From Environmental to Emotional Resiliency
Broadening the Definition of Resiliency
Climate change and resiliency is a hot topic right now and with good reason. The summer of 2023 was extremely hot, dry, rainy, or just plain unpredictable depending on where you live. As professionals working in the built environment, landscape architects can substantially impact the ecosystems, landscape spaces, and urban environments around us. Landscape architects can reduce the effect of severe rain events by designing places that will better tolerate future changes in our environment. This results in landscapes that require fewer resources to maintain, and that will support stormwater maintenance and re-use. These are the strategies that most often come to mind when discussing (environmental) resiliency. However, there's another layer of resiliency that is just as important and perhaps more impactful to more people, more often - emotional resiliency.
At KMDG, we frame emotional resiliency in our work as being the design strategies that foster community, create a foundation for improving community and inter-personal relationships, support individual health and well-being through access to nature, as well as a platform for promoting real life connections. In an increasingly digital world, we see parks and open spaces as opportunities to create rewarding analog experiences.
How do we measure success when it comes to resiliency?
Measuring a site’s environmental impact has become easier over time thanks to the introduction of certification programs like LEED, the Living Building Challenge, and SITES, among others. However, measuring a landscape’s impact on individual and collective well-being is less obvious. As a graduate student at the University of Texas at Austin, I was part of the original research group that developed the guidelines for the Sustainable Sites Initiative (SITES). Reflecting on that work, as well as my experience as a practicing landscape architect, I think we are missing a metric. Certification systems rely primarily on quantifiable information, based on concrete data that makes it possible to measure a project's success relative to how it meets environmental goals. The qualitative aspects of a site are part of LEED or the SITES Human Health and Well-Being Credits, but they are difficult to define as a metric. Now that the initial SITES framework has been established and adopted, is it possible to expand a site's qualitative and less material aspects into another measure of success? How do we measure the qualitative aspects of a project's success and make that an equally important indicator of resiliency? How can we measure success for that which we don't (yet) have quantifiable data?
At KMDG, our team discussions around resiliency have led us toward a collective idea that landscapes can support environmental, social, and emotional resiliency. The next step is quantifying it.
Putting it into Practice
Different site programs or site users require different approaches to designing the outdoor environment. The driving vision for the landscape master plan at Brigham and Women’s Hospital was the initiative of bringing nature into the campus to provide patients, families, and staff with the restorative power of landscape. The landscape design at Brigham and Women's supports patient healing and the mental well-being of visitors and staff by creating pockets of seating among a carefully curated planting palette that brings a mix of color, texture, and structure for interest throughout the year.
In contrast, a public park or playground can strengthen community bonds by facilitating gatherings between parents and children at a playground, dogs and their owners at a dog park, or sports enthusiasts at a pick-up soccer game on a swath of green space. Not all sites are large enough to support multiple uses, but each site can provide an experience, either periodic or episodic, that can support well-being.
The City of Cambridge Urban Design Guidelines are a good example of people-first landscape guidelines. In those guidelines, we have focused on the fundamental right of the public to access common space and landscaped areas. The guidelines go beyond utilitarian use and safety and outline a desire to craft a city with an array of public space amenities that will support well-being for all individuals. We hope these guidelines will help support environments that will improve the city’s environmental resilience and overall emotional resiliency.
In the private sector, there is often an opportunity to provide a public component which will provide benefits for the greater common good. In our work at Seaport Circle in Boston’s Seaport District, a new MBTA Silver Line stop will be included as part of a new health sciences research facility, built on a site that was historically used exclusively for infrastructure. With this project, we saw an opportunity to make the connection from the building and neighboring streets to the new MBTA station more than just a well-lit, safe, and accessible transit stop. Our team designed it intending to increase site users’ emotional resiliency. Moments of delight dot the small space, from the textural planting palette to the references to the Boston Harbor Islands in the sculptural landforms and flexible custom stone seating. We have designed a holistic experience that will afford people a moment of joy or peace or a landmark where they can meet a friend as they transition from their commute to the day before them and then back into the world again.
What's Next?
Developing a framework for how we measure the social and emotional resiliency of a project is a priority at KMDG. We value that a landscape can be quantified as successful in terms of its environmental resiliency. And yet, the same landscape may not be successful in attracting and sustaining site users because it doesn't provide the ephemeral qualities of discovery and delight that we value at KMDG. It's still early in our discussions, but our firm is committed to determining a methodology to study our impact on people's social and emotional resiliency through landscape architecture. Stay tuned as we continue to explore this thread in our work.
Emily Scarfe
Associate