Interview: Richard Weller

Professor Richard Weller is the Martin and Margy Meyerson Chair of Urbanism, Professor and Chair of Landscape Architecture at the University of Pennsylvania (Penn). He is also Adjunct Professor at the University of Western Australia and former Director of the Australian Urban Design Research Centre (AUDRC). His multiple award winning consultancy and academic career include international design competition awards, and the Australian National Teaching Award (2012). Professor Weller has published four books, over 80 single-authored papers and is Creative Director of interdisciplinary journal of landscape architecture LA+. His research projects have involved scenario planning for cities, megaregions and nations.

Would landscape architecture benefit from more intellectual rigor? If so, why, and what would this provide?
 
You know, the automatic response is to say yes and the apparent lack of philosophical, scientific, creative and critical rigor in the field is often commented on. But actually, intellectual rigor can also be its own worst enemy if it is overly academic or drifts into sophistry. I don’t buy the line that landscape architecture lacks rigor because it has no theoretical canon or that old ruse; the scientific method.

The question really, is does the ecological crisis require intellectual rigor and would intellectual rigor make landscape architecture more powerful as a discipline and a profession? Maybe not. That said, we certainly need enough intelligence to keep both paradisiacal romanticism and utopian fascism at bay. We also need enough intelligence to see through our own rhetoric and be critical of the profession’s propensity for self-congratulation and hypocrisy.

Rather than intellectual rigor per se I think we just need more critical and creative designers.

What new ways can landscape architects and environmental designers pursue to solicit work and help to realize their visions?
 
Firstly you need to have a vision. The problem for landscape architects has been that they tend to think that by just saying ‘stewardship’ they are automatically visionaries, but then they go to work and do storm-water swales for sprawl or put some more parsley on the pig.
 
So the vision thing is the first matter. What is it? How does it work? To whom and what does it apply? Why is it visionary? Visions aren’t easy.
 
Assuming the vision survives for a while as an idea then it has to be represented in a compelling manner. Then you just need to push it out there—to the media, to the authorities, to the academy, to the bureaucrats, to whoever is part of the puzzle. The Darwinian world of culture will sort out pretty quickly whether it lives or dies. Australia can be tough like this—it tends to kill ideas before they even take their first breath.
 
How can we reach a larger audience, beyond the design industry and those already literate in what we can do?
 
How does anyone in the 21st century get an audience? You can ask for institutional support but I’m a believer in individuals just making things happen.

Should major issues (climate change, food security, biodiversity loss) occupy a primary focus of what we do? How can we increasingly realize and implement these projects as beyond conceptual and student work? What type of clients do we need?
 
Yes and no. We are now a profession that dominates the design and delivery of the public realm in urban environments but we can’t just keep turning first world cities into pop-up playgrounds and outdoor lounges. You don't really need a profession for that.

As the world urbanizes it is important that we design good public space and that we become increasingly concerned and expert in regard to urban ecological performance. But we also need to scale up and reclaim what used to be called landscape planning. We need a deeper structural presence in suburbia both in regard to retrofitting the extant and planning the new. Beyond that the peri-urban is a vast unrealized resource for cities but remains a virtual void in terms of design thinking. Then we need to work at a catchment scale, at a food bowl scale and at a scale commensurate with biodiversity migrations and climate change with a long-term view.
 
How to move this beyond conceptual or student work is a good question. If you superimpose a map of where all the landscape architecture schools are with a map of landscapes most in crisis they are two different worlds. I am keenly aware that later in the 21st century scholars and students will look back on us now the way we look upon people who were designing beaux-arts gardens in the early 20th century—nice, but irrelevant. On the other hand there is a strong post-landscape urbanism movement that is chasing larger scale systemic and infrastructural issues but so far this has not resulted in anything real. It’s all posturing, but important nonetheless.
 
With that in mind my current research is about global biodiversity and about the peri-urban conditions of cities in the world’s biodiversity hotspots. It’s called the Atlas for the End of the World. I would call it a guide book of places we should go to work in. As to how we take action on the ground; we could learn a lot from the way in which the global conservation community has gone from a bunch of hippies in the 60s to a major corporate and political force today. Our clients should be Conservation International, The World Bank, the UN, governments, multinationals wanting to clean up their act, even the military.

To what extent should landscape architects accept current, problematic paradigms (such as population and economic growth) versus challenge these doctrines based on ethical concerns and principles? Is there a place for an activist or provocative approach?
 
Population growth and economic growth are facts and we must relate everything to an expected global peak of circa 10 billion people, many of them poor, many of them in vulnerable environmental circumstances. Of course there is a role for the activist and provocateur but only if they devote their life to it and have skin in the game. I don't think the righteous will save the world, the smart will. We need creative landscape architects muscling into territories of conflict, not sitting around in the salons of New York, Paris and London.

Institutional capacity is also an issue. We need at least one good design school in each of the world’s 35 biodiversity hotspots (there are almost none) and the world's existing schools should be running studios on global flashpoints where resource depletion will trigger conflict. We should be all over these places. I realize this is easier said than done but at Penn, we are trying.
 
I’m convinced that if you airlifted a smart landscape architect into a complex, fraught territory their methods and ways of working would be enormously valuable. IFLA should turn its attention to some practical capacity building program along these lines. You know we all feel distressed, landscape architecture is so weak and pathetic in comparison to its founding McHargian vision.
 
You have a course that explores different cultures ideas of nature. What is your idea of nature?
 
The course begins by asking students “what is nature”? Fifteen years ago I would still receive the birds and bees answer, that is; ‘nature as nice, nature as victim and nature as other’, but now most students realize it’s what we make it. My answer: It is us, we are it. Cities are nature.

But no one ever gets the right answer, which is: It’s a word, a very dangerous word.
 
What key qualities and skills do young landscape architects need to cultivate?
 
Anger is motivational. Ambition is a necessary curse. Criticality is central. Self-reflexivity is important. Hand-to-mind feedback through drawing and writing is crucial. Lateral thinking is very useful. Recognition of beauty is something. Take risks. The ability to creatively use and control technology instead of just learning the programs and producing the images is going to be very important. And yes, try to get along with the hobbits in the shire, but know when to get out of there.