Sustainable Landscapes and Cities
This course is an introduction to issues of sustainability in the designed landscape and in our cities. It includes environmental history as well as contemporary social, environmental and political issues surrounding sustainable design and activism. The course stresses motives and values expressed through environmental design at various scales – from neighborhood to global and examines problems affecting healthy environments and their solutions. Students study the need for protection and restoration of healthy ecological systems within the design of cities and landscapes and discuss ways to enable these systems to thrive. Readings and discussions focus on means to evaluate, create and advocate for healthy, sustainable environments.
Topics
- This course is an important elective to majors in the College of Natural Resources and CED students who have Architecture and City Planning majors. A new CED major, Sustainable Environmental Design (SED), has increased the number of students who require this class. It also fulfills the Social and Behavioral breadth requirement. Therefore, it is clear that the course enrollment should be increased to accommodate students from both inside and outside the CED. This course offers students the opportunity to examine a specific range of sustainable design interventions that attempt to address primary problems related to climate change, the need for healthy watersheds, adequate food security and socially resilient communities in the face of rapid environmental change. Students will see the complexity of various aspects and approaches required of sustainable design and occasionally competing goals of a project.
- Students will learn about and discuss the inter-connectedness of natural systems overlapped by human habitation. They will learn about design that can facilitate positive social systems and how the combination of ecological and social communities can present answers to some of the pressing environmental problems we face. Students will learn how various design strategies involve land preservation, watershed protection and restoration; local food production networks; resilient neighborhood design through community participation in open space design; pedestrian and bicycle friendly streets, urban forestry; reducing the waste stream. On the required field trip to San Francisco, students will be able to see and critique the efficacy of policy; of existing and emerging landscape design technology; to observe interventions intended to assist existing natural systems in urban environments and promote their viability; to see the value of community building to help establish resilient neighborhoods; to become verbally articulate about these issues.
Official catalogue course objectives and student learning outcomes
Sources
- Course catalogue ↗2026-2027