Ian Lennox McHarg: A Profile
A FORMAL INTRODUCTION
From the beginning, Ian McHarg was destined for the work that would define his life. McHarg grew up in Industrial Era Glasgow, Scotland. This was at the advent of what we now recognize as modern urban planning and landscape architecture. He grew up in an area with few environmental protections in a rapidly expanding metropolis. He had an early drawing talent and was advised to explore landscape architecture. His knowledge of the Scottish landscape of rolling hills was extensive and would later prove valuable. During his seven years of service in World War II, he worked with the Royal Engineers. This allowed him to develop a systems-thinking approach and provided him with technical skills that would be influential in his career. After his service in World War II, he attended the famous Harvard School of Design and earned degrees in Landscape Architecture and City Planning — programs that had been started by Olmsted Jr. only a few decades ago. After his studies, he returned to Glasgow with the goal of helping to rebuild his country. He was heavily involved with housing development and master plan creation.
While working on a project in the UK, he met Dean Perkins of the University of Pennsylvania. It was Perkins that convinced McHarg to begin the landscape architecture program at the University of Pennsylvania. McHarg’s Man and the Environment course became the most popular course of its time and would eventually inspire his television show which closely mirrored the format of the course. Many modern planners and landscape architects who were students of McHarg reference their experience in this course as the thing that inspired them to pursue the profession. One could argue that before Ian McHarg, the idea of landscape architecture was a foreign and reserved discipline that had difficulty relating to other fields, especially in an environmental context. Public design projects were often crafted around a particular aesthetic which could be found in nature but likely not the landscape native to the project site. Ian McHarg pioneered a new vision for urban planning and landscape architecture. McHarg envisioned a world in which the two professions would work together, through a systems approach, to produce urban environments of a higher quality than the past. Urban environments that recognized the context of the natural, native landscape were the product of Ian McHarg’s career.
A PIECE OF CAKE
Likely seen as the father of geospatial information systems (GIS), Ian McHarg pioneered the modern methodology for the fields of design and planning. His 1969 landmark book, Design with Nature, captivated audiences and brought the professions of urban planning and landscape architecture closer than ever on the idea that the two had to come together as a mechanism for environmental conservation. The challenge McHarg laid out in his book — to think about different ecological parameters as geographic layers — has permeated throughout the professions and has become the standard for landscape architecture and urban planning. McHarg’s development of layers-based thinking did not strive out of a profound interest in cartography. Instead, McHarg found himself extremely passionate about the role of human activity as it exists in natural systems.
McHarg identifies three central foundational nodes to his methodology of ecological planning. (1) The process of planning with respect the environment should be based in a scientific, mechanistic manipulation of nature for our own ends to produce “green space”. (2) Nature is a process in itself. McHarg’s framework relies heavily on the idea of chronography. The idea that nature leaves evidence of the past as a guide to the future is central to McHarg’s philosophy. (3) Humans are the great disrupters. McHarg viewed human activity as a natural process that can destroy the manipulate the landscape, similar to the way rain, snow, and wind erode the earth. This foundational philosophy was outlined in Design with Nature and is considered essential to the modern planning and public design process.
The idea for GIS and its modern applications was born out of Ian McHarg’s layers approach to development. Today, every design and planning professional relies on GIS on a daily basis to develop accurate maps and identify areas for development. All GIS tools implement the idea of layering to perform complex geographic analysis. This idea was explained in Design with Nature back in 1969, long before the first ESRI product was created. McHarg, the eccentric fellow he was, became famous for his analogy of relating the concept of “overlays” to layers on a cake.
Jack and Laura Dangermond, founders of ESRI, and the behemoth that is the ArcGIS suite of software consider themselves students of Ian McHarg’s design and environmental teachings. At the 1997 ESRI User Conference, ESRI founder Jack Dangermond presented Ian McHarg the Presidential Award. During his introduction, Dangermond had this to say about McHarg:
“He brought together, at the University of Pennsylvania, experts from social science, and physical science, and soils, and geology and he mixed these people together in a new concept of multi-disciplinary education focused not simply on academic understanding but on doing something about environmental planning as a method.”
McHarg admits that he does not consider himself the father of GIS but rather of the idea of “overlays” — the method of creating separate layers of separate data sets, then overlaying them to identify the areas where the geospatial data overlaps. Today, people have access to large amounts of data, with public agencies making GIS data sets free and available to the public, allowing non-design professionals the ability to conduct complex analyses that once took weeks and now take minutes.
A RECKONING WITH NATURE
The 1970s were a transformative set of years. Rapid industrialization of the turn of the century, and the unprecedented pace of scientific advances in the Post-War Era, many of which we now consider today as unethical, created a real crisis in the nation and around the world. The beginning of the modern environmental understanding of the world can be traced to a few select incidents. Rachel Caron’s Silent Spring, the advent of modern environmental protection legislation under the Nixon Administration, and a social reckoning with memorable instances such as the Cuyahoga River fire and the oil crisis struck up a new conversation. From this conversation, greater accountability for human activity began to call into question the idea of environmental impact. Today’s central environmental methodology, like environmental impact assessment, easements, and a greater focus the native ecology are now central to city planning and landscape design. McHarg’s career brought the cultural focus on environmental protection to both urban planning and landscape architecture. The environmental impact of development began to take a more scientific approach with formulas and uniform methods of finding the most suitable areas for development in a method that many could understand.
The debate about environmental impact expanded far beyond the disciplines of landscape architecture and city planning. Author Barry Commoner’s book The Closing Circle, brought to light four controversial ideas that many had taken extensive efforts to disguise in the past, but were now being brought to light in this environmental protection renaissance. Commoner’s four principles were (1) Everything is connected to everything else. (2) Everything must go somewhere. (3) Nature knows best. (4) There is no such thing as free lunch. Commoner’s philosophy related to Ian McHarg’s in the way they viewed nature and humanity as separate, and instead of viewing nature as something that humans had to conquer, they saw humans as a destroyer of nature, something that, like any problem, had to be reckoned. Other thinkers of the time like Elrich, believed that overpopulation was the cause of anthropogenic environmental degradation. Elrich believed that individual human actions were not at fault, but rather the scale at which they were being conducted. Commoner discredited this philosophy, arguing that the blame would disproportionately fall on the poor. Commoner saw technological and social development as the way to the sustainable future. Ian McHarg’s attitude towards human degradation of the environment can best be summed up by one of his many eccentric lines that describes his personality acutely:
“Man is a blind, witless, low brow, anthropocentric clod who inflicts legions upon the Earth.”
A PERSONAL REFLECTION
I consider Ian McHarg’s philosophy a step in an evolution towards more holistic planning. This began with Olmsted Sr.’s view of planning and landscape design as begin a catalyst for change, specifically the improvement of one’s quality of life. McHarg built on this philosophy of understanding that the role of design extends beyond the human interaction as public, functional design has an impact beyond human society, and extends itself into the natural systems. Fast forward several decades into the idea of sustainability which brings in the third pillar: the economic impact social systems can have. I see McHarg’s work as an evolutionary milestone towards the present form of sustainability thinking — the most holistic approach to public design in history. Additionally, McHarg made for a great planner due to his ability to relate to people who were not formally trained in design. His television show, The House We Live In, demonstrated the interconnectedness of all the big ideas in academia and culture at the time. Ian McHarg saw his life’s work for environmental conservation and landscape design as both the cause and effect of each other. It wouldn’t be until 1987 Bruntland Report that the famous definition of sustainable development would be authored:
“Sustainable development is development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs.”
Today, this sentence is considered one of the most essential pieces of policy in the realm of environmental protection. While ongoing disagreements about the definition of sustainability persist, this provided a framework to evolve McHarg’s ideas into the future and expand the conversation to seek a balance between minimizing or eliminating social, environmental, and economic impacts from human activity.
McHarg’s diverse education mirrored Olmsted Sr. Both men benefited from a mix of experiences in and outside of the classroom that would later help them relate to people with all different thinking styles, backgrounds, and priorities. This concept of being the relatable representative is central to the characteristic of a quality planning and public space design professional. Regarding my own education, I have been able to take courses in seven of the university’s ten colleges. I spend a lot of time in courses and work that involves collaboration among interdisciplinary groups. With my strong environmental background, I often find myself working with designers and engineers and getting them to understand one another can be a challenge but my role, as the environmental expert is to translate the discourse and establish some context for the landscape and its changes. I have had to develop strong communication and interpersonal skills, along with technical and design literacy that allows me to intelligently participate in the conversations with people with more particular skillsets. I have yet to mention Ian McHarg’s single largest impact on my life. As an urban planning student. I interface with Ian McHarg’s discipline through a GIS program running on my computer. Whether I am buffering streams to find suitable development areas or joining population and density data, Ian McHarg posthumously impact’s my life and my work every single day.
This piece was written for Dan Howe’s Design for the Public Realm course in the Deparment of Landscape Architecture at NC State University in Spring 2018.
