Planning magazine — November 1991

A Natural Legacy: Ian McHarg and His Followers

News about the master of designing with nature — and his disciples.

By William Thompson

At 70, Ian McHarg is bursting with ideas for new projects — including schemes as monumental as a global environmental database. If his face is as furrowed as the topography of his native Scotland, neither his age nor his chain smoking seems to have much dampened his energy level. McHarg's status as the standard bearer of ecological planning — underscored last year when he received the National Medal of the Arts from President Bush — stems from the revolution he fomented in the 1960s and 1970s when he argued that the physical sciences should be central to land planning and design.

"He introduced the biological metaphor for systems behavior into planning circles," says Lewis Hopkins, AICP, head of the department of urban and regional planning at the University of Illinois, who studied under McHarg at the University of Pennsylvania. "Evolution of form, survival, adaptation, niche, interaction — he became the spokesperson for that way of talking about the world." In this sense, we can see a continuum, says Hopkins, leading from another irascible Scot, Patrick Geddes, through Lewis Mumford, to McHarg.

McHarg's reputation is most often linked with a method of suitability analysis which, as everyone who has read his 1969 book, Design With Nature, knows, is a way of planning land uses using hand-drawn, translucent overlay maps of geology, soils, vegetation, and other critical factors. [The book will be reprinted next year by John Wiley & Sons, Somerset, New Jersey.]

When the maps are superimposed, sensitive areas, as well as areas suitable for particular human activities, are revealed as in the "light shining through a stained-glass window." The concept was not original with McHarg. It had been tried as early as 1912 by landscape architect Warren Manning in Billerica, Massachusetts, and later, in various rough incarnations, by others. It took McHarg to turn an old refrain into an environmental call to arms.

The work

Rather than pioneering any specific methodology, says Lane Kendig, McHarg "simply made a lot of planners aware of environmental issues and gave them a basic tool." Kendig, a consultant in Mundelein, Illinois, and the author of APA's Performance Zoning, which uses McHargian principles, reminds us that McHarg refined the soil capability surveys that planners had done for years by introducing data that ran "the whole gamut of the environmental sciences." It was a gestalt approach, making clear the intricate ecological interactions that connect bedrock geology, soils, and water sources. But it was not the survey method itself so much as McHarg's proselytizing zeal for it, says Kendig, that "inspired a whole generation of planners."

It was because of that gift for inspiration — and his native eloquence — that McHarg was able to tap the emerging environmental consciousness of the 1960s and 1970s. In those years McHarg traveled constantly, spreading the word to audiences all over the world. Often his rhetoric took the form of jeremiads, delivered in his formidable brogue. He once warned a Japanese official that if he didn't produce an environmental study for a national development scheme, "the only thing left to do is to pull the plug and let the whole archipelago sink beneath the waves."

Examples of McHarg's work during those years include the plans produced in association with the Philadelphia firm he cofounded in 1960, Wallace McHarg Roberts & Todd. Between 1960 and 1981, McHarg used the firm (still active as Wallace Roberts & Todd) to test his ideas about ecological planning on sites ranging from Baltimore's Inner Harbor to Sanibel Island, Florida.

In his 1964 plan for The Valleys in Baltimore County, Maryland, for example, he pioneered in proposing the use of purchase of development rights and conservation easements to preserve rural character. And in the Texas new town, The Woodlands, started near Houston in 1972, McHarg proved that conserving the natural drainage systems in the flood-prone coastal plain was both more efficient and less costly than the storm sewers proposed by civil engineers.

Even projects that have not been implemented embody important methodological innovations, and many are described in Design With Nature. It is on one such project, a 1965 study documenting the environmental impacts of 34 alternative alignments for 1-95 in New Jersey, that McHarg bases his claim to have invented the analytical tool now called the environmental impact statement. The highway is still unbuilt but the EIS lives on.

Equally important are the regional studies such as the 1966 Lower Manhattan Study, which helped to create a framework for Battery Park City. The 1972 Denver Regional Transportation District Study suggested ways of controlling growth along certain corridors — including the construction of a light rail system, which is now going forward.

Progeny

McHarg's projects may be most memorable for the converts they have made — converts who have institutionalized environmental analysis and protection of sensitive lands in counties and townships all over the country.

"Pick up a comprehensive plan from 1960 and one from today," says Frederick Steiner, another former student. "Practically every recent one will include a McHarg-type analysis. His work has had tremendous influence on local ordinances." David Hill, AICP, of the University of Colorado at Denver, notes that environmental analyses backed up with overlays regularly stand up in court. "Public agencies now have rational reasons for telling speculators whether they can locate projects on given soils and slopes," says Hill.

In Scottsdale, Arizona, for instance, planners this year used McHarg's methods to create an "environmentally sensitive lands" district for some 134 square miles of the Sonora Desert where steep slopes, unstable soils, and delicate vegetation pose special challenges to development. With help from consultants in geomorphology and other pertinent disciplines, city planning manager Dudley Onderdonk, AICP, and his staff created a system of overlay zoning regulations and incentives, including density transfers. The overlay maps were drawn by hand, but the department has since installed a geographic information system, which will facilitate future McHarg-type inventories.

McHarg himself was an early advocate of computerization. Lane Kendig, who notes that hand-drawn overlays "quickly get bogged down in problems of readability" when several maps are superimposed on one another, says McHarg advocated computerized regional databases in the early 1970s. Jack Dangermond, founder of the Environmental Systems Research Institute in Redlands, California, which produces Arc/Info, credits McHarg with creating a context where GIS could flourish.

Many of the McHarg converts were students of the master at the University of Pennsylvania, where he founded the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning in the late 1950s. Among them:

• Andropogon. The landscape restoration and design firm of Andropogon represents a particularly tangible fruition of McHarg's ideas. "I love them," he says of the Philadelphia-based group. "Everything I have wanted to do, and have not done, they are doing." Three of the firm's four principals, Carol and Colin Franklin and Leslie Sauer, were McHarg's students at Penn and worked for him at Wallace McHarg Roberts & Todd. (The fourth partner is Rolf Sauer.)

What Andropogon has managed to accomplish is to apply McHarg's principles of "presumption for nature" to specific sites. The firm specializes in treating environmental disturbances to urban and urbanizing landscapes, mostly in the Northeast. In a typical project, Andropogon was asked by Morris County, New Jersey, in 1986, to find the least destructive routing for a gas pipeline that would cut through a mature beech forest. By working with the contractor to devise space-saving methods of pipe installation, it succeeded in reducing the proposed 50-foot-wide right-of-way to 34 feet. Moreover, by using a backhoe specially adapted for the project, the contractors were able to replace slabs of topsoil along the pipeline trench, guaranteeing the regeneration of the vegetation along the route.

This level of attention to project detail, requiring a grasp of ecology and a knack for dealing with public agencies, clients, and contractors, is the hallmark of Andropogon. It's also a lesson learned from McHarg. Leslie Sauer recalls that "lan never hesitated" to butt heads with power brokers on behalf of the environment. Like him, she adds, "we treat every project site as if it were the whole planet."

• Pliny Fisk. The most radical and most eclectic of McHarg's progeny is Austin-based Pliny Fisk III, who has gone beyond his mentor in devising ways to combine McHarg's environmental inventory with architecture and appropriate technology — all with the aim of creating ecologically sound industries and jobs. Already trained as an architect, Fisk earned a master's degree under McHarg in 1971 and worked a year in his office. But he, like many of the disciples, sensed that something was missing. McHarg's vision of land planning did not include a "life support system" — in Fisk's words, a way people could earn a living from the resources of their own regions without despoiling those resources and the land that supports them.

Fisk then began mapping regional resources with a view to using them to develop a self-reliant local economy. In his approach, every soil and vegetative type and geological formation is seen as a potential source of energy or building material or as raw material for start-up industries. Fisk and his office — the Center for Maximum Potential Building Systems (Max Pot for short) — seem extraordinarily inventive in perceiving uses for indigenous resources. A prototype house design, for instance, uses such materials as recycled fly-ash cement and straw and clay for walls. Allowing such low-cost, energy-efficient materials could stimulate local housing construction, Fisk contends, creating hundreds of long-term construction jobs without straining local resources.

Many of his ideas for sustainable local industry are embodied in Blueprint Farm, a two-acre experimental site created by Fisk near Laredo in 1988 for the Texas Department of Agriculture to show how a small suburban farm can profitably produce fruits and vegetables for a metropolitan area. Ecologically sound farming methods include composting organic waste, using cisterns to collect rainwater for irrigation, and using wind-powered generators to provide the power for refrigeration. If Blueprint Farm proves a local success, it could become a model for similar projects on the fringes of cities all over the Southwest and in similar bioclimatic regions all over the world.

Fisk's interest is in the flow of energy and materials through various systems. He suggests, for instance, that instead of designing a water-conserving commode, we figure out how to recycle wastewater from existing toilets through a system that creates new uses at every nutrient exchange. Or, he says, instead of installing a new, energy-efficient refrigerator, we should consider integrating the old one with water heating, slow cooking of food, or other household systems. Energy conservation, in his view, results from systems working together, as in a natural ecosystem, rather than from disparate machines optimized for a single use.

• Glenn Eugster. Many of McHarg's 1,200 former students have gone on to high-level public planning positions. J. Glenn Eugster, chief of wetlands strategies and state programs for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency, is one of these. Eugster enrolled in McHarg's program at Penn after hearing him speak to landscape architecture students at the University of Georgia. He went to Penn, he says, expecting to learn the physical science underpinnings of land-use decisions. He got that, he says, but "what I also found" — and what influenced him most — "was the social science dimension, a comprehensive, holistic look at landscape protection and design."

This added dimension was the result of McHarg's decision to introduce cultural anthropologists into the program. His own interest in the social factors affecting land use dates from his four years of study in the social sciences at Harvard, where he earned master's degrees in both city planning and landscape architecture. In the projects McHarg assigned, Eugster recalls, the requisite inventory of biophysical factors was always followed by surveys of the site's cultural history and its inhabitants' attitudes and behavior.

Eugster later applied this training in jobs with the Department of the Interior and, from 1981 to 1990, as chief of the division of park and resource planning in the National Park Service's mid-Atlantic office. There, under the auspices of the National Wild and Scenic Rivers Act, he and his staff — many of them also McHarg progeny — created a program of technical planning assistance to help communities along river systems develop conservation plans.

One such plan led to the designation in 1986 of the Blackstone River Valley in Rhode Island and Massachusetts as the nation's second National Heritage Corridor. (See "You Call This a National Park?" August 1990.) Eugster says the Blackstone's industrial character had reminded him of the part of south Philadelphia where McHarg had sent him for his first studio project — a project that made Eugster realize that even "the most developed and the most disturbed landscapes" were of concern to the environmental planner.

• Frederick Steiner. Steiner says he came to McHarg's program as "a kid from Cincinnati," where he had worked as a community organizer in Appalachian-migrant neighborhoods. Like many of those who came of age in the 1960s, he says, he was looking for answers: "I saw the ghettos burning, I saw the environment being degraded, and I needed a rational approach on which to base my work." Today, much of Steiner's own work is an attempt to explicate or apply McHargian concepts, and his recent textbook of ecological planning, The Living Landscape, cites the McHargian approach as seminal.

Now chairman of the planning department at Arizona State University in Tempe, Steiner, like McHarg, likes to root his planning studios in real-world projects. "I like to blur the lines between teaching, research, and service," he says. At the University of Colorado at Denver, where he served on the faculty from 1987 to 1989, Steiner's students performed a classic McHargian analysis for Teller County, Colorado. The group came up with a landscape plan that suggests ways of integrating development into the alpine scenery. McHarg himself was flown in as a guest critic. The results of the team's inventory and some of its recommendations were incorporated into the county's growth management plan, adopted in 1990. In his present position, Steiner is researching alternatives for wetlands and riparian protection policies for the state of Arizona.

• Anne Whiston Spirn. In a sense, Spirn, another former student, inherited McHarg's mantle when he stepped down in 1986 after 32 years as chairman of Penn's landscape architecture and regional planning department and she took over. An art history student before deciding to study with McHarg, Spirn also spent five years working for his firm. Of McHarg as a practitioner, she recalls that "every project had to advance the state of the art. lan refused to do the same type of job the same way twice. He had to innovate."

While working for the firm, however, Spirn became aware of one noticeable gap in McHarg's system: the lack of solutions to problems of the urban environment. In her 1984 book, The Granite Garden, she describes "what cities could be like if designed in concert with natural processes, rather than in ignorance of them or in outright opposition" and proposes strategies both for the gradual redesign of existing urban cores and for the long-term development of growing cities.

The inventory

In 1974, McHarg recommended to Russell Train, then director of the Environmental Protection Agency, that a national ecological inventory be created to monitor the nation's environmental health and offer guidelines for environmental management. To carry out the inventory, a laboratory staffed with environmental scientists would be established in each of the nation's 40 physiographic regions. The idea went nowhere until 1988, when EPA's Science Advisory Board resurrected the proposal and gave it a name, the Environmental Monitoring and Assessment Program (EMAP). By dividing the nation into 15-square-mile hexagons, scientists would be able to identify sample sites and assess the health of their ecosystems and the effectiveness of the regulations put in place to protect them.

Last year, William Reilly, the current EPA administrator, asked McHarg to recommend a dataset appropriate for EMAP and how it might be used. Not surprisingly, McHarg suggested the same comprehensive list of environmental sciences that he has advocated for the last 35 years, integrated into a single, consistent database.

McHarg calls EMAP "the most profound act ever undertaken by government [on behalf of] the environment." But he also has ideas for a more ambitious project — a global environmental inventory. He notes that the images of the earth from outer space transmitted by NASA in the 1970s had a profound effect on him. "I had gravitated in scale from local projects to metropolitan regions, river basins, and finally the continent, but now," he says, "it became apparent that I must address the environment of the earth."

A skeletal global inventory already exists with data supplied by various scientists and agencies, but, he says, there is no shared plan, goal, or coordination. The appropriate coordinating body for such an effort, he says, would be the Department of Defense, with its unparalleled capability in satellites, computers, and other technology and data. As the scientists and technicians involved in the various defense agencies face unemployment with the end of the cold war, McHarg suggests that they, "whose ... life's work involved destroying the earth, ... be given responsibility for its protection."

If implemented, this mammoth enterprise would be, McHarg says, "the culmination of my career." His advocacy for it casts him in his most characteristic role — that of catalyst and, above all, advocate for an idea, a system, a methodology for the constructive uses of the earth.

William Thompson is a landscape architect and senior editor at Landscape Architecture magazine in Washington, D.C.