From the Past into the Future: The Utopian Roots of Ecological Planning in North America

Abstract

In the 1960s, ecological planning gained prominence in North America as a way for managing the dynamic and complex relationships between human settlements and the natural environment. In subsequent years, ecological planning developed as a planning specialization in North America, assuming a prominent role in discussions on the environmental crisis that persisted during the period. We argue that ecological planning emerged from the evolution of three initial fields of studies and activities: (i) English landscape gardening that was transmuted into genuine American landscape architecture; (ii) the management of the vast public domain, particularly by some federal agencies; and (iii) the concept of regional planning as advocated by the Regional Planning Association of America and then during the New Deal. In this paper, we conduct a historical review of these three fields, that we call roots, and then argue that utopian thinking and its translation into utopian communities in the United States, starting from the end of seventeenth century, represent the fourth field that contributed to the formative processes of ecological planning in North America. Additionally, we show how the past, in terms of utopian thinking, provides planning with a framework to confront current and future urban challenges.