Constructed Ecologies Critical Reflections on Ecology with Design

Today, designers areshifting the practice of landscape architecture towards the need for a more complex understanding of ecological science. Constructed Ecologies presents ecology as critical theory for design, and provides major ideas for design that are supported with solid and imaginative science. In the questioning narrative of Constructed Ecologies, the author discards many old and tired theories in landscape architecture. With detailed documentation, she casts off the savannah theory, critiques the search for universals, reveals the needed role of designers in large-scale agriculture, abandons the overlay technique of McHarg, and introduces the ecological and urban health urgency of public night lighting. Margaret Grose presents wide-ranging new approaches and shows the importance of learning from science for design, of going beyond assumptions, of working in multiple rather than single issues, of disrupting linear design thinking, and of dealing with data. This book is written with a clear voice by an ecologist and landscape architect who has led design students into loving ecological science for the support it gives design.

Part I: A Background to Design, 1. The Environment is Not a Human Construct, 2. Global Differences, Not Universals, 3. Shifting Adaptabilities, Not Static Concepts, Part II: Thinking about Design, 4. Multiple, Not Solo Voices, 5. Inquiries, Not Assumptions, 6. Thinking Backwards, Not as a Forward and Linear Narrative

Margaret Grose teaches landscape architecture in the Melbourne School of Design, within the University of Melbourne, Australia. Rarely for a trained landscape architect, she also has a long earlier history as an agricultural scientist and ecologist, working in Western Australia as well as in Oxford and Cambridge in the UK, where she did experimental and theoretical research in mathematical biology. She has published more than forty-five journal articles and book chapters across biological science and design, and is an Associate Editor of Oxford’s Journal of Urban Ecology.