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Green Infrastructure and Landscape Architecture
Udo Weilacher (engl. translation of an article, published in „Garten+ Landschaft“ 3/2015)
More and more, experts worldwide recommend „GI“ as the best remedy for all kinds of
unwelcome side-effects related to current changes in the environment such as climate change,
agricultural revolution, urban transformation and so on. Within the strategy “Europe 2020”,
the EU for example wants to enhance Europe’s natural capital1, and the board of the German
Association of Landscape Architects (bdla) recently declared “green infrastructure” as the
future central theme for landscape architecture. “Green infrastructure” sounds up to date but
proofs to be a very generalizing term that can be randomly interpreted according to the given
context. A clear definition of this term does not exist. “Green infrastructure means […] all
human activity in landscape in the broadest sense. It includes structures close to nature as well
as anthropogenic elements of open space – in Germany, almost all cultural landscape can be
interpreted in this way.” In the end the bdla board arrives at the astonishing equation: “green
infrastructure = landscape architecture!” 2
Is this new term really useful? This question was answered 2002 by the American
environmental and urban planners Mark Benedict and Edward McMahon in their publication
„Green Infrastructure: Smart Conservation for the 21st Century“. “Where-as green space is
often viewed as something that is nice to have, the term green infrastructure implies
something that we must have. Protecting and restoring our nation’s natural life support system
is a necessity, not an amenity. […] Green infrastructure is a new term, but it’s not a new
idea“, the experts admitted3. In the middle of the 1990s this term was used for the first time in
the USA but Benedict and McMahon identify no one less than Frederick Law Olmsted as the
inventor of green infrastructure. In 1903 he promoted that green spaces in a city should be
linked to a network in order to improve the quality of life in the urban environment. Looking
at the history of urban green systems in Europe we might identify other additional “inventors”
and we would surely arrive at an earlier birthdate of the idea of green networks. In any case,
landscape architecture as a profession obviously did not succeed in 100 years to firmly anchor
the awareness for the essential relevance of green urban networks in the public, the media or
the political system.
Obviously great hope is associated with the implementation of a new buzzword in order to
gain more acceptance when dealing with important environmental and development agencies
and more respect in the economic and scientific communities. In public and professional
discourses, “green infrastructure” as a new key term is afflicted at least with two problems.
Firstly it is risky to use the predicate green again in spite of the long established
understanding that nature in the city is not only green but also grey. This “colour-neutral”
understanding, clearly promoted by the Swiss landscape architect Dieter Kienast in the 1990s,
liberated landscape architecture from its fixation to a traditional and stereotype self-concept.
New freedom of design was offered, especially in cooperation with neighbouring disciplines
such as architecture or urban planning. In addition, urban ecologists have been stressing the
fact for many years that it is impossible to secure the “natural life support system” of a city
2
with green alone. Therefore they were asking to respect and develop the complex variety of
all urban biotopes no matter if they are green, grey, blue or of any other colour. Landscape
architects were esteemed as competent planning partners in recent years precisely because
they refused to play the role of the “advocates of the green” any longer.
The second problem of GI is connected with the technical connotation of the term
“infrastructure”. Even though “social infrastructure” is also used as a key term in planning
projects now and then, it seems to be more self-evident to use “infrastructure” in the context
of project concerning traffic, energy, communication or logistics for supply and disposal. This
technical focus is embraced by the promoters of GI, because it underlines the usefulness of
nature, its practicability as an instrument and its functional service aspects. In 2013 the
European Commission declared: „GI is a successfully tested tool for providing ecological,
economic and social benefits through natural solutions. It helps us to understand the value of
the benefits that nature provides to human society and to mobilise investments to sustain and
enhance them. It also helps avoid relying on infrastructure that is expensive to build when
nature can often provide cheaper, more durable solutions. [It is] a strategically planned
network of natural and semi-natural areas with other environmental features designed and
managed to deliver a wide range of ecosystem services.“ 4 Wolfgang Haber, renowned
German landscape ecologist criticized recently: “The term ‘services’ and the very idea that we
utilize nature because we want it to deliver supply of services is principally very absurd”.
Haber fears that the essential qualities of the environment will be sacrificed to the primacy of
economy, just because these qualities are not financially measurable. “Everything has to be
evaluated on an economic basis, even the feeling of happiness when looking at a beautiful
landscape. And the questions about functions and purposes are always raised.” 5 The step
backwards towards a merely functionalistic planning profession, as established in the 1960s,
suddenly seems to be very small for contemporary landscape architecture.
Nevertheless “green infrastructure” also carries an important and true message: it is right to
underline the necessity, that we have to deal with landscape - especially in the urban context -
in a structuralistic approach. Landscape is no longer perceived as a green total work of art
(Gesamtkunstwerk) that has to be preserved in an ideal static state. Instead, landscape is a
complex living organism and has to change constantly in order to stay alive - but it must not
loose its structural integrity. The existence of networked structures is therefore one of the
most important characteristics of landscape. These structures secure a certain stability as well
as a permanent flow of energy, matter and information. Many structural networks, such as
water systems, traffic systems, energy systems, green systems or communication systems
ensure the liveliness of todays landscape as well as their changeability, versatility and
viability. The networks are so closely cross-linked that it is very risky to analyse them in a
sectoral manner in order to improve their functionality and usefulness in a purely rational
design approach. The structural systems of the environment are complementary and reinforce
each other by interdependence, overlay and mutual permeation.
Structuralist architects and urban planners in the 1960s, fighting against the disaster of pure
functionalism, were already aware of these correlations and developed trend-setting planning
approaches, dealing with living structural systems.6 However a current study at the TU
3
Munich illustrates, “that structuralism in landscape architecture reaches far beyond the
structuralistic approach in architecture” and states that this theory should be definitely
developed far more in the future as a “versatile strategic instrument for the landscape
architectural design practice.” 7 The success stories of the Donauinsel in Vienna in the 1970s,
the international building exhibition IBA Emscher Park in the 1990s or the current
transformation of the Fresh Kills dump site in New York are showing exemplarily the
strength oft he structuralistic design approach. In these projects the planners do not
differentiate between green, grey or blue structures, not between current or historical, social,
technical, natural or artificial ones. The strength of these projects is based on the intelligent
combination of all networks and on the creation of manifold polyvalent spaces, open for the
active acquisition by man and nature. This seems to be the only way for a landscape to change
its face without loosing its face.
1 cf. European Commission: Green Infrastructure (GI) — Enhancing Europe’s Natural Capital, COM(2013) 249
final. Brussels 2013
2 bdla press release July 16 2014 “Grüne Infrastruktur - Ein Zukunftsthema der Landschaftsarchitektur”
3 Benedict, Mark A./ McMahon, Edward T.: Green Infrastructure: Smart Conservation for the 21st Century.
Washington D.C. 2002; pp.7/8
4 European Commission: Green Infrastructure (GI) — Enhancing Europe’s Natural Capital, COM(2013) 249
final, Brussels 2013; pp.2/3
5 Haber, Wolfgang: „Mit Leidenschaft kommt man heute nicht weit“ in: nodium #5, magazine of the Aumni-
Club Landscape at the TU München, München 2013; p.11
6 cf. Lüchinger, Arnulf: Strukturalismus in Architektur und Städtebau. Stuttgart 1981
7 Peisl, Julius: Strukturalismus in der Landschaftsarchitektur. Eine theoretische Untersuchung am Beispiel Peter
Latz. Master Thesis at the TU München 2013/14
