ABSTRACT
Increasingly , ecology is coming into focus as a strategy and system in the design of urban infrastructures and performance of urban economies. 1 This contemporary change is largely attributable to the massive transition from industrialization to urbanization worldwide in the past century made visible by three cumulative shifts: the rise of environmental concerns since the 1970s, the crisis of public works planning in the 1980s, and the erosion of post-war engineered structures from the 1990s onwards, whose legacy total more than 2.2 trillion dollars in urgently needed reinvestment. 2 , 3 Contributing to the rising agency of the field of landscape, this transition is further amplified by the effects of population pressures such as regional dispersal, transnational migration, geopolitical borders, and capital flows, as well as from environmental pressures such as carbon consumption, atmospheric emissions, chemical effluents, groundwater depletion, floods, droughts, sea level rise, soaring energy costs, and rising food prices. Although tremendous attention has been given to the magnitude of these challenges, the scale and frequency of infrastructural disasters and technological accidents continues to rise at an alarming rate. The upward sloping timeline of events in the past three decades is the most blatant indicator: sudden power outages in the Northeast, rolling blackouts in the Southwest, bridge collapses in the Midwest, as well as oil spills, hurricanes, and levee breaks along the Gulf Coast. 4
