Back in 1973, in an article entitled “Resilience and Stability of Ecological Systems,” the Canadian ecologist C. S. Holling seminally contrasted urban infrastructure’s engineered fail-safe intentions with ecology’s safe-tofail “unpredictability.” Fifty years later, with the planet increasingly in the throes of climate emergency and biodiversity crisis, his prescience is haunting the disciplinarity of landscape architects. If we don’t know what the future holds, the discipline surely has a problem speculating on designed infrastructural “solutions” with certainty. Which creates another dilemma, this one for the academy: how could a new generation of landscape architects be trained by, for and with unpredictability?
