What does it take to create landscape architecture with a lasting impact? In the face of climate breakdown, biodiversity loss, water scarcity, and social fragmentation, what role can – and must – landscape architects play? And most importantly: are we, as a profession, ready to evolve and embrace the future of landscape architecture?
At SLA, we believe tackling today’s urban challenges demands more than creativity. It demands courage. The courage to collaborate across disciplines. To bring biology into boardrooms, combine anthropological insights with planting design, and treat real-time data as carefully as soil samples.
And not least, the courage to constantly reinvent our tools – without forgetting where we come from.
A landscape of disciplines
Our latest project – designing 104 new neighbourhood parks across Abu Dhabi – confronted us with the full spectrum of these challenges:
How do you create, at speed and scale, 104 high-quality, low-irrigation, multi-performing, and deeply local parks that are socially inclusive, ecologically robust, and economically viable – and which are each uniquely tailored to its social, urban, and ecological context?
The answer: You build a team as diverse as the challenge.
At SLA, that meant drawing on all 130 of our colleagues across 15 disciplines – from urban designers, biologists and anthropologists to computational designers, planners, planting specialists, and light-and-darkness designers. And it meant letting those disciplines shape not just the designs themselves, but the very way we design.
Together, this uniquely interdisciplinary design team joined forces to build our own custom computational tool: SLIM (SLA Landscape Information Modelling).
SLIM
For us, SLIM is more than software. It is a manifestation of how we work in SLA: combining ecological fieldwork and anthropological insights with real-time, data-rich modelling and award-winning local design expertise.
With SLIM, we integrate 3D modelling with data-driven feedback on key performance factors such as biodiversity impact, irrigation needs, carbon sequestration, plant viability, social programming, and lifecycle cost. This allows us to continuously simulate and optimize each park throughout the design process and across multiple parameters simultaneously without sacrificing creativity or local sensitivity.
Using SLIM, we transformed 740,000 square meters of barren ground into a living network of vibrant, hyperlocal parks. Each of the 104 parks is an Abu Dhabi ecosystem of its own: Urban forests and desert gardens. Multi-sports courts and picnic clearings. Cooling shade, improved air quality, and a total of 22,571 new trees. A 500% increase in biodiversity. And a tangible improvement in the daily lives of hundreds of thousands of residents.
A new role for landscape architecture
But this isn’t just about the 104 parks. It’s also about what’s next for landscape architecture and how our profession must evolve – without losing its soul.
To lead in the 21st century, landscape architects must do more than draw beautiful plans. We must be biologists, anthropologists, system thinkers, and sensory designers. We must know how to make a place feel right – and how to prove, with data, that it performs right.
Our traditional tools – site analysis, planting design, material knowledge, and community engagement – are more relevant than ever. But they must be paired with newer competencies: computational modelling, ecological restoration, soil science, and anthropology.
To remain impactful, we must evolve.
Cities for life
At SLA, we believe landscape architecture can – and indeed must – become the connective tissue of tomorrow’s cities: where climate, culture, nature, infrastructure, and community meet in a new nature-based urbanism that puts people, plants, animals, and ecosystems at the center of the design process.
But that will only happen if we keep asking the hard questions: Are we bringing the right expertise into the room? Are we designing from the ground up – literally and figuratively? And are we bold enough to make landscape architecture the radical, systemic, life-affirming force it’s meant to be?
We believe the best cities come from embracing complexity – not simplifying it; and that the only way to create lasting change is to work across disciplines, cultures, and scales.
Only in this way can we design cities for life – all life.
Images Credit: SLA
Article submitted by SLA
