Rod Barnett “Nonlinear Encounters: Emergence in Landscape Architecture”

As emergence theory is invoked and operationalized in a wide range of projects and studios, cities are becoming adaptive in ways they never were before. But the concepts mobilized by systems thinking require us to reexamine the very nature of our human encounter with the world, whose complexities are not often considered in landscape architecture. With the aid of key concepts of emergence such as difference, disturbance, and assemblage, this lecture will attempt to situate designers within the systems they intervene in while acknowledging that the systems are within them too. The Olmsted Lecture is an annual honorific lecture in landscape architecture.

by TheHarvardGSD