related phenomena of adaptability, resilience, and flexibility. But ecology is not simply a project of the natural sciences. Researchers, theorists, social commentators, and designers have all used ecology as a broader idea or metaphor for a set of conditions and relationships with political, economic, and social implications. Projective Ecologies takes stock of the diversity ofcontemporary ecological research and theory--embracing Felix Guattari's broader definition of ecology as at once environmental, social, and existential--and speculates on potential paths forward for design practices. Where are ecological thinking and theory now? What do current trajectories of research suggest for future practice? How can advances in ecological research and modeling, in social theory, and in digital visualization inform, with greater rigor, more robust design thinking and practice? New original essays by Peter Del Tredici, Erle Ellis, Christopher Hight, Sanford Kwinter, Sean Lally, Nina-Marie Lister, Chris Reed, Jane Wolff Reprinted/excerpted essays by Robert Cook, David Fletcher, Richard T.T. Forman, C.S. Holling. With drawings by, Gross.MAX, James Corner, Field Operations, Sean Lally, Anuradha Mathur and Dilip DaCunha, OMA, Stoss Landscape Urbanism, West 8.

The past two decades have witnessed a resurgence of ecological ideas and ecological thinking in discussions of urbanism, society, culture, and design. The field of ecology has moved from classical determinism and a reductionist Newtonian concern with stability, certainty, and order in favor of more contemporary understandings of dynamic systemic change and the related phenomena of adaptability, resilience, and flexibility. But ecology is not simply a project of the natural sciences. Researchers, theorists, social commentators, and designers have all used ecology as a broader idea or metaphor for a set of conditions and relationships with political, economic, and social implications. Projective Ecologies takes stock of the diversity of contemporary ecological research and theory--embracing Felix Guattari's broader definition of ecology as at once environmental, social, and existential--and speculates on potential paths forward for design practices. Where are ecological thinking and theory now? What do current trajectories of research suggest for future practice? How can advances in ecological research and modeling, in social theory, and in digital visualization inform, with greater rigor, more robust design thinking and practice? How does all of this point to potential paths forward in an age of climate change and the need for adaptation and mitigation? With Contributions of: Jesse M. Keenan, foreword to the second edition Charles Waldheim, foreword to the first edition James Corner Christopher Hight C.S. Holling and M.A. Goldberg Wenche E. Dramstad, James D. Olson, and Richard T.T. Forman Daniel Botkin Erle C. Ellis Jane Wolff Robert E. Cook Peter Del Tredici David Fletcher Frances Westley and Katharine McGowan Sean Lally Sanford Kwinter

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Here is a book that challenges the very basis of the way psychologists have studied child development. According to Urie Bronfenbrenner, one of the world's foremost developmental psychologists, laboratory studies of the child's behavior sacrifice too much in order to gain experimental control and analytic rigor. Laboratory observations, he argues, too often lead to "the science of the strange behavior of children in strange situations with strange adults for the briefest possible periods of time." To understand the way children actually develop, Bronfenbrenner believes that it will be necessary to observe their behavior in natural settings, while they are interacting with familiar adults over prolonged periods of time. This book offers an important blueprint for constructing such a new and ecologically valid psychology of development. The blueprint includes a complete conceptual framework for analysing the layers of the environment that have a formative influence on the child. This framework is applied to a variety of settings in which children commonly develop, ranging from the pediatric ward to daycare, school, and various family configurations. The result is a rich set of hypotheses about the developmental consequences of various types of environments. Where current research bears on these hypotheses, Bronfenbrenner marshals the data to show how an ecological theory can be tested. Where no relevant data exist, he suggests new and interesting ecological experiments that might be undertaken to resolve current unknowns. Bronfenbrenner's groundbreaking program for reform in developmental psychology is certain to be controversial. His argument flies in the face of standard psychological procedures and challenges psychology to become more relevant to the ways in which children actually develop. It is a challenge psychology can ill-afford to ignore.

A definitive intellectual history of landscape urbanism It has become conventional to think of urbanism and landscape as opposing one another—or to think of landscape as merely providing temporary relief from urban life as shaped by buildings and infrastructure. But, driven in part by environmental concerns, landscape has recently emerged as a model and medium for the city, with some theorists arguing that landscape architects are the urbanists of our age. In Landscape as Urbanism, one of the field's pioneers presents a powerful case for rethinking the city through landscape. Charles Waldheim traces the roots of landscape as a form of urbanism from its origins in the Renaissance through the twentieth century. Growing out of progressive architectural culture and populist environmentalism, the concept was further informed by the nineteenth-century invention of landscape architecture as a "new art" charged with reconciling the design of the industrial city with its ecological and social conditions. In the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, as urban planning shifted from design to social science, and as urban design committed to neotraditional models of town planning, landscape urbanism emerged to fill a void at the heart of the contemporary urban project. Generously illustrated, Landscape as Urbanism examines works from around the world by designers ranging from Ludwig Hilberseimer, Andrea Branzi, and Frank Lloyd Wright to James Corner, Adriaan Geuze, and Michael Van Valkenburgh. The result is the definitive account of an emerging field that is likely to influence the design of cities for decades to come.

Mapping has been one of the most fertile areas of exploration for architecture and landscape in the past few decades. While documenting this shift in representation from the material and physical description toward the depiction of the unseen and often immaterial, Cartographic Grounds takes a critical view toward the current use of data mapping and visualization and calls for a return to traditional cartographic techniques to reimagine the manifestation and manipulation of the ground itself. Each of the ten chapters focuses on a single cartographic technique—sounding/spot elevation, isobath/contour, hachure/hatch, shaded relief, land classification, figure-ground, stratigraphic column, cross-section, line symbol, conventional sign—and illustrates it through beautiful maps and plans from notable designers and cartographers throughout history, from Leonardo da Vinci to James Corner Field Operations. Mohsen Mostafavi, dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design, introduces the book.

Design with Life chronicles the breakthroughs and projects of a nonprofit that is defining resolute new directions in socio-ecological design and other deep-seated intersections of synthetic biology, architecture, and urban systems. In the challenging context of accelerating climate dynamics, the core discipline of architectural design is evolving and embracing new forms of action. New York-based nonprofit Terreform ONE has established a distinctive design tactic that investigates projects through the regenerative use of natural materials, science, and the emergent field of socio-ecological design. This kind of design approach uses actual living matter (not abstracted imitations of nature) to create new functional elements and spaces. These future-based actions are not only grounded in social justice, but are also far-reaching in their application of digital manufacturing and maker culture. Terreform ONE tackles urgent environmental and urban social concerns through the integrated use of living materials and organisms.