“An Ecological Method for

Landscape Architecture”
from Landscape Architecture Magazine (1967)

Ian McHarg

Editors’ Introduction

Conservation of natural areas has been a public concern since the turn of the twentieth century. In the United
States, early efforts focused on the preservation of natural areas of great beauty, such as Yosemite Valley
and Yellowstone, turning them into National Parks. Larger environmental concerns leapt to the forefront of
public consciousness in the early 1960s spurred by a host of environmental ills, including air pollution, water
pollution, pesticide poisoning, and dwindling energy sources. Books such as Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring
(New York: Fawcett Crest, 1962) and Barry Commoner’s The Closing Circle (New York: Knopf, 1971) elo-
quently called attention to these matters. Members of the design professions responded by shifting their atten­
tion to environmental issues. Architects explored passive solar and energy efficient building designs, urban
planners became environmental advocates and began focusing on regional-scale environmental planning,
landscape architects dug deeper into the ecological issues of landscape design, and urban designers began
exploring the dimensions of environmental perception. In practice, designers and the communities they worked
for grappled with how to address environmental concerns in projects of large and small scale. The tool they
turned to was the new “ecological method” articulated by landscape architect Ian McHarg (1920–2001) in
his seminal book Design with Nature (Garden City, NY: Natural History Press, 1969), which became an instant
classic. McHarg critiques the effects of urban sprawl and advocates plan-making based on natural processes.
He calls for landscape architects to act within design processes as “interpreters” of the land and its resources
by engaging in comprehensive analysis of the study area’s geology, climate, slope, exposure, water regimens,
soils, plants, animals, and land use. Such analysis, he argues, reveals appropriate sites for human land-using
activities of various kinds as well as areas of particular environmental sensitivity or value that should be left
untouched. Key to McHarg’s method is the use of layered transparency mapping which creates a graphic
matrix that identifies compatibilities and incompatibilities between various human uses and between those
uses and the aggregated ecological contexts. Going beyond matters of functionality, McHarg argues that
design inspiration should derive from the perception of natural form that comes from this analysis.
McHarg’s ecological method was widely adopted in landscape architecture and regional planning practice,
and remains standard practice today. Today, the method is generally applied using spatial mapping techniques
conducted using Geographic Information Systems (GIS) technology. This new technology has the advantage
of being able to link spatial maps with comprehensive databases covering not only ecological factors but also
any number of physical, social, and economic factors.
In retrospect, McHarg can be criticized for being overly optimistic that ecological science could shape
urban development in an ecologically responsible direction in the face of powerful social and economic forces
promoting unsustainable development. As well, his emphasis on regional-scale ecological analysis and land
use decision-making is at odds with how land use planning decisions are actually made in most places in
America because few places have effective regional governance. Nonetheless, McHarg’s exhortation that

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 520 I an M c H arg

landscape architects and urban planners should take addressing environmental issues as a central charge
still resonates across the design fields. His ecological method laid the groundwork for how designers and
planners might begin the hard work of understanding complex environmental systems and learning to design
from an ecological perspective.
The paper “An Ecological Method for Landscape Architecture” from Landscape Architecture Magazine
(1967) is two years older than Design with Nature, but it provides a good summary of McHarg’s seminal
analytical method because it focuses on the actual processes illustrated in the more famous book.
Growing up in a small town near Glasgow, Scotland, McHarg was exposed to both the harshness of an
industrial city and the beauty of natural countryside, and he attributed his lifelong concern with nature and
development to that experience. After earning master’s degrees in landscape architecture and city planning
from Harvard, in 1954 he founded the department of landscape architecture at the University of Pennsylvania
and taught there as a professor for many years, creating one of the most interdisciplinary programs in the
United States. He was a founding member of the landscape architecture firm Wallace, McHarg, Roberts &
Todd, through which he worked on many professional projects and garnered numerous awards. He was a
Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) and the recipient of many honors including
the ASLA Medal and the LaGasse Medal.
Design with Nature has been reprinted several times, most recently by John Wiley (1992). McHarg’s two
other books are To Heal the Earth: Selected Writings of Ian L. McHarg (Washington, DC: Island Press,
1998), co-edited with Frederick R. Steiner, and A Quest for Life: An Autobiography (New York: John Wiley,
1996). A book that stands alongside McHarg’s Design with Nature in terms of influencing designers’ early
awareness of urban ecology issues is Anne Whiston Spirn’s The Granite Garden (New York: Basic Books,
1984), which articulates the natural contexts and ecological processes to be found in cities. At the time of
its publication, this book was radical in its insistence that cities are a part of nature and that nature is to be
found everywhere within them. It continues to inspire today’s designers with its simple ideas for how to design
urban places in concert with natural systems rather than in opposition to them.
Classic works that anticipated the later twentieth-century concern with ecological systems are Patrick
Geddes, Cities in Evolution (London: Williams & Norgate, 1915) and Benton MacKaye’s The New Explor­
ation: A Philosophy of Regional Planning (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1928). A classic work that set the
stage for the ecological consciousness that began in the 1960s is Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac
(1949), reprinted in many later editions including most recently by Oxford University Press (2001).
Recent works on ecological planning and design abound. A recently reprinted classic text on ecological
design principles is Sim Van der Ryn and Stuart Cowan’s Ecological Design (Washington, DC: Island Press,
2007), which encourages design across spatial scales and collaboration across design professions in the
pursuit of low environmental impact development. More recent works include Robert G. Bailey’s Ecoregion-Based
Design for Sustainability (New York: Springer, 2002); Forster Ndubisi’s Ecological Planning: A Historical and
Comparative Synthesis (Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002); and Wenche E. Dramstad et al.’s
Landscape Ecology Principles in Landscape Architecture and Landuse Planning (Washington, DC: Island
Press, 1996). Edited anthologies of essays include Issues and Perspectives in Landscape Ecology (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2005), edited by John A. Wiens and Michael R. Moss, and Ecological Design
and Planning (New York: John Wiley, 1997), edited by George F. Thompson and Frederick R. Steiner.
Randy Hester’s Design for Ecological Democracy (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2006) is a powerful book
that outlines principles for urban design that allow communities to both connect with the natural environment
and enhance a sense of community.
Recent architecturally oriented books that address ecological drivers for design include Douglas Farr’s
Sustainable Urbanism: Urban Design with Nature (Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley, 2008) and Ken Yeang’s Design­
ing with Nature: The Ecological Basis for Architectural Design (New York: McGraw Hill, 1995).
Works that address GIS applications in ecological analysis include Carol A. Johnston’s Geographic Informa­
tion Systems in Ecology (Oxford: Blackwell Science, 2001) and Mohammed A. Kalkhan’s Spatial Statistics:
GeoSpatial Information Modeling and Thematic Mapping (Boca Raton, FL: CRC Press, 2011).

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 “ A n E cological M ethod for L andscape A rchitecture ”
In many cases a qualified statement is, if not the
most propitious, at least the most prudent. In this
case it would only be gratuitous. I believe that
ecology provides the single indispensible basis for
landscape architecture and regional planning. I
would state in addition that it has now, and will
increasingly have, a profound relevance for both
city planning and architecture.
Where the landscape architect commands eco­
logy he is the only bridge between the natural sci­
ences and the planning and design professions, the
proprietor of the most perceptive view of the
natural world which science or art has provided.
This can be at once his unique attribute, his pass­
port to relevance and productive social utility. With
the acquisition of this competence the sad image
of ornamental horticulture, handmaiden to archi­
tecture after the fact, the caprice and arbitrariness
of “clever” designs can be dismissed forever. In
short, ecology offers emancipation to landscape
architecture.
This is not the place for a scholarly article on
ecology. We are interested in it selfishly, as those
who can and must apply it. Our concern is for a
method which has the power to reveal nature as
process, containing intrinsic form.
Ecology is generally described as the study of
the interactions of organisms and environment
which includes other organisms. The particular in­
terests of landscape architecture are focussed only
upon a part of this great, synoptic concern. This
might better be defined as the study of physical
and biological processes, as dynamic and interact­
ing, responsive to laws, having limiting factors and
exhibiting certain opportunities and constraints,
employed in planning and design for human use.
At this juncture two possibilities present them­
selves. The first is to attempt to present a general
theory of ecology and the planning processes. This
is a venture which I long to undertake, but this is
not the time nor place to attempt it. The other
alternative is to present a method which has been
tested empirically at many scales from a continent,
a major region, a river basin, physiographic regions,
sub-regional areas and a metropolitan region town
to a single city. In every case, I submit, it has been
triumphantly revelatory.1
First, it is necessary to submit a proposition to
this effect: that the place, the plants, animals and
men upon it are only comprehensible in terms of
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521
physical and biological evolution. Written on the
place and upon its inhabitants lies mute all physical,
biological and cultural history awaiting to be
understood by those who can read it. It is thus
necessary to begin at the beginning if we are to
understand the place, the man, or his co-tenants
of this phenomenal universe. This is the prerequi­
sitie [sic] for intelligent intervention and adaptation.
So let us begin at the beginning. We start with
historical geology. The place, any place, can only
be understood through its physical evolution. What
history of mountain building and ancient seas, up­
lifting, folding, sinking, erosion and glaciation have
passed here and left their marks? These explain its
present form. Yet the effects of climate and later
of plants and animals have interacted upon geo­
logical processes and these too lie mute in the
record of the rocks. Both climate and geology can
be invoked to interpret physiography, the current
configuration of the place. Arctic differs from
tropics, desert from delta, the Himalayas from the
Gangetic Plain. The Appalachian Plateau differs
from the Ridge and Valley Province and all of these
from the Piedmont and the Coastal Plain. If one
now knows historical geology, climate and physio­ f
graphy then the water regimen becomes compre­ i
v
hensible – the pattern of rivers and aquifers, their e
physical properties and relative abundance, oscil­
lation between flood and drought. Rivers are young
or old, they vary by orders; their pattern and dis­
tribution, as for aquifers, is directly consequential
upon geology, climate and physiography.
Knowing the foregoing and the prior history of
plant evolution, we can now comprehend the nature
and pattern of soils. As plants are highly selective
to environmental factors, by identifying physio­
graphic, climatic zones and soils we can perceive
order and predictability in the distribution of con­
stituent plant communities. Indeed, the plant com­
munities are more perceptive to environmental
variables than we can be with available data, and
we can thus infer environmental factors from the
presence of plants. Animals are fundamentally
plant-related so that given the preceding informa­
tion, with the addition of the stage of succession
of the plant communities and their age, it is pos­
sible both to understand and to predict the species,
abundance or scarcity of wild animal populations.
If there are no acorns there will be no squirrels;
an old forest will have few deer; an early succession
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 522 I an M c H arg
can support many. Resources also exist where they
do for good and sufficient reasons – coal, iron,
limestone, productive soils, water in relative abun­
dance, transportation routes, fall lines and the ter­
mini of water transport. And so the land use map
becomes comprehensible when viewed through this
perspective.
The information so acquired is a gross ecolog­
ical inventory and contains the data bank for all
further investigations. The next task is the inter­
pretation of these data to analyze existing and
propose future human land use and management.
The first objective is the inventory of unique
or scarce phenomena, the technique for which
Philip Lewis2 is renowned. In this all sites of unique
scenic, geological, ecological or historical import­
ance are located. Enlarging this category we can
interpret the geological data to locate economic
minerals. Geology, climate and physiography will
locate dependable water resources. Physiography
will reveal slope and exposure which, with soil and
water, can be used to locate areas suitable for ag­
riculture by types; the foregoing, with the addition
of plant communities will reveal intrinsic suitabil­
ities for both forestry and recreation. The entire
body of data can be examined to reveal sites for
urbanization, industry, transportation routes, indeed
any human land-using activity. This interpretive
sequence would produce a body of analytical mater­
ial but the end product for a region would include
a map of unique sites, the location of economic
minerals, the location of water resources, a slope
and exposure map, a map of agricultural suitabil­
ities by types, a similar map for forestry, one each
for recreation and urbanization.
These maps of intrinsic suitability would indicate
highest and best uses for the entire study area. But
this is not enough. These are single uses ascribed
to discrete areas. In the forest there are likely to
be dominant or co-dominant trees and other sub­
ordinate species. We must seek to prescribe all
coexistent, compatible uses which may occupy each
area. To this end it is necessary to develop a matrix
in which all possible land uses are shown on each
coordinate. Each is then examined against all
others to determine the degree of compatibility or
incompatibility. As an example, a single area of
forest may be managed for forestry, either hard­
wood or pulp; it may be utilized for water manage­
ment objectives; it may fulfill an erosion control
9780415668071_P5_01.indd 522
function; it can be managed for wildlife and hunting,
recreation, and for villages and hamlets. Here we
have not land use in the normal sense but com­
munities of land uses. The end product would be
a map of present and prospective land uses, in
communities of compatibilities, with dominants,
co-dominants and subordinates derived from an
understanding of nature as process responsive to
laws, having limiting factors, constituting a value
system and exhibiting opportunities and constraints
to human use.
Now this is not a plan. It does not contain any
information of demand. This last is the province
of the regional scientist, the econometrician, the eco­
nomic planner. The work is thus divided between
the natural scientist, regional planner-landscape
architect who interprets the land and its resources,
and the economics-based planner who determines
demand, locational preferences, investment and
fiscal policies. If demand information is available,
then the formulation of a plan is possible, and the
demand components can be allocated for urban
growth, for the nature and form of the metropolis,
for the pattern of regional growth.
So what has our method revealed? First, it allows
us to understand nature as process insofar as the
natural sciences permit. Second, it reveals causal­
ity. The place is because. Next it permits us to
interpret natural processes as resources, to pre­
scribe and even to predict for prospective land uses,
not singly but in compatible communities. Finally,
given information on demand and investment, we
are enabled to produce a plan for a continent or a
few hundred acres based upon natural process. That
is not a small accomplishment.
You might well agree that this is a valuable and
perhaps even indispensible method for regional
planning but is it as valuable for landscape archi­
tecture? I say that any project, save a small garden
or the raddled heart of a city where nature has long
gone, which is undertaken without a full compre­
hension and employment of natural process as form-
giver is suspect at best and capriciously irrelevant
at worst. I submit that the ecological method is the
sine qua non for all landscape architecture.
Yet, I hear you say, those who doubt, that the
method may be extremely valuable for regional
rural problems, but can it enter the city and reveal
a comparable utility? Yes, indeed it can but in cross­
ing this threshold the method changes. When used
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 “ A n E cological M ethod for L andscape A rchitecture ”
to examine metropolitan growth the data remains
the same but the interpretation is focused upon the
overwhelming demand for urban land uses and it
is oriented to the prohibitions and permissiveness
exhibited by natural process to urbanization on
the one hand and the presence of locational and
resource factors which one would select for satis­
factory urban environments on the other. But
the litany remains the same: historical geology, cli­
mate, physiography, the water regimen, soils, plants,
animals and land use. This is the source from which
the interpretation is made although the grain
becomes finer.
Yet you say, the method has not entered the city
proper; you feel that it is still a device for protect­
ing natural process against the blind despoliation
of ignorance and Philistinism. But the method can
enter the city and we can proceed with our now
familiar body of information to examine the city
in an ecological way. We have explained that the place
was “because” and to explain “because,” all of phys­
ical and biological evolution was invoked. So too
with the city. But to explain “because” we invoke
not only natural evolution but cultural evolution as
well. To do this we make a distinction between the
“given” and the “made” forms. The former is the
natural landscape identity, the latter is the accumu­
lation of the adaptations to the given form which
constitute the present city. Rio is different from
New Orleans, Kansas from Lima, Amsterdam from
San Francisco, because. By employing the ecological
method we can discern the reason for the location
of the city, comprehend its natural form, discern
those elements of identity which are critical and
expressive both those of physiography and vegeta­
tion, and develop a program for the preservation and
enhancement of that identity. The method is equally
applicable when one confronts the made form. The
successive stages of urbanization are examined as
adaptations to the environment, some of which are
successful, some not. Some enter the inventory of
resources and contribute to the genius loci. As for
the given form, this method allows us to perceive
the elements of identity in a scale of values. One
can then prepare a comprehensive landscape plan
for a city and feed the elements of identity, natural
process and the palette for formal expression into
the comprehensive planning process.
You still demur. The method has not yet entered
into the putrid parts of the city. It needs rivers and
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523
palisades, hill and valleys, woodlands and parkland.
When will it confront slums and overcrowding,
congestion and pollution, anarchy and ugliness?
Indeed the method can enter into the very heart
of the city and by so doing may save us from the
melancholy criteria of economic determinism which
have proven so disappointing to the orthodoxy of
city planning or the alternative of unbridled “de­
sign” which haunts architecture. But here again we
must be selective as we return to the source in
ecology. We will find little that is applicable in en­
ergy system ecology, analysis of food pyramids,
relations defined in terms of predator–prey, com­
petition, or those other analytical devices so effica­
cious for plant and animal ecology. But we can well
turn to an ecological model which contains multi-
faceted criteria for measuring ecosystems and we
can select health as an encompassing criterion. The
model is my own and as such it is suspect for I am
not an ecologist, but each of the parts is the prod­
uct of a distinguished ecologist.3 Let us hope that
the assembly of the constituents does not diminish
their veracity, for they have compelling value.
The most obvious example is life and death. Life
is the evolution of a single egg into the complexity f
of the organism. Death is the retrogression of a i
v
complex organism into a few simple elements. If e
this model is true, it allows us to examine a city,
neighborhood, community institution, family, city
plan, architectural or landscape design in these terms.
This model suggests that any system moving to­
wards simplicity, uniformity, instability with a low
number of species and high entropy is retrogress­
ing; any system moving in that direction is moving
towards ill health.
Conversely, complexity, diversity, stability (steady
state), with a high number of species and low en­
tropy are indicators of health and systems moving
in this direction are evolving. As a simple applica­
tion let us map, in tones on transparencies, statistics
of all physical disease, all mental disease and all
social disease. If we also map income, age of popula­
tion, density, ethnicity and quality of the physical
environment we have on the one hand discerned
the environment of health, the environment of patho­
logy and we have accumulated the data which
allow interpretation of the social and physical en­
vironmental components of health and pathology.
Moreover, we have the other criteria of the model
which permit examination from different directions.
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 524 I an M c H arg
If this model is true and the method good, it may
be the greatest contribution of the ecological
method to diagnosis and prescription for the city.
But, you say, all this may be very fine but land­
scape architects are finally designers – when will
you speak to ecology and design? I will. Lou Kahn,
the most perceptive of men, foresaw the ecological
method even through these intractable, inert mater­
ials which he infuses with life when he spoke of
“existence will,” the will to be. The place is because.
It is and is in the process of becoming. This we
must be able to read, and ecology provides the
language. By being, the place or the creature has
form. Form and process are indivisible aspects of
a single phenomenon. The ecological method
allows one to understand form as an explicit point
in evolutionary process. Again, Lou Kahn has made
clear to us the distinction between form and design.
Cup is form and begins from the cupped hand.
Design is the creation of the cup, transmuted by
the artist, but never denying its formal origins. As
a profession, landscape architecture has exploited
a pliant earth, tractable and docile plants to make
much that is arbitrary, capricious and inconsequen­
tial. We could not see the cupped hand as giving
form to the cup, the earth and its processes as
giving form to our works. The ecological method
is then also the perception of form, an insight to
9780415668071_P5_01.indd 524
the given form, implication for the made form which
is to say design, and this, for landscape architects,
may be its greatest gift.
NOTES
1 Australia; Rhodesia; the United Kingdom; the
Gangetic Plain; the Potomac River Basin; Allegheny
Plateau; Ridge and Valley Province; Great Valley
Province; Piedmont; Coastal Plain; the Green
Spring and Worthington Valleys, Philadelphia
Standard Metropolitan Statistical Area; and the
City of Washington. [See “Plan for the Valleys
vs. Spectre of Uncontrolled Growth,” by Ian L.
McHarg and David A. Wallace, Landscape Architec­
ture, April, 1965. Ed.]
2 See “Quality Corridors for Wisconsin,” by Philip
H. Lewis Jr., Landscape Architecture, January,
1964.
3 “Simplicity, complexity; uniformity, diversity;
independence, interdependence; instability, sta­
bility,” thesis by Dr. Robert McArthur. “Stability,
instability,” thesis by Dr. Luna Leopold. “Low
and high number of species,” thesis by Dr. Ruth
Patrick. “Low and high entropy,” thesis by
Dr. Harold F. Blum. “Ill-health, health,” thesis by
Dr. Ruth Patrick.
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