Landscape architecture has seen a paradigm shift in the last two decades, requiring designers to respond to the dynamic and temporal qualities of landscape both through formal solutions and through methods of distanced authorship. This response upholds the long held view that landscape embraces an ephemeral medium constructed and maintained through generations. Landscape — a dynamic and temporal medium — is expressed through careful manipulation of vegetated, hydrological, and stratigraphic systems. The coupling of this shift and the increased accessibility of responsive technologies presents a new approach for challenging static design solutions. A technological ability to sense and respond to environmental phenomena invites new ways to understand, interpret, experience, and interact with the landscape.

Amongst rapid technological development and an expanded view of humanity and the environment occurs a tenuous state that requires an important shift in our conceptualization of responsive technologies. The landscapes that we imagine have the capacity to not only embed themselves within their context but can evolve with a life of their own, a synthesis between the biological, mechanical, and computational. There are several aspects that must be addressed in this regard, particularly in reference to our relationship to the design of systems that focus predominantly on control. How might we leverage the potential of data-gathering, analysis and visualization tools to improve a community’s sense of the challenges, risks and opportunities facing it, and support it in the aim of autonomous self- governance? How might we use networked technologies to further the prerogatives so notably absent from the smart-city paradigm, particularly those having to do with solidarity, mutuality and collective action?

Bradley Cantrell is a landscape architect and scholar whose work focuses on the role of computation and media in environmental and ecological design. Professor Cantrell received his BSLA from the University of Kentucky and his MLA from the Harvard Graduate School of Design. He has held academic appointments at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, The Rhode Island School of Design, and the Louisiana State University Robert Reich School of Landscape Architecture where he led the school as graduate coordinator and director. His work in Louisiana over the past decade points to a series of methodologies that develop modes of modeling, simulation, and embedded computation that express and engage the complexity of overlapping physical, cultural, and economic systems. Cantrell’s work has been presented and published in a range of peer reviewed venues internationally including ACADIA, CELA, EDRA, ASAH, and ARCC.

Presented in collaboration with the Knowledge Media Design Institute at U of T’s Faculty of Information.