Ulaanbaatar, the rapidly growing capital of Mongolia, is two cities in one: at its core is a dense downtown of Soviet-era shopping centers, government buildings, international banks, and apartment towers; surrounding the “official core” is a rapidly growing ring of informal urbanization consisting of traditional round “ger” dwellings and simple wood-frame houses, arranged on privately-held parcels spreading up into the surrounding foothills. These “ger districts” rely almost exclusively on raw coal for heating during the winter; the burning of coal in thousands of individual structures makes Ulaanbaatar the city with the world’s worst winter air quality, resulting in severe health effects for residents. Families in the ger districts spend 60-70% of their income on fuel, in a city where winter temperatures regularly reach -40°C.
While Mongolia has ample solar and wind resources, it also has an immense supply of state-owned, unregulated, cheap coal, and there are currently no credible plans for phasing out the use of coal for either electrical generation or thermal uses for the majority of the Mongolian population. As the air pollution in Ulaanbaatar has become a major public health crisis (pollution is regularly five times worse than the worst air quality levels in Beijing), a change in energy supply seems inevitable, but what will such a transformation look like, and how will it affect the form of the city?
While projects led by UNICEF, the World Bank and other international NGOs have focused on energy efficiency and improved cookstoves, there has not yet been significant research on district-scale energy infrastructure or its impact on future urban design and planning.
Spatial planning and design questions are central to long-term considerations for sustainable urban growth and energy transition in the quasi-informal ger districts of Ulaanbaatar: currently little thought is being given to the provision of municipal electrical supply, the siting of regional renewable generation and transmission, or local land use challenges such as flooding risk and water pollution.
The goal of this project is not to develop the economic pathways for an energy transition, but to help envision what that transition will look like and how it will affect the urban form and communities of Ulaanbaatar.
This project was made possible through the generous support of the Kleinman Center for Energy Policy at the University of Pennsylvania. We thank our local research partner GerHub for their invaluable help.
Download the full report.
Field Stations is an immersive educational workshop at ecologically-critical places facing rapid change. The program is based in Bogotá, Medellín, and in the tropical rain forest of the Rio Claro Valley in Colombia. This project draws from the fields of environmental planning, design, ecology, forest management, cultural landscape studies, and environmental communication.
The workshop aimed, through intense on-site immersion, to expose participants to an understanding and deepened appreciation of the complex inter-relatedness of natural and cultural phenomena as exhibited by a particular landscape and ecosystem. Field-based, cross-cultural, place-based learning pulls the study of sustainability out of a purely academic context and engages in living the experience of communities and the unique issues and conditions of surrounding ecosystems, bio-regions and watersheds. The program encouraged understanding of the natural world through experimentation, data collection, drawing, photography, digital visualization, reviewing of historical records and exchanges with the community.
The month-long, field-based program brought together a diverse group of participants form design, planning, anthropology, sociology, media, environmental science, and engineering. The curriculum used a socio-ecological framework to examine layered histories of urban and rural landscapes of Antioquia. The program was funded by the Wright Ingram Foundation and benefited greatly from the generous support of the Fundación Amazonas and an incredible community of Colombian researchers, scholars and artists.
www.fieldstations.org
Unearthing Gas Infrastructure's Socio-Ecological Impacts
The Mapping Methane project focused on bringing together data collection and visualization of underground gas leaks along iconic Boston streetscapes, with interpretation of the gas leaks’ effects on the urban tree canopy, on climate change, and on public health. The local impacts and causes of climate change are hard to visualize and hard to talk about. This project explored the pressing and thorny issue of natural gas infrastructure and methane leaks and its multi-scalar impacts on landscape health, human well-being and global warming. The project also provided an opportunity to build partnerships with researchers in climate science and public health researchers around a tangible, though invisible infrastural system and design problem.
Mapping hidden territories of gas infrastructure, necessitated learning how to read utility street markings and other clues in the asphalt. With this semiotics of the street in hand, I set about creating a primer of street markouts, to organize and communicate the vocabulary of marks and their meaning.
The project also engaged archival photographic research, locating and documenting the locations of some of the first gas distribution pipes laid in Boston, in the 1870s-1890s, and the same locations today.
The major part of the project was a series of design proposals for places in the city where persistent continuing methane leaks are threatening iconic street trees, or threatening to undermine long-term afforestation efforts. The goal of the cutaway street visualizations is twofold: to communicate the relative severity of methane leakage at these iconic urban locations based on firsthand observation and measurement; and to communicate the various socio-ecological impacts of leaking methane on trees, people, and climate.
Finally, the project envisioned a transformed public realm for a future time when the gas leaks are permanently eliminated, proposing an aggressive afforestation strategy to relay the climate-safe status of these leak-proof streets. The lushly planted climate-safe streets stand in sharp visual contrast to the leak-prone streets in the rest of the city, on which vegetation is continually being killed and sickened by leaking methane gas.
I would like to thank Bob Ackley and Nathan Phillips, the crusading lead researchers of the Boston gas leaks issue, as well as the members of Mothers Out Front and Gas Leaks Allies, who supported this research with contacts, logistics, and the lay of the land.
This project was made possible by the generous support of the 2017 Maeder-York Landscape Fellowship at the Gardner Museum in Boston.
Extraction and sequestration represent two sides of an expanded concern with the resource territories required to power the industrialized world, and to deal with its byproducts. The rise in prominence of both sites of extraction and of carbon sequestration follow the increased concern with more intelligently managing carbon across its full life cycle, and the critical re-appraisal of the land use choices that underpin our economy.
What will it take to address climate change? Increasingly, it looks like it will take both a complete overhaul of energy infrastructure, and also a massive amount of carbon sequestration — an experimental process that has not yet been demonstrated at scale. How will carbon sequestration be deployed, by whom, and what could it look like? How might future landscapes of carbon sequestration mirror previous patterns of energy extraction, or forge alternative pathways?
The Reading Viaduct in Philadelphia is an abandoned rail infrastructure overgrown with spontaneous urban plants. It is often described as a “ribbon of green” cutting through the city, but what is its actual ecological contribution?
Working with students from the University of Pennsylvania, we systematically cataloged and mapped plant communities along the viaduct, finding more than 200 species, including a variety of native trees, shrubs, grasses, and herbaceous forbs. Despite their spontaneous arrival by wind, birds, or people, the plants have since responded to microclimatic conditions and to ecological dynamics of competition and symbiosis, and have coalesced into a diverse series of coherent plant communities with unique spatial and ecological characteristics. This survey can serve as a baseline for future restoration or rehabilitation efforts.
Scenario Journal is an online publication focused on the next generation of urban landscapes. From planners looking to model urban growth and achieve better neighborhoods, landscape architects designing hybrid natural systems and urban developments, ecologists taking cities seriously as habitats, architects concerned with building performance and street life, to engineers developing more efficient and more public infrastructure, there are many exciting projects taking shape that promise to improve the way our cities perform.
While multiple professions have shown a renewed interest in the functioning and life of cities, parallel conversations occur within disciplinary silos, with too little cross-pollination across related fields. Scenario seeks to create a free and accessible platform for showcasing conversations across disciplines that spark collaboration, rethink urban landscape performance, and lay down an interdisciplinary theoretical framework for design innovation. Scenario builds on the theoretical foundation of “landscape urbanism,” merging design intelligence and scientific inquiry, to support the continued exploration of this concept and collaborative project.
Scenario brings together work from practitioners, academics and students of landscape, planning, architecture, art, engineering, and environmental science. The journal is committed to striking a balance between rigorous and critical academic pieces, provocative thought pieces, design projects and graphically lush photo essays/artistic work. Scenario Journal is generously supported by the University of Pennsylvania School of Design, the journal’s primary affiliation.
All work published on Scenario Journal is available open-access and free of charge. Enjoy!
Images by: J Elliot, Mohamad Zeina, Tom Driggers as published in Scenario Issues 5 and 6.
What do design students need to know about contemporary environmental science? How can designers be trained to engage with new science theory and techniques?
Our teaching at PennDesign aims to expose students to core concepts and methods of contemporary urban ecology and introduce students to a range of practitioners working in this diverse and young field. This theory and field course provides 2nd year landscape architecture graduate students an introduction to the core concepts, ecological mechanisms, and vocabulary of contemporary urban ecology. The class aims to introduce and expose students to various methods of studying urban systems, to build students’ facility and comfort with accessing and reading scientific literature, to ground students in some of the fundamental ecological mechanisms that underlie and control ecosystem function in urban environments, and introduce them to contemporary modes of environmental management strategies that aim to steer ecological function towards desired outcomes.
The class covers topics from contemporary ecological theory to applied strategies and techniques. It starts with basic landscape ecology (patterns and the processes that shape those patterns), moves to vegetation community dynamics (stress, disturbance, competition, succession), then the fundamentals of ecosystem ecology, (biogeochemical cycles and the role of landscapes in mediating and altering these interlinked biogeochemical processes). Lastly, it integrates some more applied topics, bringing in guest speakers from a variety of disciplines, from applied restoration ecology, long-term ecological research in cities, urban forestry & urban forest research, and remediation.
