The climate crisis has helped build a sense of urgency toward climateresilient development, particularly around the challenges and consequences of increased global urbanization. Given that the building sector accounts for approximately 40 percent of annual global energy consumption,1 built environment professionals have been confronted with their role in driving resource extraction and perpetuating unsustainable construction practices. Human endeavours are also creating contaminated soils, which, according to American landscape architect Julie Bargmann of D.I.R.T. Studio, are “a byproduct of the human pursuit of greater material wealth and a more convenient and comfortable life.”2
Given that landscape architects are professionally equipped to understand site complexities and naturally tend to systems-based thinking, we are in a prime position to drive the innovation, use and development of new materials and design practices for genuinely circular economies (and ecologies). We also have a role to play in finding ways to
