JOAN NASSAUER
Professor in the School for Environment and Sustainability at the University of Michigan, Fellow of the American Society of Landscape Architects and Fellow of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture, Distinguished Scholar of the International Association of Landscape Ecology
Joan Nassauer uses a design-in-science approach to build knowledge about how landscape design and planning affect aesthetic experience, well-being, and the cultural sustainability of environmental benefits. Her earliest research used social science methods to investigate perceptions of the Iowa rural landscape. She subsequently conducted research in support of the USDA Natural Resource Conservation Service’s development of a rural landscape aesthetic assessment methodology. She was a co-founder of the ASLA Rural Landscape Committee, co-author of the ASLA’s LATIS on rural landscapes, served on the founding council of the Minnesota Institute for Sustainable Agriculture and the Advisory Board for the Land Institute. She has conducted research on rural landscape perceptions and multi-functional rural landscapes in the United States and Europe. She is the author of several books and book chapters, reports, and papers that address rural landscape quality. The author of more than 100 papers and books, she employs socio-environmental science to address the design and planning of metropolitan and agricultural landscapes – ranging from continental scale implications of agricultural practices to neighborhood scale implications of green stormwater infrastructure.
Some of her publications related to rural landscape and transdisciplinary approaches can be found here and cited following her dialogue.
Joan Nassauer
You've been integral in elevating rural landscapes in Landscape Architecture discourse since the founding of ASLA's Rural Landscape Policy in 1985. What progress has been made and where do you still see challenges?
When we founded the ASLA Rural Landscape Committee, we wanted to affect federal agricultural policy, as well as state and local regulations related to sprawl. Since that time, more progress has been made regulating sprawl than in affecting agriculture, which remains the largest land use by area in the lower 48 states. The rise of New Urbanism helped to regulate sprawl in some metropolitan areas, but in rural areas with little population pressure, sprawl can seem like desirable growth. On metropolitan fringes and in small towns, local control can overlook the downsides of sprawl. Further, in more recent transdisciplinary research, we’ve shown that appropriately designed and managed exurban landscapes could be producing much more in the way of ecosystem services (e.g., Nassauer, 2017). Local planning and regulations should demand much more if rural landscapes are developed.
Related to agricultural land management, several of us active in the ASLA Rural Landscape Committee saw that rural landscapes were far more affected by the federal Farm Bill than by federal environmental laws (including the National Environmental Policy Act and the Clean Water Act), and we had begun to build the case for a more multi-functional policy approach to agricultural policy for American rural landscapes (e.g., Coen et al. 1987). When the Committee was founded, affecting federal policy was not central to organizational activities of ASLA, and we worked hard to move ASLA toward a stronger emphasis on policy, especially for rural landscapes. Today affecting policy IS central to ASLA. That is great progress for ASLA and the profession! However, little policy progress has been made on agricultural landscapes.
How has policy shaped the rural environment into what we see today? Why should designers get involved in promoting policy change?
Affecting rural landscape policy is particularly complex, and subject to international agri-business interests. Negotiations on the federal Farm Bill, which is a sunset law, are fundamentally influenced by agri-business as well as by the structure of the US Congress, in which low population rural states are powerfully represented in the Senate. In those states, agricultural land tends to be in the hands of large landowners – a trend that has been boosted by federal policy (e.g., Nassauer et al. 2007). Water quality, biodiversity, and rural livelihoods and community institutions have been radically degraded by these trends, but conservation stewardship is voluntary under federal agricultural policy (figure 1). Some states’ enabling legislation for local planning even prevents local regulation of “nuisance” agricultural functions like confined animal feeding operations. Finally, as farms get very large and rural populations shrink, there is little incentive for rural local governments to adopt ordinances that might control sprawl (figure 2). Together, these realities present enormous challenges to protection of ecosystem services that can be provided by agricultural landscapes. This affects not only rural communities, but the entire nation. Rural watersheds affect flooding and water supplies in cities. Rural landscapes are essential to the habitat mosaic of the continent.
Figure 1: From the Corn Belt to the Gulf: Societal and Environmental Implications of Alternative Agricultural Futures (2007). Corn Belt rural landscapes shed nutrients that have created a Gulf of Mexico Dead Zone. This book is an integrated assessment that shows how future visions supported by farmers could support federal policy changes that could shrink the Dead Zone, build biodiversity, and enhance well-being of rural communities.
Figure 2: As farms have gotten much larger, populations have shrunk in small rural towns like this one in Kansas, often leaving abandoned properties that mirror challenges in legacy cities of the Rustbelt.
American landscape architects should look beyond our own nation and beyond our own discipline for inspiration in getting involved in promoting policy change for rural landscapes. I think of the profound effect of the European Landscape Convention, as advanced by Bas Pedroli, Teresa Pinto-Correia, Jorgen Primdahl and others (figure 3); the development of landscape assessment procedures by Carys Swanwyck and others; the movement for US national standards for organic agriculture, as advanced by Willie Lockeretz, Kathleen Merrigan and others; the development of perennial agriculture by Wes Jackson, Don Wyse and others; the integration of indigenous perspectives into rural land management decisions as influenced by Diane Menzies and others; and the critical examination of industrial agriculture, as advanced by Douglas Tompkins and others. There is a great deal of rural landscape scholarship and policy development work to inspire design, planning, research, and advocacy by American landscape architects.
Figure 3: Countryside landscapes, like this in northern Italy, have been managed under the European Landscape Convention for the past 20 years. This is a policy example for American landscape architects.
American landscape architects should actively advocate for rural landscape policy change because the American rural landscape begs for innovation that will produce societal benefits commensurate with the enormous financial investment in rural landscapes. For example, the well-respected Environmental Working Group calculated federal agricultural subsidies to be $20B in 2020, with the majority of subsidies going to larger farm operations. That’s about the same as the total budget of the US EPA in 2020. Imagine a green streets mindset brought to the entire American agricultural landscape! In some way, that was our mindset in the EPA-funded transdisciplinary project that we reported on in publications from 2002-2007 (figures 4 & 5).
Figures 4 and 5: Between 2002-2007, we published a series of papers and books that described alternative visions for Corn Belt landscapes. Continuing with current federal policy, we get a landscape of genetically modified monocultures (figure 4). In one of the alternative visions (figure 5) we developed and assessed, we get a landscape of greater biodiversity and better nutrient management that is an inviting place for people to live and travel.
What role does transdisciplinarity play in working in the rural landscape and effecting change?
Transdisciplinarity is essential to affecting rural landscapes for several reasons. First, rural landscapes are inherently multi-functional. These functions start with management for many different agricultural products – each with its own requirements and market/policy incentives. These functions should include management for water quality and flows, for biodiversity, for climate resilience, and for enjoyment by local communities and visitors. Second, rural landscape ownership patterns, livelihoods, and stakeholder perspectives are different from cities. Working with the distinct perspectives of those who do and could inhabit or own rural landscapes is a fundamental springboard for change. Third, policy that effects landscape change operates at extreme scales in rural landscapes; both massive federal agricultural policy imperatives and hyper-local land use and water management decisions dramatically affect change. Together, these three characteristics should push landscape architects to:
Learn from and exchange ideas with topical experts (e.g., agronomists, horticulturists, aquatic and terrestrial ecologists, agricultural economists, rural sociologists).
Be transdisciplinary catalysts to exchange learning with stakeholders and local communities.
Include federal and local policy influencers in the transdisciplinary process of design and planning rural landscape futures.
How have you engaged with communities in these regions around such big topics like agriculture, ecology, and design? What has worked?
I’ve used the transdisciplinary approaches I described above to engage with rural communities and the larger set of rural landscape stakeholders. Specifically, I have organized transdisciplinary processes to generate alternative prospective scenarios for agricultural landscapes. These are iterative processes that I have described, for example, in Nassauer & Corry, 2004 . In some projects that are intended to influence federal policy, the scenarios were normative, that is we used expert and local knowledge to formulate visions for the way rural landscapes should or could be in the future – not to predict how they would be or to reflect only the wishes of stakeholders. In these iterative processes, pairing of data about landscape functions with maps and visualizations that directly communicate with all participants, including local people, was essential. The landscape served as a boundary object (Nassauer, 2012), and assessments of maps and visualizations were key to an integrative assessment (Nassauer et al. 2007). To contribute to these integrated assessments, my team returned to the community – but this time to conduct rigorous social science research about likely community response to alternative scenarios. In other projects, I have used transdisciplinary approaches to reflect the landscape implications of community members’ preferences back to the community for their discussion and deliberation. This produces predictive alternative scenarios that, again, serve as boundary objects, but for communication among community members with different viewpoints about preferred futures. In other transdisciplinary projects, my team has joined ongoing work by natural scientists who have realized that implementation of their discoveries depends on community perceptions and preferences. In those projects, we begin by framing alternative scenarios that fall within a range relevant to the natural science, and then iterate with local communities to reconsider those alternatives, and ultimately, to use social science methods to rigorously assess them. Each of these projects worked to the degree that we involved community members and the broader set of stakeholders, including decisionmakers. At the very least, such involvement brings society along with the evolution of ideas. A purely interdisciplinary research project that is presented to society only after the fact may not be understood as useful – even if its conclusions are prescient. I recall one rural landscape project that was very promising, but stalled because it was not understood by stakeholders at that time.
Where has scenario building led your work?
Scenario building is a regularized form of speculative landscape architecture. Known by other names, it’s as old as the profession. Certainly, Ian McHarg, Carl Steinitz, Julius Fabos, and Richard Toth regularized it in different ways that were amendable to quantification. Several of us have adapted these approaches in different ways as transdisciplinary methods that methodically engage communities while rigorously developing evidence to influence policy and future research. It is telling that social and natural scientists “discovered” scenario building as part of the Millennium Assessment – long after landscape architects developed these methods. Subsequently, scenario approaches have been widely used and described by natural and social scientists, especially to address global change. In my own work, scenario approaches have allowed me to develop and assess landscape innovations, using what I have termed a design-in-science approach. In rural landscapes, we used this approach to invent new Corn Belt agricultural landscape patterns; our team built on the work of agronomist Rick Cruse to invent and assess the performance of perennial strip intercropping (Nassauer, Corry & Cruse 1993). Such an approach is widely applicable to landscape problems that call for experimentation and invention. For example, I’ve also used it to invent green stormwater infrastructure patterns for cities.
What does your ideal future for the rural countryside look like?
That ideal future is very much like one of the scenarios we developed in our 1997 project and described in our 2007 book about future visions for Corn Belt agricultural landscapes. In this ideal future, the rural landscape is a place where people want to live, whether or not they are engaged in agricultural production; a place where landscapes are stewarded for future generations partly because more people are there to notice and care what happens to rural landscapes – they are not abandoned to large-scale industrial agriculture. Rural institutions have been reinvented to bring local people together to thrive in new, diverse communities. The damaging effects of sprawl have been addressed by new mobility, energy, remote work, and water infrastructure technologies. The air and water are clean, and the landscape is a mosaic of carbon-storing agricultural production that makes room for biodiversity in preserves, between fields and along roadsides, wetlands, streams and lakes. Such an ideal is not a fairy-tale. With the right policy levers and a transdisciplinary approach to landscape invention, it is entirely plausible.
Additional publications related to rural landscapes and transdisciplinary approaches (to download many of these, go to joan-nassauer.com):
Nassauer, J. I. 2017. Greening sprawl: Lawn culture and carbon storage in the suburban landscape. In Infinite Suburbia. A.M. Berger & J. Kotkin, eds. Princeton Architectural Press, New York. Pp. 506-517.
Nassauer, J. I. 2012. Landscape as medium and method for synthesis in urban ecological design. Landscape & Urban Plan. 106:221-229.
Nassauer, J. I. 2010. Rural landscape change as a product of US federal policy. In Globalisation and Agricultural Landscapes: Change Patterns and Policy Trends in Developed Countries, Primdahl, J. and S. Swaffield, eds. Cambridge University Press. Pp. 185-200.
Nassauer, J. I., and D. M. Wascher. 2007. The globalized landscape: Rural landscape change and policy in the United States and European Union. In Political Economies of Landscape Change. J. Wescoat & D. Johnston, ed. Springer Press, Dordrecht, Netherlands. Pp. 169-194
Nassauer, J. I., M. V. Santelmann and D. Scavia. 2007. From the Corn Belt to the Gulf: Societal and Environmental Implications of Alternative Agricultural Futures. Resources for the Future Press. Washington, D.C. 260 pp.
Nassauer, J. I., and Corry, R. C. 2004. Using normative scenarios in landscape ecology. Landscape Ecology 19: 343-356. https://doi.org/10.1023/B:LAND.0000030666.55372.ae
Santelmann, M.V., White, D., Freemark, K., Nassauer, J. I., Eilers, J. M., Vache, K B., Danielson, B.J., Corry, R.C., Clark, M. E., Polasky, S., Cruse, R.M., Sinfeos, J. Rustigan, H., Coiner, C. Wu, J., Debinski, D. 2004. Assessing alternative futures for agriculture in Iowa, USA. Landscape Ecology 19: 357-374.
Nassauer, J. I., Corry, R. C., and Cruse, R. 2002. Alternative future landscape scenarios: A means to consider agricultural policy. Jnl Soil & Water Conservation 57:2, pp. 44A-53A.
Nassauer, J. I. 2002. Agricultural landscapes in harmony with nature. pp. 189-193. (Revised and reprinted from Visions of American Agriculture, Wm. Lockeretz, ed. 1997) In Fatal Harvest, Douglas Tompkins, ed. Island Press, Washington, D. C. 384 pp.
Nassauer, J. I. 1997. Cultural sustainability: aligning aesthetics and ecology. In Placing Nature: Culture in Landscape Ecology. J. I. Nassauer, ed. Wash, D. C., Island Press: 65-83.
Nassauer, J. I. 1997. The Landscape of American Agriculture: A Popular Image and a New Vision, in Visions of American Agriculture, Wm. Lockeretz, ed., Iowa State University Press. Pp. 59-76. Nassauer, J.I. 1992. Prospect: Bringing Design to the Rural Landscape. Landscape Architecture 82: 136.
Nassauer, J.I. 1991. Using Design to Reveal the Intention of Agricultural Conservation. The Rural Landscape. 4:1.
Nassauer, J.I. 1989. The aesthetic benefits of agricultural land. Renewable Resources Journal 7:4.
Nassauer, J.I. 1989. Agricultural policy and aesthetic objectives. Jnl Soil & Water Conserv 44:5, pp. 384-387.
Nassauer, J.I. 1988. Landscape care: Perceptions of local people in landscape ecology and sustainable development. Landscape & Land Use Planning, 8: 27-41. Amer. Soc. of Landscape Architects, Washington DC.
Nassauer, J.I. 1988. Vernacular aesthetics and new policies for the rural landscape. The Rural Landscape 1:2. Pp.1-5.
Nassauer, J.I., and R. Westmacott. 1987. Progressiveness Among Farmers as a Factor in Heterogeneity of Farmed Landscapes. In Landscape Heterogeneity and Disturbance, M.G. Turner, (ed.), Springer‑Verlag.
Coen, D., J.I. Nassauer, and R. Tuttle. 1987. Landscape Architecture in the Rural Landscape. Landscape Architecture Technical Information Series 10, 7:1. American Society at Landscape Architects, Wash, DC.
Nassauer, J.I. 1986. Caring for the Countryside. U of MN Ag. Exp. Station. St. Paul. AD‑SB‑3017.
