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About Landscape Engineers

Sam Clemente

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Those working towards climate-responsive futures are in a messy transition zone. Lack of expertise, investment, and trust in nature-based solutions call for a hybrid approach with grey path-dependent systems. Green infrastructure is used everywhere—infiltrating stormwater, filtering the air, dissipating waves, sustaining humans— but in doing so, we are putting plants to work in an overwhelming and exploitative fashion. Many coastal adaptation efforts surprisingly surpass the upper carbon emission limit given to buildings and designers are now catching up,  beginning to measure how we can do better. We have even run out of space for these efforts, transforming ports, rivers, rails, and roads when bare land is largely allocated for private development. In each of these cases, designing in a buffer is increasingly overwhelmed on all sides by environmental, technological, social, and financial forces. Many of them strike in unequal measures and even more in opposite directions. But above all, each of these issues requires us to think outside of our professions’ ideological and methodological tendencies. We can’t embark on a post-carbon transition, in other words, without a trans-disciplinary one, too.

For a profession originally dedicated to military operations, engineering is in a challenging position to make this shift. Civil engineering has since been divided into sub-disciplines (structural, transportation, environmental, geodetic, etc.), often stressing expertise in a single, niche school of thought. We have a tendency to solve a design problem as it's defined by our discipline, and to pull from a playbook of solutions. Think: “when your only tool is a hammer, everything looks like a nail." Yet, no design exists in a vacuum, and engineers are increasingly called to a broader, more decentralized framework; for example, road and bridge construction will face increasing flooding risks, creating new challenges for mechanical and energy engineers in the process. This alone is a great shift for the engineering community. But, when it comes to the dynamic, epistemological forces–even messier and less quantifiable–entangled in our work, we come to realize that our own playbook does not have all the answers. Or, in fact, that there is no playbook at all.

We do not want to understate the role of engineers. But the immense power given to the discipline must be harnessed with responsibility. At the close of 2025, the American Society of Civil Engineers (ASCE)’s report card rated the US infrastructure system a “C,” citing resilience–“ the ability to plan, prepare for, mitigate, and adapt to changing conditions from hazards”–a key driver for an improved grade. Resiliency is a buzz word in engineering discourse, but it operates at the core of design disciplines– landscape architecture, architecture, urban design, etc. Their definition, in many cases, considers the dynamic nature of humanity, how ecology evolves, how culture has shifted, but it also understands infrastructure’s vital role in these systems. Their definition also challenges ours: resiliency goes beyond survival and into viability, relying on elasticity rather than toughness. They embrace the entangled and overwhelming nature of design— they absorb the complicated forces that intersect their work. 

There are many ways for engineers to make this ideological shift. Several already have, and they exist in small pockets and far corners. The EMLab at the Weitzman School of Design, as an example, is an applied research lab that uniquely harnesses sensing, simulation and modeling in contemporary landscape architecture practice, collaborating with academic and private-sector partners. Others include Biohabitats, USACE’s Engineering with Nature® Program, the Climate and Community Institute, Tulane University’s Landscape Architecture and Engineering dual-degree, and even individuals in their own work. These groups exist in small circles in far corners, but are working at vast scales and densities. Some of these call themselves nature-based engineers, humanitarian engineers, resiliency engineers, or even technical landscape architects. We like to call them Landscape Engineers for in each case, landscape is a logic— shaped by natural and anthropogenic forces, operating at various scales and densities, and anything but static. The hybrid name reminds us that we do not need a new discipline for a climate-responsive future; we have all of the solutions, technology, and ideas we need; we just need to realign them. In departure from its sub-disciplinary counterparts, Landscape Engineers do not only work alongside design. We instead cannot function without it.

Landscape Engineers—the individuals, the work, this platform—is inherently multi-faceted. We have passions for design discourse but foremost we, too, are Landscape Engineers. We do not have one totalizing vision for how this framework should emerge. Instead, we are interested in celebrating all of the ongoing efforts that work quite well, interrogating the path-dependent systems that are still common practice, and unearthing the feedback loop between the two.

These tensions stretch across polar ends of a regenerative transition; a regenerative future is not forthcoming. In fact, we believe it is already here, just unevenly distributed.