Planning policy has been greatly influenced by ecological paradigms. Concepts such as empiricism, succession, metabolism, and most recently, non-equilibrium or flux, have profoundly shaped the way conceptualize, code, and design our cities. In order to (re)establish landscape architecture as an instrumental agent in the formation and transformation of urbanism, this talk will recount the links between ecological paradigms and comprehensive planning policy over the last century.  In charting the historical development of urban codes, we see two conditions emerge over time. The first condition is the regulation of land. The second is the regulation of use. This talk proposes a “third condition”, rooted in the inherent fluctuations of both. It asks why is land-use static when land is dynamic? In this condition, program, form, and use are enriched by landscape’s systems and processes.  The work probes this “third condition” by reconsidering design’s agency on matters of codification and land use in conditions of extreme landscape variability, such as coastal areas, as well as at the dynamic edges of the polynodal metropolis.

Fadi Masoud is a Lecturer in Landscape Architecture and Urban Design at Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Department of Urban Studies and Planning and the MIT Center for Advanced Urbanism. Masoud holds professional degrees in planning and landscape architecture from the University of Waterloo, the University of Toronto, and Harvard University, where he graduated with distinction. His current research and design work focuses on establishing relationships between dynamic large-scale environmental systems, landscape architectural design, and the instrumentality and agency of planning policies, tools, and codes. Masoud’s research and design work has been recognized through several international competitions, and has been heavily exhibited and published in numerous books and journals. He held previous faculty appointments at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and at the University of Toronto, where he taught design studios and seminars on urbanism, landscape, and visual representation.