RURAL DESIGN BUREAU
Anne Loftin Weber is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at Cornell University
Michael Luegering is an Assistant Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Virginia and Co-Director of the Natural Infrastructure Lab
The Rural Design Bureau works at the speed of the communities they live in. Anne Loftin Weber and Michael Luegering both grew up in rural communities before meeting at Harvard GSD during their MLAs. After, the duo both found themselves in New York City, practicing at the high profile firms - SCAPE and MVVA. Following careers working on urban projects, Weber and Luegering both found a way to reconnect with their passion for rural communities through teaching and research. Weber took a Assistant Professor position at Cornell University where she runs a ‘Rural Adaptations’ research seminar, and a studio on the Black Dirt region of New York. Luegering recently joined the faculty at the University of Virginia as an Assistant Professor and co-director of the Natural Infrastructure Lab.
The Rural Design Bureau has emerged to fill a void in the design landscape. They have not only positioned themselves in agricultural communities and regions, but they have rooted their design methodology in the way those communities operate. They deliberately work at a slower pace, building deep relationships with the people and land they work with. They apply the tools of design to create practical, nature-based solutions to things that many design firms would overlook, such as ditches and substrate stockpiles. In their DIALOGUE, Anne and Michael have provided a survey of the rural design landscape and a thoughtful way of working within them. They are an emerging voice on this topic and we’re thrilled with the insights they shared below.
Michael Luegering (left) and Anne Loftin Weber (right)
How did Rural Design Bureau (RDB) emerge? Why have you focused your research and practice in the rural context?
Anne:
Rural Design Bureau emerged naturally from a shared interest in the rural landscape, as well as a critique in how rural landscapes were approached, if at all, in contemporary design fields. Though we both went to graduate school in a coastal metropolis, Michael and I both grew up in rural places (him in Kentucky, and me in southeastern Illinois) and quickly bonded over both our interest in working in the contexts similar to where we grew up. We saw a vacuum of work in the types of landscapes and communities we cared most about. At the time we were in graduate school, the dominant approaches to rural landscapes were ‘territorial’, influenced by regional planning precedents that worked at large scales, as well as approaches of ecological urbanism, and at the time, both tended to rely on top-down, centralized approaches to design. While there are merits to these approaches, rural regions were typically understood as hinterlands, as extensions of urban processes and operations. This mode of design tended to rely on large-scale mapping with rough-scale GIS analysis that often approached rural areas as cultural tabula rasa, focusing more effort on mapping environmental conditions than investigating these regions as complex cultural landscapes, with stakeholders as diverse and histories as long and contested as an any urban site. So the types of projects that tend to happen in this kind of approach assume that we could, for example, tell 500 different small-scale landowners on a complex range of soils (or parcels randomly assigned as ‘vacant’) to apply the same design detail. This is in direct contrast to the sensitivity more common in urban work that is rooted in community engagement to develop more nuanced design solutions. Why don’t we apply the same approach to rural sites, and consider how unique cultural and ecological conditions, building from local knowledge, could create sensitive, site-specific design? How do we see the role of community cooperation and generational private land holding as symbiotic?
The history of geography and large-scale mapping has been used for leverage and power, relying on generalities from a single viewpoint. When we see ‘forested’ or ‘agricultural’ regions on a land-use map, without knowing them on the ground, it’s easy to think of these areas as open or vacant. Real communities and landscapes are incredibly diverse and complex, and it’s critical to balance work between a bottom-up and top-down capacity. This approach is very much how Michael and I seek to work. From slow engagement with a community to slow study of a nature-based infrastructure or design detail in its actual context, our work seeks to be deeply contextual. Some of our projects might partner with state or federal organizations, but always with some connection to a place and its people. Rather than building from large-scale abstractions, we seek out projects that grow from fine-grained interactions and analysis. We are proud to understand and draw on the nuts and bolts of seemingly simple details, from the procurement of seed to the box grading of a road to the trench cutting of a ditch. The everyday cultural landscapes of these regions are unique, subtle and rich with knowledge and welcome opportunity for design to learn and engage the landscape. To paraphrase JB Jackson, these methods are truly about speeding up or slowing down natural processes through a close reading of cultural practices and deliberate actions.
How does practicing in rural communities differ from working with their urban counterparts?
Rural communities, at least those in the United States, tend to be very wary of outsiders. There is a deep distrust of someone from the outside, especially those in power, telling them what to do. Trust building is a critical step in working with rural communities; however, the speed of a typical design studio model, with intense engagement that then disappears after three months, is probably the least helpful method you could imagine for building trust.
MICHAEL:
Part of building trust is having stake in the game, or the taking on liability and ownership of your ideas. It takes time to build trust, time to build proof, time to learn from others and time to demonstrate putting it all into practice at a believable scale. Sometimes there are early adopters because folks in these landscapes have been curious about these questions for just as long as we have. However, for many others, we need to build stake, liability and trust by testing experiments at-scale. As an example, my work at the University of Virginia’s Morven Sustainability Lab, in cooperation with the USDA-NRCS, is committed to studying plant propagation, landscape grading and plant migration protocols at-scale to address the impacts of saltwater intrusion and coastal erosion. Our studies are manipulating the soil and select plants to induce plant root activity and plant migration using the same tractors, tillers, backhoes and substrate stockpiles as the farmers of the target region to ensure our approaches are feasible, believable and conveyed in the local language. The goal is for this work to continue for years to come, demonstrating a dedication to learning about their landscapes.
Another way we seek to build trust is by developing a means of communication that is made in the image of the people it is intended to serve. The history of the Almanac as a home for the dissemination of socio-cultural information and best practices provides insight into a viable, elective avenue for landscape architectural practice in the rural context. My ongoing work with The Rural Design Almanac, from graduate thesis until now, is an important component of my research not only as a design tool but also as a method of conveying information to private land owners who must elect to engage these ideas. When we describe our approaches, we hope to use USDA bulletins, but we also hope to make a few changes over time, including the reincorporation of the learnings from the Almanac as an approach to knowledge exchange that embraces contemporary culture. What makes the almanac special is the way it blends and blurs the cultural elements, from seasonal foods and recipes to animal husbandry, and the critical nuts and bolts of applied sciences to provide a logic for how new approaches fit and fold the local lifestyle. I consider this approach to be very much, as a cultural, artful and scientific practice, core to Landscape Architecture.
At-scale research and development as well as the Almanac both hope to create bottom-up dialogue that expands the extension service’s base of knowledge. As an example, the USDA-NRCS's production of seed and therefore available species, is impacted by private market demand resulting in the ebb and flow of popular plants. Yet, at the local scale, many folks can speak to the robust and hearty species that if propagated at scale, could guide and influence the market and subsequent regional planting approaches. We look to create a dialogue, through application, that can help open new species to markets that have long driven demand.
ANNE:
Before studying design, my background was in documentary work, including photography and audio and writing, and those are tools that I try to bring into both research and teaching. For documentary work, building trust for a project could take weeks, sometimes months, to meet key stakeholders or knowledge keepers in any given community. For design work or research in rural areas, it is critical to reach out to and work with those who are already deeply trusted in the community and those who are already doing the work, in order to earn some legitimacy in the eyes of the community and learn from those who know the land best. Our first step in any project is to do a lot of listening and ask a lot of questions.
In my studios, I’ve been trying to work against the dominant studio model, and slow the pace of investigations. My goal is to layer research projects with studio work with follow-up exhibitions and other project types that all build upon each other over time. For example, I’ve been working in the Black Dirt Region in southeastern NY for a few years, funded generously by the Water Resource Institute (WRI) and working with the NY Department of Environmental Conservation. One of the main stakeholders, the head of the local Soil + Water Conservation District, has been a critical partner to working with the community. He knew every farmer in the region, and introduced me to local landowners who were open to discussing issues on their land, and greatly informed the research and subsequent studio. The community partners also brought in deep knowledge about the unique soils, flooding, and key sites that informed the studio scale and brief, and helped the students produce knowledge that the community partners themselves found valuable. For example, in analyzing the local hydrology, my students laboriously digitized a huge set of paper ditch-shed maps that legally defined where water could move throughout the region, which was the first time this critical information was made in a user-friendly format. The studio produced a 120-page report of its findings, and now I’m now working with the community partners to design a pop-up, traveling exhibition of the research, as well as a series of ‘toolkits’ that could be used by specific landowners to improve water quality, retain soil, or reduce flooding. Slowing down, conducting interviews and listening sessions, and considering how studio deliverables can be useful to partners, were all something I tried to incorporate in this project.
Black Dirt Studio: Leonard DeBuck of DeBuck Sod Farm
Rural regions are increasingly discussed as frontline territories for addressing climate change, while also being tasked with securing resources for urban populations? How do you balance the local needs of rural communities with the immense pressure they are receiving from national and global populations?
RDB:
Rural regions and national interests have always been entangled, and the mechanisms through which they are tied together are much more complex than a unilaterial model of direct extraction of resources. Federal policy is something that is essential to understand as a major player in rural landscapes and communities. For example, farmers don’t grow corn and soybeans because it’s their favorite crop. It’s because federal subsidies and corporate pressure have made the market greatly lopsided, making these crops some of the only dependable ways for some farmers to make a living. Joan Nassauer has written extensively about how changing the farm bill could have massive economic and environmental impacts on rural landscape futures and communities.
Land grant universities and agricultural education are another major player, especially in agricultural communities. Historian Deborah Fitzgerald’s book, “Every Farm a Factory’, discusses the role of land grant universities and extension agencies in convincing farmers to adopt new technologies and industrial farming practices, usually to the benefit of corporations and urban bankers who wanted to turn family farms into industries. The results, however, often indebted small-scale farmers and made them more dependent on a single crop, and less likely to be able to financially weather the instabilities of climate changes or global markets, a situation which continues to this day. While the extension system and regional education remain important institutions, historically, one of the major impacts to rural regions was a slow creep towards universal practices and approaches. The details and thinking on agricultural approaches applied in one location successfully, could then be repeated writ large in every community. No local knowledge or insights, no buy-in on the logic, just templates and applications. Another issue, stemming from repeatable approaches, was the solutionist approach to farming. Borne out of public perception and vilification of perceived agricultural practices and environmental degradation in the 1930’s, the Soil Conservation Service mandated a series of approaches on farmers to stem the tide of erosion, crop loss and water way sedimentation. The methods chosen to mitigate these issues were a series of chain reactions – one plant selected to control erosion soon became the invasive species that the next animal was introduced to kill off. These hyper-accelerated, top-down decision making and implementation processes often hurt rural communities and landscapes as much as they sought to helped them.
Balancing needs also comes back to a bottom-up approach to research and design. We don’t think any national or global initiative, no matter how well intentioned or researched, is going to succeed unless you get local buy-in. A good example is Obama-care. Though most people would greatly benefit, rural communities overwhelmingly vote against top-down centrally funded models of health care, and most top-down funded programs in general. It’s not just Fox News, but a deep distrust of federal institutions in most rural regions that goes back generations. Look no further than the Tennessee Valley Authority era, which mirrors the urban planning policies of the eminent domain. When the TVA looked to build the capping dams at the Land Between the Lakes, they engaged in nothing short of theft in driving rural communities off their land at pennies on the dollar. When they refused, they would lure them away with fake emergencies and burn down their homes. The stone used for both the Cumberland and Tennessee River Dams was extracted from a local quarry. The owner was told the stone was not capable of structuring a dam and that the TVA was doing him a favor to sell at the price offered. Against his better judgement he sold, and the TVA used the quarry for the block to build both dams.
It takes time to build back that kind of trust. Programs like payment for environmental services or carbon credits, for example, won’t succeed unless work is done at the local level to build trust, demonstrate these ideas, show their benefits to local farmers or landowners and create open dialogues about their benefits. This is where extension agents, local 4H clubs, FFA all can be key partners in building local knowledge and creating dialogue around new ideas. Designers could and should be a part of that dialogue in helping to test, illustrate and demonstrate these new ideas.
While there is a troubled legacy in land grant institutions (see this report ), there is also remarkable work being done at them across disciplines, and we feel lucky that one of us works at one. In the context of changing climates, land grant institutions offer great opportunity for helping rural communities build greater economic and ecological resilience at a local and regional scale. Their mission is focused public service through three branches: teaching, research, and extension. The extension programs are often well loved and trusted in local communities, just as certain local arms of the NCRS or Soil + Water Conservation Districts are as well. The ability to focus design research and project on the public good, and partner with a range of extension, local and state agencies is unique; and makes it a wonderful place to build projects and research.
What projects are you currently working on? Who are the stakeholders and partners in this work?
Michael:
I have been very fortunate to be included in a few exciting projects, with the largest focus of my time currently dedicated to Planning with Integrated Natural Systems (PWINS). PWINS, is an umbrella project with several subprojects focusing on the role of Nature-Based Infrastructure in climate adaptation. The project team includes the United States Army Corps of Engineers (USACE), United States Department of Agriculture’s (USDA) Natural Resource Conservation System and University of Vermont amongst other important partners. Current PWINS work focuses on two key areas including monitoring and adaptive management of plants and plant systems as well as hydrologically driven design iteration and coordination. Large scale monitoring and adaptive management research focuses on riverine and coastal landscapes, developing agriculturally minded adaptive management practices to produce disturbance invigorated planted form with the goal of addressing the impacts of coastal erosion, sea level rise, and saltwater infiltration. Monitoring research focuses further to develop novel data processing tools including the use of LiDAR and spectral remote sensing to track plant species movement and health with the aim to help guide USACE districts on adaptive management and monitoring plans. Hydrologically driven design iteration and coordination focuses on the role of conceptualization, iteration, and adaptation of numeric modeling systems in nature-based infrastructure projects, which blend conventional hard infrastructure and ecological infrastructure. Each of these projects is intended to help further the research and development of nature-based infrastructure, with the goal of centering adaptive management as a key component of engaging plants and people in the development of infrastructure.
I am also working as a member of the Coastal Resilience Management Plan Advisory Committee. The Nature Conservancy, building off of work by the Maryland Department of Natural Resources, is working to create a framework for resilient rural agricultural landscapes on the Eastern Shore of Maryland. As noted by the Nature Conservancy, “This Committee will inform the development of coastal, resilient protection frameworks that are adaptable to climate impacts, support both landowner and environmental goals, and that can be adopted by protection practitioners throughout the Mid-Atlantic region.” While my role is limited, I consider it an immense privilege to serve on the advisory committee and do my best to provide updates and insights from my ongoing research to the committee leadership. I am working to share and incorporate key findings from PWINS, especially around my field studies at the Morven Sustainability Lab, to increase relatability and trust in the development of management practices that engage coastal erosion, salt water infiltration and turnover/ migration of coastal plant species into agricultural fields. As an ongoing dialogue between rural farmers and The Nature Conservancy, I hope the recommendations I share can be a product of learning from their experiences balanced with our active testing at Morven using the same equipment and agricultural techniques. Both of these projects operate out of a research collective, the Natural Infrastructure Lab, co-founded here at UVA by Prof. Brian Davis and I.
Finally, I am a principal at LVA Landscape Architects. The bulk of our current projects are nuts and bolts Landscape Architecture, but with a growing bent towards ecological change, infrastructure and alternate funding sources for unconventional projects. My active practice, including licensure, allows me to balance my research logic with applicability and buildability as well as earn the trust of rural communities. Questions about rural culture, agricultural practices and the approach of contemporary design all rattle around and create (hopefully) positive influences on how I approach each aspect of the work.
Michael Luegering
Anne:
One main thread of work has looked at how rural landscapes within the Black Dirt Region in southeastern NY can be better designed as nature-based living infrastructures to improve water quality, reduce soil erosion, or improve flood resiliency. The Black Dirt is an incredibly unique cultural landscape, renowned for its expanse of black muck soils, the largest concentration of such soils in the United States outside of the Florida Everglades and, through centuries of engineering and drainage, the largest under cultivation. Altered hydrology and urbanization along its floodplain have made the waters of the Wallkill River that run through it some of the most polluted in New York state, while the low-lying lands and unique soils remain increasingly vulnerable to flooding, erosion, oxidation, subsurface fires, and subsistence amid changing climates. Through initial stakeholder-led research, the project expanded to look at the whole Wallkill River Valley, considering how upland urban areas and tributaries could work to reduce runoff to the valley, while nature-based infrastructures designed in the lowlands could start to reduce erosion and nutrient runoff. We also looked at where conditions might allow floodwaters could expand. This work has been supported by the NYS Water Resource Institute, in cooperation with the NY Department of Environmental Conservation, the Orange County Soil + Water Conservation District, Wallkill Watershed Alliance, and the Orange County Planning Department, along with several local farmers in the most flood-prone regions, including the head of the Drowned Lands Historical Society. Through interviews, fieldwork and workshops, the studio identified catalytic locations for designing rural landscapes as both living infrastructures and novel public spaces.
I’m now at work on a traveling exhibit of the resulting work. The exhibit, Black Dirt Futures, builds on the momentum of the studio to educate the public about invisible and urgent issues within the Black Dirt, and illustrate a set of site-specific green and living infrastructures ‘toolkits’ that can improve ecologic and economic resiliency within the region. We will have a pop-up exhibition that can move to different local events, meeting the Black Dirt community where they are, and hopefully opening up conversations about how the region can better adapt to increasing flooding, development pressures, and water quality issues within the Wallkill River Valley. This has been designed in tandem with some of our community partners.
Another project is looking specifically how ditch networks in rural regions can be designed as site-specific nature-based infrastructures. Ditches are often overlooked as ubiquitous in rural landscapes, but are one of the primary vectors of non-source point pollution, and a critical part of rural watersheds. I’m writing a grant now to do pilot research on Cornell’s Experimental Farms with project partners including Dr. Rebecca Schneider, a stream ecologist who is also an expert on the role of ditches in watersheds, and fellow ditch-geek. We’ll be testing a range of seed mixes and management protocols that consider both environmental conditions and needs (such as nutrient removal or erosion control) as well aesthetics and cues to care. To provide environmental services, ditches need to be unmown at key times in the year, which can make these areas look untidy, and so many landowners and road commissioners will just default to mowing them. How could we look at adding species with key bloom times or growth habits (such as low growing grasses) to create the perception of care? Rebecca has worked on this issue for quite some time, so I’m really building off her work with the tools of a landscape architect, thinking about what we can do to gain private landowner buy-in, and how design and aesthetics can engender local stewardship. The idea would be to develop a range of seed mixes that various private landowners could choose from, designed for specific needs. So maybe one landowner might choose a mix that supports local pollinators, while another might choose a mix that can help with nutrient run-off from an adjacent field. The stakeholders here are everyone in the watershed, from private landowners, to road commissioners and maintenance crews, to those who live downstream. You could imagine a project like this scaling up to help improve water quality in regions as large as the Chesapeake Bay as part of a TMDL plan.
I also view my teaching as an extension of the RBD work, including seminars and several studios that have looked at rural lands, from agricultural floodplains to experimental orchards to an upcoming studio on working forests. I’ve been lucky to also work with some wonderful thesis students on adjacent topics, such as Mark Schrader who explored how Cornell’s Experimental Farms could be leveraged to design and demonstrate nature-based infrastructures, Kelly Zhan who used extensive interviews with farmers to reimagine dairy landscapes in upstate New York (coining the term ‘Dairyscapes’), Akshai Wilkinson on species-specific conservation design in New Zealand, and Jimmy Lynch looking at how the heterozygosity of the apple could lead to experimental and resilient cider orchards. My students and research assistants are a core part of the RBD, which both Michael and I see as a collaborative group.
Cornell students learning about fruit trees.
What does Rural Design Bureau’s ideal future for the rural countryside look like?
There is no one rural countryside and our ideal future would be that there is no singular future. There are many ruralities—dry lands, forested lands, wetlands, tundra, working lands, indigenous lands, conservation lands, public lands—each with their own histories, vernaculars, communities and conflicts. The idea of a singular countryside derives from an idealized notion of the ‘rural’ as a place outside of urban centers (often with the ‘rural’ as a salve for urban ills), when rural communities are remarkably diverse ecologically, culturally and demographically. In that regard, we hope and seek to work on projects that avoid the capitol I – Infrastructure capitol P – Projects, projects that stem from top-down thinking. These ‘IP’ projects have a tendency to burden rural regions as the fixers, without any consent or agency in how these projects hit the ground.
The autonomy, cooperation, and elective discernment of directions for farming communities is a potentially optimistic outlook for rural landscapes. We imagine this would create not just one, but a variety of future outcomes. As noted by Carville Earle in The Myth of the Southern Soil Miner, too often top-down projects are positioned with moral and academic superiority. This continues to be a long and difficult part of rural history which seems poised to repeat itself once again, as ‘vacant’ spaces of rural landscapes are seen as the solution to the next big environmental issues... if only the residents of these regions will see the bigger picture. The political vilification of regions and peoples creates barriers from productive discussions. We are not opposed to big visions (in fact, we will need them!), but we believe that conservation practices are at their best when they focus on functions and impacts, build consensus, and emerge from dialogues, demonstration and co-learning, rather than top-down initiatives alone.
A great example of how rural futures could be built locally comes from the Rural Climate Dialogues in Minnesota, which operated in pilot form back in 2014-16. Here, a political cross-section of a small town is brought together with a group of scientists, designers, agronomists and meteorologists to discuss the current and future impacts of climate change not at the scale of melting polar ice caps but at the local scale. For example, how is drought and flood impacting local economies right now and how might that increase, and what types of actions might individuals or the local government take? The residents themselves are put in charge of coming up with their own list of priorities, and action items that are then brought up to state representatives. We think that this methodology, of dialogues not diatribes, offers an interesting model for designers to adopt in rural communities, and one of the best models for starting to image how we might work with a range of partners to co-design new, resilient rural futures.
Images provided by Rural Design Bureau
