Billy Fleming teaches landscape architecture, but he spends most of his time outside the profession as it is usually practiced. He’s an assistant professor at Tyler School of Art and Architecture, Temple University, and founding co-director of the Climate and Community Institute, an independent climate and economy think-tank, where he and his colleagues work less as designers than as translators, supporting social and climate justice movements and turning their needs into research that progressive policy-makers can actually legislate with. It’s a peculiar position for someone trained in a design discipline, and Fleming is candid about why he took it up: landscape architecture has mostly functioned as a service industry for capital, dressing up luxury development and ecological gentrification in the language of sustainability. He closely experienced the binding context of design meeting politics while working as a policy advisor in the Obama administration, shaping the built environment without design by drawing. And this is where landscape architecture should be more instrumental.

Building Postcarbon Futures: Land, Justice, and Energy Transitions, published this year by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, is an Atlas of twenty-nine projects across forty-three countries, with Field Notes and contributions from more than a dozen scholars of climate justice. This is the book particularly for landscape architects, even though, as Fleming points out, there are no projects in the book where landscape architects or designers are central. The point he keeps returning to is that design might be as well understood as policy-making, community empowerment, and the steering of just land ownership and energy transition.

Fleming is on the road with the book through the fall — in Boulder, Los Angeles, New York, Boston, and Detroit — and hopes to bring it to Europe next spring.

Your 2019 Places Journal essay Design and the Green New Deal opens with the line: “If landscape architects want to remake the world, we can start by remaking our discipline.” There, you exposed the gap between the profession’s ambition to “save the world” and a reality in which it is often complicit, supporting development by erasure, serving a design culture built for the elite. Building Postcarbon Futures moves past that critique of the profession of cover-up, into the politics. How do you understand the world’s current entanglement — ecological, economic, political — and what kind of planetary design does it demand? More broadly: how do you see the role of design?

Well, in some ways that analysis has only grown stronger with time. Design is a professional service, categorized as such by all manner of industrial classification systems. That’s not an opinion, by the way, that’s now the North American Industrial Classification System and the Standard Industrial Classification system categorize our work. It places design alongside management consulting and financial services firms like McKinsey and KPMG because it operates in much the same way—by chasing flows of capital, via commissions and RFPs, for high end residential gardens, homes, and commercial developments; for so-called public realm projects that often operate as a form of ecological gentrification; in post-conflict reconstruction initiatives, like those detailed by Ed Wall, Ananya Roy, Patrick Bigger, and so many others; and in the carceral state, especially the booming detention center and prison-building industries in the United States. This is not all that professional design does, of course, but these are the projects that sustain our fields by and large.

Many of the projects presented in the Postcarbon Futures document and foreground a new set of tools, tactics, and modes of practice being employed by non-credentialed designers to response to climate, housing, and economic crises at incredible scale.

But one thing that this book argues for, at least in part, is a much broader conception of what counts as design, who counts as a designer, and which places and projects designed by this more expansionary view of our fields belong at the center of our discourse—especially when it comes to developing responses or solutions to the climate, housing, and economic crises that shape everyday life on this planet. If we widen our aperture in this way, we can see a much wider horizon of possibility for the role of design in responding to the climate crisis and participating in a just transition. Many of the projects in this book document and foreground a new set of tools, tactics, and modes of practice being employed by non-credentialed designers to response to these crises at incredible scale: the tallgrass prairie restoration, bison rewilding, and broader land stewardship methods of the Blackfeet Confederacy in the North American Great Plains; and the land and fire management techniques of Aboriginal peoples of the West Arnhem Land Fire Abatement project in the top end of Australia, to name only two. There, traditional methods of relating to land and the more-than-human world are more than branding exercises or spatial techniques acquired and exported to new contexts. Instead, these are places where Indigenous peoples are given real resources, autonomy, and space to determine their own futures through a blend of traditional and modern modes of land stewardship, ecosystem restoration, and carbon mitigation. They also happen to be some of the highest performing climate and design-driven decarbonization projects in the world. 

Ultimately, it’s not for me to say what the role of design is in anything. We have too many totalizing visions of our fields already. Rather, as more of a first principle, I think design must recognize that great work is being done all over the world, all of the time, by people without elite professional credentials. This book spotlights some of them, but there are many more that operate as a new set of beacons for our fields to march toward as we try to find our place in a global energy transition that is, and will continue to, reshape every scrap of land on this planet. In some ways, I think that if we recognize these other people and projects as works of architecture or landscape architecture or planning, then not only do we gain a completely new and much more radical set of practitioners and case studies to help reshape our fields, but we can begin dissolving the very narrow boundaries that professionalization required of design.

We have to find ways to make this new energy system strategically inefficient—to stop optimizing it around a single goal, like energy density, and instead find ways to incorporate as many other functions, amenities, and uses into it as possible.

All that being said, the energy transition is a material thing that requires us to balance the need for expediency—to build as much stuff as has ever been built, as fast and as well as we have ever built anything—with the desire to practice democratic values and protect community self-determination. The scale, scope, and pace of new infrastructure and development that this transition requires is staggering, at least in part because you simply need so much more land to build solar and wind power plants and storage than you do for fossil fuels. Even in land-rich nations like the U.S., we can already find pockets of intense conflict over the land-use transformation that is required to move from a dense form of energy generation to one that is far more diffuse. To do this well, we have to find ways to make this new energy system strategically inefficient—to stop optimizing it around a single goal, like energy density, and instead find ways to incorporate as many other functions, amenities, and uses into it as possible. This might come in the form of experiential wonder or joy, developing an aesthetic orientation toward a renewable energy system that better connects people to the systems they rely on to sustain life; it might come through accompanying investments in quality of life, especially in homes, offices, and public amenities that stitch together everyday life; it might come through a parallel transformation of the transportation system, including new investments in public transit and electric vehicles. The aesthetic, material, and experiential dimensions of the transition must matter as much as the provision of abundant, decarbonized electricity. This is work for designers, credentialed or not, to do.

I’m not interested in distilling those relationships down to something easily commodified — stamped down as a land acknowledgment in a master plan. I’m interested in all the different ways that alternative forms of ownership, relating to land and to each other and to the more-than-human world, can become central to our response to the climate crisis, whatever the context. I’d never want a totalizing vision for what landscape architecture or architecture should be. There are many different ways to do this work well.

Many landscape architects nevertheless end up in a municipal or a government office, where they work optimizing legislation, policy-making, bound by political choices of the running office. Moreover, public offices are often understaffed, lacking knowledge, research opportunities and other resources. We try to bridge that gap – between ideas, research and implementing radical, progressive currents – with the Climate and Community Institute (CCI).

CCI began as a small project of the McHarg Center–basically a way for Daniel Aldana Cohen and I to formalize a collaboration during our time at Penn together. At the time, it included a small network of other climate and built environment scholars scraping together whatever time and resources we had–folks like Mijin Cha, Johanna Bozuwa, Julian Brave NoiseCat, Mark Paul, Thea Riofrancos, and a few others. Our work has always been a kind of conduit between social movements, who are often the only makes with ideas at a scale that match our various crises, and progressive legislators who, much as they might want to translate those ideas into policy, often operate with small staffs and limited technical capacity, making that kind of work impossible. CCI is a kind of force multiplier for both, producing cutting-edge climate, economic, and built environment research that can help make the technical or policy case for the demands of housing, climate, and environmental justice movements. As you might imagine, that kind of work quickly outgrew the boundaries of what the university could manage. We simply had too many other faculty and collaborators trying to plug into our work, too many funders interested in supporting it, and too many urgent deadlines for a small school of design to support–and, frankly, an administrative team that was eager to see the work excised from campus.

It turned out that being essentially booted off campus was exactly what we needed to grow CCI into the powerhouse it’s become. That began by hiring the inimitable Johanna Bozuwa as our Executive Director, Thea Riofrancos stepping into a strategic co-director role, and building what I think is the best climate research, communications, and operations staff in the world–we’re up to 13 full-time staff now, with a budget larger than anything we managed at the McHarg Center, and shaping some of the most important climate, infrastructure, and political economy conversations in the U.S.

Earlier this year, the World Inequality Lab released its Global Justice Report, projecting a plan for equality and prosperity within planetary boundaries. It joins a field of frameworks, treaties, and proposals: the Paris Agreement, the Green New Deal, and others, binding and non-binding alike. We have no shortage of tools. Yet, a liberal economy and an energy-intensive political order keep pulling away from Just Transition, which sits at the core of your book. What does a genuine just transition require? What are its central concepts, as you see them?

A common mistake when thinking about design and climate action or energy transitions is that it requires some herculean feat of technological innovation. And sure, there are some sources of CO2 that we don’t quite yet know how to unwind (e.g. high heat industrial processes, aviation, maritime transport). But for almost every kind of climate or energy challenge that a designer will touch, the technologies we might specify are mature and obvious—they are just simply not deployed at a sufficient scale or scope to drive deep decarbonization.

Decommodification is necessary to ensure that the goods and services at the core of the built environment, like housing and utilities and food, are treated as essential to human flourishing instead of speculative investments, and the wealth that these investments create becomes socialized and reinvested in the communities.

One of the central arguments in this book is that, for the energy transition to be just and fully realized, it must be collectively owned and managed—whether that’s through direct forms of public ownership, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, collective forms of ownership at a smaller scale, like the Cano Martin Pena Community Land Trust of Proyecto Enlace in San Juan or the agroecological cooperatives of Cuba’s Organopónicos agricultural system; or the more hybridized systems of public and collective ownership in the social housing projects of Vienna, Bordeaux, Sao Paolo, and Jakarta documented in this book.

These varying methods of decommodification are necessary to ensure that (1) the goods and services at the core of the built environment, like housing and utilities and food, are treated as essential to human flourishing instead of speculative investments, and (2) the wealth that these investments create become socialized, producing a positive feedback loop in which land trusts, cooperatives, and other forms of public or collective ownership can use the proceeds of the energy transition or urban development to reinvest in their communities. This happens in projects throughout the book, but especially with the Tu Deh-Kah Geothermal power plant in Fort Nelson, British Columbia. It is the first of a wave of clean energy projects in Canada that were developed in response to their Truth and Reconciliation commission—which is now leading many of the federally and provincially funded energy projects to become owned outright by consortiums of First Nations. In this case, the Fort Nelson First Nation (FNFN) is using a mature technology (geothermal power) to generate heat and electricity at a higher rate than they can actually consume—which, by the way, was built by members of the FNFN. This means that they’re able to both sell excess power back to the grid, generating a large new revenue stream that can be used to reacquire and remediate land that was stolen from them and denuded by extractive industries, to invest in cultural and economic development projects that can sustain a number of rituals and practices that once faced extirpation, and otherwise use their ownership stake in the energy system to build toward true sovereignty. This is what a just transition looks like.

The book is structured in two parts: “An Atlas for Building Postcarbon Futures,” organised around Energy, Land, and Urbanism chapters, and “Field Notes,” essays on postcarbon society, decommodification, and justice. Each could stand alone — the range is enormous, from the Zapatista movement to postindustrial redevelopment in the Ruhr Valley. Land justice, energy transition, extraction, housing, pollution: the material is overwhelming. What holds the book together is less a single argument than a shared current of hope, or better, a positive action. How did you decide what belonged in the Atlas? Are there particular case studies or themes, from either section, you’d want to draw out here?

In many ways, I want the book to feel overwhelming because there are just so many people, places, and projects already built and operating that response to the climate crisis in beautiful, creative ways. It’s just that most of them are not part of any mainstream climate policy or design discourse. If nothing else, this book is trying to get our professions to stop looking in all of the wrong places for exemplars of what it looks like to build more just, low-carbon projects and to expand our case study library to include those in this atlas (and the many more outside of it).

The book is organized around themes of Energy, Land, and Urbanism to map onto practice areas that link professional design practice with policy development processes. There are no heroic design projects in here. Instead, there’s a consistent recognition that, if professional design is involved in these kinds of transformations, it is in the smallest ways at the very end of a much longer social and political process.

The process itself was long and conventional. I began with a team of graduate students, Ari Vamos, Jackson Plumlee, Caroline Gagne, and, later, Ruth Penberthy (who produced all of the maps in the book), on a desktop research phase that focused on cataloguing recent volumes, exhibitions, and other works that focused on climate action in design. We didn’t find much there worth keeping—a lot of luxury waterfront redevelopments masquerading as climate resilience projects, and a heavy focus on paving materials and CLT as solutions to the climate crisis. From there, we developed a much larger, interdisciplinary cohort of nominators, secondary sources, and other materials to generate a list of more than 300 potential projects for the Atlas. I ultimately decided to organize around themes or Energy, Land, and Urbanism to map onto practice areas that link professional design practice with policy development processes. Now, some of the projects that ultimately made it into the book did involve professional design offices—Cantinho do Ceu, Proyecto ENLACE, Gran Parc Social Housing, and a few others. But the way they’re presented in Building Postcarbon Futures emphasizes the years—or in some cases, decades—long processes of community organizing, regulatory reform, and, in some cases, changes in local or national law that were required before an architect or landscape architect could pop in, give some form or aesthetic to the long-held desires of those people, and then be on their way. Put another way, there are no heroic design projects in here. Instead, there’s a consistent recognition that, if professional design is involved in these kinds of transformations, it is in the smallest ways at the very end of a much longer social and political process.

We’ve already talked about many of the projects in the Atlas, but it’s worth spotlighting two of them here: Cuba’s Organopónicos Urban Farming program and Puerto Rico’s Proyecto ENLACE project. The Cuban project is of interest for a variety of reasons—chief among them is that this collectively owned and managed agroecological farming program feeds the entire island, operates without any chemical or fossil fuel inputs, and is deeply informed by the world-class agricultural and ecological research done in its university system. In a few decades, it pushed Cuba from a net importer of food (it once grew mostly sugarcane on plantations, which it traded with other Soviet nations for fuel and food) to one that can operate without imports and, in the process, made agricultural work one of the best-paid and most prestigious jobs on the island. Proyecto ENLACE is useful as a model for how to drive major investments in housing upgrades, flood risk reduction, public space and amenities, and other elements of high-quality urbanism into a community without triggering displacement. This is owed in large part to the foresight of its residents to organize for changes in Puerto Rican law that allowed them to establish the Cano Martin Pena Land Trust, which owns the redevelopment area and was able to set the terms of an RFP that designers ultimately responded to (including ensuring that current residents could remain).

I want to ask about the current protests in Albania. What began as a local fight over a Kushner-backed resort on the protected Vjosa–Narta wetland has grown into a nationwide movement, with tens of thousands in the streets of Tirana and communities mobilising abroad. In one local conflict, on the other side of the continent, the shape of the larger system becomes visible. Does a moment like this fit into how you think about the book’s themes and who gets to decide what a landscape becomes? What do you make of it as a signal for where these struggles are heading?

Well, this is the model of development that sustains the design professions. For every project that attempts to speak to questions of social justice or climate action or ecosystem restoration, there are dozens more, at far greater scale, involving the construction of prisons and detention centers, high-carbon luxury buildings and landscapes, and otherwise contributing to ever-widening inequality on a warming planet. Landscape and architecture are instruments of global and racial capitalism. They exist, by and large, to give form and aesthetic to capital flows, laundering them and other forms of power along the way. Unless and until that relationship to carbon and capital changes, our fields will struggle to meaningfully participate in the buildout of anything resembling a just transition or postcarbon future. Telling ourselves fairytales about our contributions to these processes won’t solve anything—it will just undermine any chance we have of being more useful to these generational challenges.

I’m sure you’re asking this question in part because some of the projects in this book are place-based resistance movements. Some of them—Urani? Naamik! In South Greenland, Marena Renovables in Oaxaca, Long Isun in Borneo—remain in a defensive posture. They’re focused on squatting, protest, port blockades, and other forms of direct protest to disrupt mining, fossil fuel exploration, and industrial development on sacred land. But many of the projects in this book feature social movements that have been able to go on offense—to unbuild socially and ecologically corrosive systems and to replace them with collectively-owned works that center justice and decarbonization. The Tu Deh-Kah Geothermal Power Plant is a great example of this. Built on a decommissioned gas plant as part of the Truth and Reconciliation process in Canada, the plant is owned and operated by the Fort Nelson First Nation. It’s perhaps the single greatest tool for building wealth and political-economic power that they’ve had in a postcolonial world.

There are many forms of resistance in this book, at different stages — some still figuring out how to stop the projects they need to stop, others far enough along to go on offense and start building the world they’ve been asking for.

There’s been some talk more recently of whether the transition is stalled or being reversed. But we’re just in what Emily Grubert refers to as the mid-transition—a point in any energy transition in which an old system (fossil fuels) remains largely intact while a new one (renewables) is just beginning to come online. It is a time filled with contradictions and, in this case, a massive expansion of both industries at once, generating a range of conflicts over land, capital, and other resources. And given the land-intensity of renewable energy systems, the competition for space and the encroachment of heavy industrial development into rural and exurban communities is already creating backlash. Whether its symbolic developments like the Kushner-Trump project in Albania, the proliferation of utility-scale solar projects in upstate New York, the expansion of offshore wind power in luxury beachfront communities like Cape Cod, or the data center boom unfolding around the world, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to build the kinds of energy systems we need if people don’t see something in it for themselves and their communities.

Yes, the book serves as a toolbox, presenting successful struggles we can look to. To close, where do you see landscape architecture in all of this? Is there a remodelling of the landscape architecture as you called for back in 2019, or a shift brought about by younger generations, influenced by the climate crisis?

This is an incredibly optimistic book, maybe to a fault. I think I’m sometimes framed as a cynic or too harsh a critic by folks in design, especially those for whom the status quo of the profession (and the world) has been good. But this book is what it is because of the years I’ve spent in and learning from the climate justice movement, recognizing that we’ll lose more battles than we win, that the wins we do get are incredibly meaningful and transformative for so many people, and that there’s always remarkable and inspiring work underway somewhere to build a more just, postcarbon world. The 29 projects in this book are certainly among them, but there’s a much wider horizon of transformation and change to guide our work going forward.

If I’ve become pessimistic about anything, it’s regarding the ability or willingness of landscape architecture, architecture, and urban planning to become truly engaged in this work. There’s an ongoing retreat in our leading institutions, across academia and practice, to retreat from some of the more expansive conversations that inspired this book and really entered our fields in 2019, through work I led with many others around the Green New Deal. In its place, we’re seeing a return to capital “a” Architecture, capital “l” Landscape Architecture, and so on. Much of this is being blamed on the Trump Administration and its attack on higher education, but I suspect that at least some of this retreat is being led by folks who never wanted design to be more directly engaged in politics or policy and who simply bided their time until an opportunity for retrenchment presented itself. I think I spent more time in my career naively believing that some of those institutions could be transformed and pushed in new directions, instead of treating climate and housing and racial justice movements as fads or PR to attract the next cohort of graduate students. There is still incredible work happening in this regard—Ozayr Saloojee at Carleton, Neeraj Bhatia and GSAPP (and formerly the CCA), Dorothee Imbert at Berkeley (formerly at tOSU), Janette Kim at UNM (also formerly of the CCA), CL Bohannon and Leena Cho at UVA, and the leadership team at Terremoto, to name a few. But I’m afraid that they are exceptions in the field rather than harbingers of what’s to come, at least any time soon.

It’s why I’ve spent so much of the 2020s outside of landscape architecture and design, building the Climate and Community Institute. It requires letting go of the idea that design can or should lead any of this work, or that we’re uniquely positioned to do much of anything. It requires accepting that we’re merely capable of being involved in it and embracing our support role.

Besides CCI, I always have another twenty or thirty students at other institutions in my inbox facing an existential crisis about what they thought they’d do as a landscape architect versus what they’re actually going to do in an office. Until our field finds a way to be responsive to what actually drives young people to want to be a landscape architect, growing up in the shadow of social and ecological crisis in a way that wasn’t true for my generation or those who run design firms — we’re going to lose way more people than we should. This is what Postcarbon Futures suggests, extending the scope and understanding of what profession could steer towards. We need a wider horizon of landscape architecture and design if we want to keep this rising generation of practitioners in the field.