Design with Nature by Ian McHarg

Commented by Francesco Domenico Moccia

Introduction
Design with nature was published 50 years ago and will be celebrated by the University of Pennsyl-
vania McHarg Center. Penn Department of Landscape Architecture is honoring one of his most fa-
mous head and promising that his lesson may steal lead a new wave of sustainable planning and also
a movement for ecological purposes. Meeting around such mythic figure the best thinking and pro-
fession of our time will not reaffirm any more the pivot rule of the ivy league University, but also to
foster some central principle still projected to a future envisaged half a century ago but no more
achieved. The choice of supporting ideas and proposals clearly opposed to the majority trend in the
United States and his Presidency (already an alumni of the Penn Warton School) is shown as a sharp
positioning in the political arena in addition to academic ambitions.
In this contribution, at distance, to that celebrations, as a post-doc researcher to the close Department
of Planning, I will try to select what seems to me the most promising ideas still able to stimulate and
address the work of landscape, regional and urban planners.
I will start recalling few information of the McHarg biography that may explain why his commitment
to environmental issues was so challenging and may be still fertile. Then I will outline some features
of the planning culture of the time the book was written having special attention to the closer col-
leagues and theories growing in the Philadelphia melting pot. I find also of great interest to point to
the way the book was born not only as the output of the complex character of its author, but as a
measure of the deep construction of proposals whose aim was to face new and hard problems in a
fresh vision and practical efficiency.
Many critics, better that I can do now, forwarded many and sometime contrasting appraisal of the
values of this book together to the whole McHarg production. Some stated that in Design with Nature
is condensed all McHarg had to say, or at least the best he could. That is why, discussion over his
contribution to landscape design could be concentrate there to assess faults and merits.
My effort is more oriented by the interest of a reflexive practitioner, always in search of effective
tools for practice. In the list many things may be added: new perspective to look at complex word
phenomena and be able to understand them; how to take advantage of the knowledge coming from
science and technology and use it to human purpose; why deep beliefs spread in our culture and lead
our actions, belonging to decision processes; how the knowledge bag of planners benefitted of his
teaching, and sill do.

Biographical premises.
Ian L. McHarg was born in 1920 in Scotland. In his Autobiography (1996) he explains why since his
childhood he fell in love with landscape. Living in a suburb of Clydebank near Glasgow he did not
had the opportunity to experience the urbanity of cities like gothic and neoclassical Edinburgh, but
only a smoky and ugly industrial space at his adolescent eyes; on the contrary he explored the mag-
nificent countryside in the most intense and joyful times of freedom from study and others obliga-
tions. Such passion addressed his education to landscape architecture whose competence sited him in
the Corps of Engineers of the British Army where he served during the Second World War first in
the Africa campaign and then he landed in Italy crossing almost the whole country from Apulia to
Cassino and farther (McHarg 1966).
One more mark over is character should have been what he recalls as a father inclination toward the
function of a minister of the Presbyterian Church, though he preferred to marry and to perform many
businesses in the economic hardship of the Scottish crisis before the Word War. A mystic familiar
atmosphere fueled the vigor of his deep greed and the warm of his speeches in a time where fighting
for environment was a pioneering effort.
After the war he studied at Harvard, having as a mentor Lewis Mumford, with the intent to rebuilt his
war-ravaged home land working on housing and new town in Scotland. From this effort, just
undertaken after his graduation and return at home was diverted by Dean G. Holmes Perkins who
enticed him to build a new graduate program in landscape architecture at the University of Pennsyl-
vania in the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning established in 1924. For
many years both the academic department and the firm Wallace, McHarg, Roberts and Todd engaged
in action research, advancing in both disciplines and professions.
Design with nature advances a new theory for design and a new mandate for public policy while
presents insightful case studies.
In addition to academic research and teaching in close linkage with his professional practice, McHarg
was also a very popular figure. In twenty-six Sunday, CBS television broadcasted the program The
House We Live In where he interviews leading theologians and scientists to discuss man and envi-
ronment relationship and to give a sense to the place of mankind on the hearth. The acquired popu-
larity gained many important friendships as the first lady Lady Bird Johnson – founder of the Society
for a More Beautiful National Capital in behalf of the city and region of Washington DC - , Steward Udall
– the Secretary of Interiors promotor of an environmental policy whose outcome was the establish-
ment of many Nation Parks and Laws for the protection of nature -, and Laurence Rochfeller – the
owner of the environmentally focused hotel chain.

How the book was born

His excellent reputation gained with the prestigious academic career in one of the most important
USA Universities, his forerunners ideas on an emergent policy challenge, the wisdom of the proposals
he carried on and the practical demonstrations of the feasibility of agreed on solutions, all scientific
and professional attitudes joined to a wide popularity given by TV broadcast. All these put McHarg
in the forefront of a policy change in the environmental issue and let him to serve in very important
panels and commission as the White House Commission on Conservation and Natural Beauty. In
1965, May 24-25, the Commission held a Conference in Washington opened by a President Johnson
message, demonstrating McHarg leading role.
In PENN he started a course named “Man and Nature” in 1959 and went on in the ’60s and ‘70s as
one of the most popular and crowded. Because that University praise herself of brilliant lecturer there
is a habit among the students to follow whom they feel of more interest and attraction independently
of their program. And the McHarg class was awarded of one of the most successful. Again, the reason
why we recall it is for his syncretism in mixing academy with outside word, more discipline and skills
together. The format of Man and Environment was the some of the TV Broadcast and reflect itself in
the Design with Nature book too (Steiner 2006).
All the above reported events give to the book commented here a very special profile. It is not, as
generally people think to literature, the solitary effort of a thinker closed in his intimacy or reflecting
over his readings. Neither this book may be considered the simple account of a successful practice,
nor a research report. It is a demonstration of haw the focalization on one single issue may convey in
that point a multiplicity of interest. But it is to consider not only the way the book was written, but
also the effect it had on his time. Being a pioneering effort, it had a leading role in collecting around
McHarg and the University of Pennsylvania students angry to understand natural forces and the way
to design sustainable human spaces. This movement grow out of academic borders and had influential
effects over the beginning of an ecological policy of the USA federal government demonstrating how
knowledge may be a powerful fuel of progressive politics.

City and country

Man and nature is one of the main topics of Design with Nature. McHarg shows the opposition in
shining words that evoke images of his life in Scotland but can be understood by any people living
in modern industrial cities as they took shape in the after-war time. As it seems a period of time far
from our days, we can assimilate it to the critical accounts of modern urbanism on problems it was
obliged to face. Pollution, crowding, lack of hygiene, and all the worst living conditions of slums
tenements for workers in Europe and America generated with the industrial development in cities, is
pointed out from the Engels inquire on through philanthropist movement until city planner at the
beginning of the XX century.
Modernist answer to the problem was to escape from the crowded city and refuge in the country. Both
Olmsted’s garden city that German socialist democrat siedlungen propose to colonize countiside.as
well as McHarg declare they do not choose for one of the two opponents, but try to mix them together
to obtain the best from each of them. In the famous circle drawing Olmstead try to visualize the
joining effect of these conflicting settings in his proposal of housing in the rural atmosphere able to
structure a new metropolis. In this narrative, the discourse speaks of houses only; of the land cost and
real estate investment. Budget are studied to let hoses to be affordable for workers and responding to
their family needs. Some concern is given to assure communication with working placed while trying
to strengthen the autonomy of a self-administrating community. Of this social and special project, the
environment is only a background, surely healthier that the former escaped. The colonization propose
is focused on the social innovation with its economic and technical nuances, CIAM congresses com-
mitted to the modernizing endeavor architectural thinking making one more step on the anthropocen-
tric account of city-country swinging.
At the side of the mainstream city planning culture, in British seminal regional studies a different root
may be found, whose contribution is essential for the McHarg combination of the dyad so central to
modern planning. In contrast with the British, the Scottish school rooting in Patrick Geddes legacy
grants more relevance to the natural side of the balance. As a biologist, his comprehension of the
industrial conurbations has to take in account geographical, geological, botanic and hydrological fac-
tors. According to his natural sciences approach, also conurbations should be considered living or-
ganism integrated in the general flux of natural processes. At the wider scale, city and region; the
former expression of human endeavor, the latter domain of natural forces, are more balanced. At list,
nature can teach a better method to understand urban dynamics commanding environmental condi-
tions to its development.
In modern urbanism to the machinist rash ideas of the functionally efficient metropolis was opposed
an organic bias where Geddes sensibilities survived and developed. One of the champions of organic
urbanism was Lewis Munford, a teacher of McHarg and the author of introduction chapter of Design
with Nature. While Mumford was attracted more by the social organization of metropolis, his image
of cities was close to a metaphor of a living organism where neighborhood may be similar to the cells
od a body of the size proportional to the performing functions and, primary, that of nurturing the
social nexus of the local community.
My search of McHarg roots is does not reduce the novelty of his seminal work. The stream of thinking
I am connecting him is more an orientation of feelings and orientation of perspective. Over that en-
ergy and attention there were to elaborate theory and method, to show haw beneficial could be to the
society of his time and to move into practice.

The book geo-historic setting

Before moving to the utility of McHarg in our time, let me consider the years when to book was
written. In 1969 United Sates were in the post-war renaissance, the name adopted by many cities in
the process of renewal, slum clearance, CBD creation. While central cities entered in the service era,
the development of global corporations, and the communication network extension, a pool of forces
concentrating in key metropolis wealth and command; suburbanization was spreading housing in far
neighborhoods under the exuberance of inexpensive fossil fuel powered culture. War victory give
people trust they could dominate the world and the nature, supported by the unprecedent technology
advances a scientific discovery. All problems should be solved, even the wickedest as poverty.
Criticism to uncontrolled growth will come only some decade after and could not be understood at
the time when economic and environmental inconvenienced were not evident. The whole picture
gives the measure of the difficulty of advancing ecological sensitivity. As the effect of the develop-
ment boom over displaced minorities erupted in social protests, city planning found some champions
that reconsidered the role of the discipline and found it tom much aligned with government, capitalism
interests. Advocacy planning was born in some Myerson Building where McHarg had his depart-
mental offices (Davidoff 1965).
In this impetus of deep planning reform McHarg had to elaborate over a long, and well-established
American tradition: Park movement. In the laissez fare city, that movement chaptalized public inter-
vention and was the most important urban public policy. Sometime urban planning was identified
with park design and give to landscape the status of urban planning. We can say more. Landscape
was the only practical American urbanist. Due to this historic legacy, no surprise if again in the
higher-ranking universities and the most successful landscape architect propose a seminal discipline
named landscape urbanism.
In American urban history parks are a central component of cities when they both offer the oppor-
tunity of civic representation of government symbols in State Capitols, municipal institutions centers
or structure, as connecting linkages the neighborhoods spread in the suburbs. In the former role, cel-
ebration of the nation values evokes the virtues of the original continental wilderness celebrated by
poets, father of the nation, as Thoreau (1906) and Emerson (1836), implanted in the vice generating
conflicting congestion of profit and success research. In the latter, parks were asked to function as
integrating machines of immigration waves through sport exercise where competing needs group
cooperation while educating bodies to toil and stress. Prime public space should be considered also a
health environment thanks to the nature benefits profiting of these resources to shape citizens.
Also, if based over that tradition, whose main contents he sharply confirmed, McHarg contribution
was innovative. His strategic move was from the design of pieces of nature or protection of some
tract of land inside the industrial metropolis – a task so well performed by excellent professional of
the stature of both Olmsted – to the territorial or regional scale. He inverted the elements considered
and made the natural setting of the urbanization spread the forefront of design instead of the back-
ground.

A multiple track narrative.

Design with Nature develop many parallel tracks quite independent at the first glance, but metaphor-
ically or causally related each other’s, during the development of the story. McHarg share with some
other famous colleague of his University a concern of deep thinking. Also, if he is developing a
technical proposal for regional planning he take care to explore fundamental values of cultures with
the attempt to let his message to be accepted by the wider audience. This means to involve culture
and As Luis Kahn in architecture, Edmund Bacon in Urban Planning, all teaching in PENN in the
some time, McHarg is willingly to made changes in the way people thig to the world, and, as a con-
sequence he has to discuss deep values. This approach went on with the following teaching od Sey-
mour Mandelbaum.
There is some discussion if McHarg was or not a scientist, opposing his main competence in planning.
Notwithstanding, epistemic discussion is a reference anchor to find a path among scientific paradigm
explaining natural process dynamics. So, he faces different naturalist approach (competitive vs. col-
laborative evolution of leaving species) or criticize the second principle of thermodynamics, opposing
to entropy the more positive negentropy preferring the more optimistic solution to many of discussed
dilemmas.
One of the thickest tracks is ecology, where he takes advantage of the Odum’s work and feed his
progressivism with the regenerative effects of metabolic processes. Focusing on such natural devices
he nurtures the hope that humans may address nature to better future if design comprehends directions
of dynamics and leads, with proper action toward the better choices. In the ecologic field an original
McHarg contribution is regional analysis. In his studies of areas close to Philadelphia, New Jersey,
Baltimore, and Washington (what Gottman will identify as the West Coast Megalopolis) he perfected
progressively a tassology of land mosaics to capture natural and cultural values. In subsequent times
this effort proved to be very fertile and many more studies developed the tool and consolidated the
theory framework (Forman 1995).
Though the book collects some case study whose selection comes from opportunities of jobs or ap-
pointment, they cover the main landscapes: river shores in New Jersey, the plain of Philadelphia, river
basin in the study on Washington; large Delta areas as in New York, hilly landscape in the Baltimore
region.
Design methodology became known as overlay mapping and is the most used in landscape planning.
It is a collection of values and hazards on different thematic maps. Their overlaying shows areas of
risk and areas of to preserve for their supply of ecosystem services (to use a definition not yet existing
at the book time, but categorize exactly what McHarg wanted to preserve). The criterion of interven-
tion should be suitability. Other world, neither of the identified issue should be, for opposite reasons,
hurt. The best location of development should be chosen in the empty areas of the overlaid maps.
This methodology of data collection, data bank, thematic mapping and layers moved to GIS technol-
ogy and become the widespread tool every planner use today (Steiner 2000).
One more effect of that methodology was impact assessment and strategic environmental assessment
because Design with nature is not only a system to decide locations, but, building a knowledge of
natural processes, define also development as a process that interact with the natural one of the sites
addressing their trajectories.
The last track of the book is a group of real plans made for real sites and aimed to regulate the use of
land and ad steer development. Here an original contribution to regional and landscape planning
should be registered. After a period when Landscape Architecture was devoted to design of parks and
open spaces, the McHarg holistic approach turn to comprehensive planning at regional scale, without
losing attention to detailed site solutions especially in most sensible environmental nodes. However,
the general picture is not only the framework for the landscaping of river banks or shorelines, nor for
deciding institutions of new parks over natural areas to protect. It tries to give order to the sprawling
metropolis before criticism against the sprawl had happened.
The strength of McHarg proposals are evaluated by Heavers (2019) in the Washington waterfront.
He collaborated on two important planning reports in the mid- 1960s: the Potomac Report and To-
ward a Comprehensive Landscape Plan for Washington DC. Both studies were the basis for several
chapters of Design with Nature. Heavers demonstrate that in the different plans issued after the book,
suggestions presented in it are left alive and steered ecological policy and design. The author added
some issues were not considered by McHarg, and they fall in the social policy field.

Landscape and planning

Design with nature was born in years of booming capitalism. The nation after the triumph of the
second world war, when, defeating Nazi empire ambition and empowering his leadership, in negoti-
ation with Soviet Union over the planet, was deeply restructuring his economic regime and, subse-
quently, the whole urban system. Urban redevelopment started under the flagship of a social enter-
prise with at the top the blighted neighbor cleaning. What was initiated as a housing betterment public
program, implemented in a public private partnership, turned to be the tool international companies
could install in the city cores their top management offices. Despite objectives as poverty reduction
and social integration were main efforts of federal government and inspired critical revisions of for-
mer programs failures, suggesting new proposals and experimentations, American cities seem be
shaped more by economic forces of the real estate market. Expansion of America companies over
larger and larger markets, supported by communication technologies development, engineered their
organization in more centralized management and permitted fusions to advantage of scale economies.
Such processes are at the root of Central Business Districts dissemination in any large America city.
Housing demand came from blue and white collars (while the former where declining, the latter sup-
plemented them) families in the time of baby boom with a majority preference for cottages and single
home in auto connected suburbs. Only the ‘90s a reurbanization process will be fueled by single high
technology or finance workers.
At the face of the so stylistically sketched process of city change critical thinking departed in two
divergent directions both represented in the University of Pennsylvania with the main national
representative. The planning stream, led by Davidoff, attacked the social side of urban policy stress-
ing failures of the solution of the housing blight. Accepting the democratic arena where social and
economic parties negotiated for their interests, claimed for equity. While other authors developed
other critical approaches inspired by Marxism analysis, Frankfurt School of critical rationalism, …
of social conversation, planning theory domain has been completely inscribed inside a sort of critic
of social impact of urban development.
On the other side, one more critical thinking was aware of the nature degradation determined by
infrastructure and general urban development of city sprawl. This second stream may be considered
lead by McHarg and grounded in the Landscape Department. While the other criticism was involved
in values and rights, the second one was aware of all the thing combine in the environment. They are
physical things, albeit non-urban, but part of the nature as rivers, beaches woods, hills, trees. His
claim is developed from a nature preservation to a promise of a new type of future city where land-
scape is its ordering and public space system. In fact, a long tradition gives to landscape architect the
task to design the main public space of America cities: parks and parks chain.
As a result, separateness of the afore mentioned thinking streams generated a dead treatment of urban
problems whose eco we can perceive easily when we hear about claims of ecological policy able to
not generate social injustice. On the contrary support of social integration does not propose a vision
of public space and a physical structure of a just city. According to this perspective, the best way of
recovering McHarg lesson is also to understand his limits and try to overcome the dual development
of urban critical knowledge, avoiding that it become a conflict.

Celebrations
While I am writing this short presentation, in June 21-22 the 50th anniversary of landmark McHarg
book will be celebrated by a two-day conference and an exhibition of landscape projects by the De-
partment of the University of Pennsylvania he worked in. In October, many of the lectured and design
will be conveyed in the book Design with Nature now, edited by Frederick Steiner, Richard Weller,
Karen M’Closkey, and Billy Fleming, published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy in association
with the University of Pennsylvania Stuart Weitzman School of Design and the McHarg Center. May
be that the focus of McHarg alumni and students will be about Design with Nature legacy.
Bibliographical references
Steiner Frederick R. 2000, The living landscape. An ecologic approach to landscape, New York,
McGraw Hills Companies,
Steiner Frederick R. (editor) 2006, The essential Ian McHarg Writings on Design and Nature, Wash-
ington Island Press
McHarg Ian L., 1996, A Quest for Life. An Autobiography. New York, John Wiley & Sons
Geddes Patrick 1915, Cities in Evolution. An introduction to the town planning movement and the
study of civics, London, Williams & Norgate
Forman Richard T. T. 1995, Land Mosaics. The ecology of landscape and regions, Cambridge Uni-
versity Press
Heavers Nathan 2019, “Ian McHarg enduring influence on the ecological planning and design of
Washington’s waterfront”, Socio-Ecological Practice Research, https://doi.org/10.1007/s42532-
019-00015-5
Odum Eugene P., 1983, Basic Ecology, CBS College Publishing (1988, Padova, Piccin)
Davidof Paul 1965, “Advocacy and pluralism in planning”, Journal of the America Institute of Plan-
ners, v. 31, n. 4, p. 331-338
Dal Co Francesco 1973, “Dai parchi alla regione. L’ideologia progressista e la riforma della città
Americana”, Ciucci, Dal Co, Manieri Elia, Tafuri (eds.), La città Americana dalla guerra civile al
“New Deal”, Bari, Laterza, p. 149-314
Cranz, Galen, 1989, The Politics of Park Design. A History of Urban Park in America, Cambridge,
Mass., MIT Press
Thoreau H. D. 1906, Journal, II, Boston, Houghton, p. 341-342
Emerson R. W. 1836, Nature, Boston, James Munroe and Company, p. 5f