Martha Schwartz on the challenges of designing urban green space in a changing climate

2024-12-10T10:26:00-05:00

The biggest challenges, especially as I’ve encountered while developing the Linear Urban Forest, are the upfront costs, the inconvenience factor of construction and retrofitting older infrastructures with technologically innovative features. There is also a lack of awareness about using the landscape to lessen the damage of climate change.

Schwartz worked for SWA Group in the 1970s and early 80s before launching her own practice in New York in 1983.

She says she chose landscape architecture principally because "I didn’t have enough money to buy a tract of land where I could create land art projects" (a movement her contemporaries like Michael Heizer had begun pioneering around the same time) and then gradually grew into the realization that it would be applied in urban contexts to combat against climate change. Of late, she been at work developing her Linear Urban Forest model, which is supported by a Harvard University Climate Change Solution Grant and recently completed its first pilot test in Springfield, Massachusetts.

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Martha Schwartz on the challenges of designing urban green space in a changing climate