1 Introduction

Landscape architecture has celebrated multiple scales of practice throughout its short history as a profession, spanning from garden design (with examples from Thomas Church and Roberto Burle Marx) to urban parks (famously, Olmsted in Central Park, NYC) to regional planning (such as Ian McHarg’s layer cake approach as outlined in Design with Nature 1969). At the same time, it was concerned with numerous social and political issues tied in one way or another to the production of the built and unbuilt environments, where Olmsted and Burle Marx’s work again comes to mind. Yet, as pointed out by Steinitz (2016), contemporary landscape architecture appears to be little concerned with its political dimensions despite the extremely valuable work of Barbara Bender (1993), Egoz et al. (2011), among others.

In recent decades, several scholars and practitioners have denounced this trajectory and proposed frameworks that offer what we might call a scalar fix to the discipline’s political shortcomings by “going big” and scaling up their interventions. These frameworks for designing and planning larger-scale landscapes and regions complement McHarg’s earlier work and range from Kongjian Yu’s “Art of Survival” (2006) to Carl Steinitz’s influential notion of Geodesign (2003, 2012). Our contribution in this article is similarly concerned with actualizing the agency of landscape architecture in addressing sociopolitical issues and scales that could just as easily fall within the domains of geography and urban planning, such as border regions. However, our viewpoint differs significantly from McHarg, Yu, and Steinitz’s largely environmentalist approaches in our flexibility of scale, scope, and method, and we put humans and human perceptions at the core of our approach.

Landscape architects should engage with large-scale and heavily politicized territories. But they should do so by working with the myriad systems of interrelationships that constitute a landscape and its entanglements and complexities. In this paper, we use Félix Guattari’s The Three Ecologies—the social, environmental, and subjective ecologies—as a framework for discussing the complexities of landscape (Guattari 1989). Echoing Arnes Naess (1973, 1989), Guattari calls for an “ecosophy,” or “ecological philosophy,” that takes a holistic view of the relations between people and the environment, nature, and culture. For Guattari, combining the environmental with the social and subjective is essential when considering the future of cities and regions. When we view these systems separately, as is most often the case, we end up producing flattened, disembodied, and even dangerously myopic accounts and proposals. This entangled understanding of the social, environmental, and subjective could lead to a more complex, people-centered, and multiscalar methodology to regional questions—an “ecosophical” approach in which landscape architects could play a central role.

Thus, in this article, we ask: How can ecosophy help us assess and design regions? And in which ways does this approach differ from existing city planning and environmental landscape planning approaches? In a research project commissioned by two local governments on either side of the Irish-Northern Irish border in 2018, we were asked to imagine how their cross-border landscapes might change in the wake of Brexit and other looming transformations such as climate change. During that project, and through fieldwork, we engaged with different human and non-human actors and how they interact with their cross-border landscapes on an everyday basis—from roads to rivers, to fly fishers. The present article and driving research questions thus arise from this experience and the impossibility of addressing the complexities of the Irish Northwest (or any other large-scale landscape) under dominant city and environmental planning frameworks. This article should thus fill a gap in practice and research by discussing the limits to contemporary frameworks for dealing with large-scale landscapes while offering a conceptual and methodological alternative—what we are calling here a regional ecosophy.

Taking the Irish Northwest Border region as an example, then, we outline what an ecosophical approach to regional questions could entail and how it should differ from both geography and planning and from existing environmentalist frameworks by considering the sensual, haptic, and subjective dimensions of landscape. Or, to put it differently, by recognizing that the phenomenological and temporal skills of the landscape architect also apply to regional questions and provide invaluable insights into the sensitivities, nuances, and complexities that are particularly necessary in designing border landscapes. We contend that such an ecosophical approach should foster a critical assessment of quantitative data and the hegemony of the plan view when dealing with “large issues.” It should focus on inter-linking inter-scalar relationships in a rhizomatic manner, from the very small to the very large, rather than nested conceptions of scale that operate like a series of Russian dolls having to cascade through one organizational level to reach the next. Finally, this ecosophical approach to regional questions should take the iterative character of the design process seriously, starting with the critical phases of so-called “data gathering” and “contextual understanding” and engaging in fieldwork throughout. In other words, it should force the landscape architect to work inductively, rather than deductively, trying to formulate the “right” questions through ethnographic interactions rather than rushing to provide the “right” answers with a false appearance of data-backed objectivity (Deming and Swaffield 2010, p.152).

In what follows, we will present (2) the specific context of the Irish Northwest in the wake of Brexit and the challenges entailed for the region’s cross-border landscapes—the example through which we will outline the ecosophical approach. (3) We discuss the limits to common city-centric planning approaches and policy tools, such as city-region designations to address border regions in Europe. (4) We also discuss the limits to environmentalist landscape planning at a regional scale when dealing with similar complex and highly politicized territories. (5) We further define what we mean by an ecosophical approach and why we see it as a productive conceptual and methodological maneuver in such contexts as the Irish Northwest while flagging the distinct contributions that landscape architecture could make to both urban studies and international politics.

2 Brexit and the Irish Northwest: a regional (and highly politicized) landscape

Maps of Ireland from 1921 onwards invariably show a divided island: The six counties of Northern Ireland are set apart from the 26 counties of what is now the Republic. Yet, despite the border’s intractable presence on the map and on the ground, the border is mostly invisible since most vestiges of it were eradicated after the Peace Process of the 1990s. Visitors, in fact, struggle to know which country they are in and only know the line has been crossed when a mobile phone signal changes or from the formats of road signs. Many institutions in the area also predate the border (Fig. 1). Church diocesan boundaries, for instance, date from an earlier period and thus do not follow the international division. Other bodies, established since partition, thrive on forms of exchange that the border enables. Cross-border bus companies, for example, fill the void left in the absence or inability of the states to cross the political line.

Fig. 1
figure 1

The juxtaposition between one of the many maps depicting Ireland (Éire) and Northern Ireland, in the UK of Great Britain and Northern Ireland (GB), as divided by a stark line and the ground-level reality in which the border is but a subtle change in the asphalt. For reference, the distance between Londonderry (Derry) and Belfast is around 70 miles. The left image was obtained from alamy.com; the right photograph by Charles McQuillan was obtained from Getty Images

Full size image

However, the Irish Northwest is not just a cross-border landscape between two jurisdictions or an insular coastal area. It is an incredibly rich palimpsest of histories of colonization and rebellion, migrations, nation-building projects, religious struggles, languages, farming practices, and complicated family ties (Donnan 2005; Hempton 1996; Wilson and Donnan 1998). The border has been both a guardian of peace and a source of strife on the island since it was first drawn in the winter of 1921–1922 when Ireland was divided into the Irish Free State (which became the Republic of Ireland) and the statelet of Northern Ireland, founded on the principle of a majority of the population favoring the continued union with the UK. The civil rights marches of the 1960s were then succeeded by the Troubles—in which over 3500 people lost their lives. This conflict ended with the Northern Ireland Peace Process and the Good Friday Agreement of 1998.Footnote 1

One intractable aspect of the Troubles was the Republic of Ireland’s claim over the territory of Northern Ireland. Article 2 of the Constitution of Ireland (1937) stated that the nation consisted of “the entire island of Ireland, its islands and territorial seas.” This territorial claim could not be dropped without disenfranchising the 40% of Northern Ireland’s population who wanted to be part of Ireland. Following the Good Friday Agreement of 1998 that marked the end of the Troubles, Article 2 of the Constitution of Ireland was changed by an overwhelming majority through the Nineteenth Amendment of the Constitution Act. Of the Irish electorate, 94% voted to replace the once territorial definition of Ireland with a people-based one. The Constitution now reads: “It is the entitlement and birthright of every person born in the island of Ireland, which includes its islands and seas, to be part of the Irish nation” (Constitution of Ireland, Art. 2, 1998).

One of the diplomatic geniuses of the Northern Ireland Peace Process was thus to bypass territorial imaginations by redefining the Irish nation as the people born on the island of Ireland—allowing anyone born in Northern Ireland to choose whether they were Irish, British, or both. The third space of the European project, which resulted in the European Union, was an essential component of the negotiations that led to the breaking of the binaries that perpetuated the Troubles. With the newfound peace process, the border was opened up, and most signs of the border were removed.

On June 23, 2016, barely 20 years after the Good Friday Agreement, the UK voted to leave the EU, while Northern Ireland and Scotland voted to remain. The prospect of the UK leaving the EU meant that the border between Ireland and Northern Ireland would become the only land border between the UK and the EU. This meant the possibility of new customs controls, bringing back a hard border and a land-based, territorial definition of both Ireland and Northern Ireland, ending the virtuality in which being Irish and British were not incompatible anymore, and reinstating the binaries that too often define border landscapes. It also meant the possibility of turning what had become a fluid boundary between multiple overlapped peoples, sensitivities, and everyday practices into a stark divide between two territories (Hayward 2021).

It is in this context that the Ireland and UK national governments, including local governments in the Irish Northwest border area—Derry City and Strabane District Council in Northern Ireland and Donegal County Council in the Republic of Ireland—formed the cross-border partnership of the Northwest Regional Development Group (NRDG). It is also in this context that, with the approval of the NRDG, in 2018, the councils came to the Harvard University seeking new imaginations for how to plan and design their cross-border landscapes.

Brexit had got both councils thinking about the future of their cross-border landscapes—as one official explained, it is “the most pressing issue we face.” They were concerned about the likely impacts on the border area of the UK’s decision to withdraw from the EU. No one wanted to return to the hard border with checkpoints and customs of the past, and yet, as another official admitted, “It is hard to imagine how to address this situation from our offices where we have been for decades.” In turn, both governments had been overwhelmed with quantitative reports and predictions on the potential negative impacts of Brexit on their national economies and their ability to attract tech companies, manage freight transport, etc. Yet they had very little insight into how it might affect their everyday lives—something that was rather obvious to the council members as residents of the Northwest who remembered the Troubles.

Thus, when the councils came to the Harvard University, we argued that landscape architecture could have a say by taking an integrated, fieldwork-based approach—an ecosophical approach, that is—and received the project’s commission through the Critical Landscapes Design Lab. Building on the prior studio experiences by Schwartz and Lefebvre in Northwest Ireland (2007), and the Sustainable Future for Exuma project (Mostafavi and Doherty 2016, p.188), we contended that the discipline could provide new creative imaginations for the Irish Northwest (an area where planning and design decisions do not usually involve landscape architects) and address not only the challenges that Brexit could potentially pose, but also other looming transformations such as climate change. And it could complement existing governmental reports by offering insight into the complex web of memories and subjectivities, everyday social and economic practices, and rapidly changing ecological dynamics—Guattari’s three ecologies—that weave together the Irish Northwest.

3 The limits to city-centric planning designations: city-regions vs. border landscapes

One solution to the Brexit conundrum proposed by the local governments was to designate the Northwest as a “city-region”—a policy designation that gained popularity in Western Europe in the 1990s to ensure cross-border mobility and development for cities near borders, as with the famous Øresund region between Denmark and Sweden. By the time this research project started in 2018, the notion of city-region had become so widespread that both counties’ officials saw it as the self-evident path forward for the Irish Northwest. They surmised that a city-region designation would help establish the Northwest as an economic powerhouse, a destination for investment and tourism, and provide a framework for a long-term partnership between the local governments, bringing together both jurisdictions while recognizing their independence.

However, the actual definition of city-region remains vague, allowing for different governments to mobilize it in different ways, oftentimes as a strategy to foster rapid regional development and economic growth (Brenner 1999). According to economic geographer Andrés Rodriguez-Pose, a city-region is generally characterized by “the presence of a core city linked by functional ties to its hinterland [including] a combination of economic, housing market, travel-to-work, marketing, or retail catchment factors” (2008, p. 1027). Other geographers such as Scott et al. (2001) have complicated this definition by arguing that this “urban core” may be substituted by multiple cores, making the city-region a polycentric geographical unit. Yet others have even included identity and a number of social, cultural, and historical factors as essential elements in the definition of a city-region (Davoudi 2003; Paasi 2003, 2011).

Across these various definitions, the notion of city-region appears characterized by the presence of urban agglomeration(s) that act as a core and an adjacent hinterland that is functionally tied to it, much like a sunny-side-up fried egg. In other words, it is a policy designation that privileges city-centric understandings of what constitutes a region to ensure economic growth and development. It embraces a territorial approach that places a finger on city cores and tries to determine an adjacent boundary based on different functional ties—travel-to-work times being the most common.

A city-region designation thus presents a number of shortcomings, especially when trying to address a dispersed, overwhelmingly rural, and highly politicized region such as the Irish Northwest that developed informal border ecologies over the decades. First, such a city-centric, functionalist notion appears to be essentially foreign to the decentralized manner in which the Irish Northwest functions and has developed over the centuries. Although home to Derry-Londonderry, the second largest city in Northern Ireland with over 80,000 residents, and Letterkenny, with over 20,000 residents, the region spans far beyond these nodes with a population of well over 200,000 depending on where you draw the region’s boundaries. It comprises a network of small towns, villages, and settlements dispersed throughout a mostly agricultural landscape (McSheffrey 2000, Ch. 4). In fact, most towns and villages in the region date only to the British colonial invasions of the seventeenth century. In this decentralized context, focusing on city cores as the gravitational center of the region appears misguided (Fig. 2).

Fig. 2
figure 2

The twin towns of Lifford and Strabane straddle the Irish border along the River Foyle. The border as a line becomes imperceptible, and yet you can still find its imprint in the layout of the settlements and the field patterns around it. The image was produced by Pol Fité Matamoros using satellite imagery from NASA’s Earth Observatory and is available at http://zoom.earth/

Full size image

Second, a city-centric focus on functional ties, such as home-to-work commuting, risks oversimplifying the many multi-vectorial ways in which the region is interconnected through its inhabitants' increasingly diverse economic practices—from agriculture to manufacturing, to services, to tech industries (NRDG 2022). It risks taking for granted peoples’ routes and the reasons they move around while subsuming all the social practices that enable social differentiation and peaceful coexistence such as gardening, going to church, and playing sports. A city-centric focus also ignores the complex border economies that had developed over the years thanks to operating with two different currencies and administrations that people had managed to leverage in their favor. In other words, such a city-centric and functional approach risks flattening social variance by construing a single, universal subject whose sole activity is to commute from its periurban or rural home to what is assumed to be an urban job.

Third, the territorial notion of city-region hinders the possibility of addressing the many processes that interconnect the region and constitute it as a landscape at multiple scales, often spanning beyond parameters such as travel-to-work time. It precludes thinking metabolically and addressing larger key processes such as food production or waste management that bind the constellation of cities, towns, and farms across the Irish Northwest with its bogs, fields, and rivers. It completely obliterates all non-human actors and ecological dynamics that do not abide by human-centered boundaries and scales.

Thus, when officials from both city councils showed us one of the earlier unpublished maps for the city-region using questionable work-home commuting data, the resulting area effectively cut off a series of peninsulas (Inishowen, Fanad, and Rossguil) and other rural areas. In other words, it produced an image that effectively dismembered the region’s mental, social, and ecological map, severing several of its farms, bogs, villages, and floodable areas from its larger towns (Fig. 3). Against the backdrop of these city-centric planning limitations, our attention must now turn to the other key contender in the field of regional design: Environmental(ist) landscape planning.

Fig. 3
figure 3

Proposal for Northwest Metropolitan Area Spatial Plan for the Irish Northwest as a City-Region based on travel-to-work times. The proposal effectively cut off the peninsulas to the north. Redrawn from All-Island Research Observatory and International Center for Local and Regional Development, Northwest Metropolitan Area Spatial Map (MASP), 2019

Full size image

4 The limits to environmentalist landscape planning: modernist/rationalist myopia

When trying to go beyond the limits of city-centric planning and policy designations and consider the broader processes in the design of regions, environmentalist landscape planners such as Ian McHarg, Kongjian Yu, and Carl Steinitz have produced some of the most influential work. Since the late 1960s, with McHarg’s famous Design with Nature, this environmentalist tradition of scholars and practitioners has made the case for actualizing the agency of landscape architecture by upping its level of concern and intervention at the regional scale and beyond.Footnote 2 This was the case for McHarg when arguing for a regional focus on the watershed as the base unit of landscape design and management (1969). It is also the case with Yu’s contemporary understanding of landscape architecture as the new art of survival, with examples like the Taizhou urban growth pattern based on landscape infrastructure (2006, p. 32). And it is again the case with Carl Steinitz in projects such as Alternative Futures for Changing Landscapes: The Upper San Pedro River Basin in Arizona and Sonora Steinitz et al.(2003). Steinitz’s project deployed the framework of Geodesign to compile vast amounts of georeferenced data and produce myriad future scenarios, evaluating their outcomes simultaneously through feedback loops.

Let us consider Steinitz’s Geodesign framework as a paradigmatic example of such an environmentalist approach against which to evaluate the case of the Irish Northwest presented here, for it is indeed one of the most successful and influential. As discussed by Hollstein (2019) in their review of the framework’s history and application, Geodesign has proven a successful framework across the US and beyond, especially when addressing areas susceptible to desertification and deforestation. It allows for a broad array of variables—“data, information, and cultural knowledge” (Steinitz et al 2003, p.14)—to be woven into a series of landscape representations and future scenarios. This framework also engages with different stakeholders—defined as “experts and local actors who are able to distinguish between working and non-working processes and desired and undesired outcomes” (Hollstein 2019, p. 63)—as an integral part of the process that provides cultural knowledge and can evaluate their outcomes through different feedback loops.

However, as captured in Hollerstein’s review, Steinitz’s framework has also been brought to question on a number of fronts: It has been criticized for being too broad to be considered a coherent framework; for being geographically limited and better suited for the large and decentralized context of the US rather than smaller and more centrally planned territories, as in Japan; for being more theoretical than applied (a critique that was wielded before Geodesign began to influence planning work); for infra-defining the initial context and scope of the work, especially in complicated territories such as brownfields that arguably require a more expert setting of the site of inquiry; and for being too rational and obliterating the experiential and subjective altogether (Hollstein 2019, p. 64, building on Rittel and Webber 1973 and Thwaites and Simpkins 2006). We echo and expand on this latter critique—that of expert-driven, modernist over-rationality—with the example of the Irish Northwest.

Rittel and Webber’s (1973; also Chan and Xiang 2022) notion of “wicked problems” is particularly useful here to understand the limits of such modernist over-rationality when dealing with social relations, forms of subjectivity, and politics: We might agree that ecological systems follow specific laws that can be scientifically determined and apprehended. For instance, we may be able to understand how a process of desertification is taking place, the different factors that weigh in, and anticipate possible futures and modes of intervention. However, when dealing with social and economic relations and social needs, this question becomes trickier, for these relations are not governed by universal laws but by historically and geographically specific idiosyncrasies and everyday negotiations that vary from group to group. In the early-to-mid-twentieth century, high-modernist designers and planners already tried to scientifically determine the universal needs of Man (sic.) so they could optimize the social body. This approach caused much pain to the least-privileged groups across the globe with ill-fated high-rise housing developments, failed environmental engineering, de-contextualized transplanting of built forms, and en-masse demolitions—“Man,” as it turns out, was not universal but very masculine, and very French. Beyond high-modernist designers, the ethos of Modernism permeated governments across the globe through the idea that there was a single “public” whose needs could be determined by a central government and provided for—a notion still very prevalent today among planners and policymakers. The point that Rittel and Webber raised in the early 1970s as a critique of the ethos of Modernism is that if one takes social differences, practices, and subjectivities seriously, the needs and wants of various groups may turn out to be incompatible with one another and need to be negotiated—something that falls in the realm of politics, rather than of science. This means that there may be nothing to aggregate and optimize through a centralized “expert” framework or governmental apparatus when we deal with our social and subjective worlds and not with the laws of nature. Moreover, according to Rittle and Webber, designers and planners often have to deal with these kinds of “wicked” problems, where the question is not “how to make a transportation system more efficient” but rather “how to negotiate the incompatible needs of different groups”—one needing cars to find low-skilled jobs; another needing less cars, pollution, and noise, and more bike lanes and parks for their kids and schools; and another fighting bike lanes and parks for their role in gentrification.

Geodesign may indeed be able to input feedback from different stakeholders. Although, it remains doubtful how “stakeholders” are defined and whether you can readily dismiss those who do not fall under the definition of “experts and local actors who are able to distinguish between working and non-working processes and desired and undesired outcomes” (Hollstein 2019, p. 63). Nevertheless, the underlying rationale of this and other environmentalist frameworks is to apply the logic with which natural, law-abiding systems operate to sociological interactions. This leads to curated forms of participation governed by an expert who presumes that all forms of “data” will coalesce in a single, coherent totality. How does one talk about questions of history and memory through this system? How does one talk about social or environmental justice (i.e., the deliberate privileging, in a world of wicked problems, of the wants and needs of a particularly underprivileged group)? In a landscape such as the Irish Northwest, with memories of the Troubles still palpable, how does one discuss the religious and political sensitivities around which different groups organize?

Steinitz’s framework seems to avoid this question through another scalar move when claiming that the global is about “laws,” the regional about “broad patterns of change,” and the local about “direct experience, [since] designing a landscape at this level is not abstract, it is tangible” (Steinitz 2004, p. 120). However, this poses further problems: It reduces the social and the subjective to the local, ignoring their impact on larger-scale phenomena. It portrays scales as pre-existing siloes that hold little to no relationship to one another and abstracts larger scales to the point of considering them “intangible.” It also makes it very difficult to explore the interrelationships between law-abiding ecological processes (which may be easier to apprehend at larger scales) and the social and the subjective. And yet, as Guattari urges, the environmental, the social, and the subjective ecologies are interrelated, as are their scales of operation. This is to say that apparently large-scale phenomena, such as identity politics or social differentiation, also occur through minute sensory interactions like smell or touch. This idea has already been beautifully demonstrated by anthropologists such as Denyer Willis when discussing the role of soapy scents in the favelas of Rio de Janeiro for those usually deemed racially inferior and unclean (2018) or, famously, by the award-winning film Parasite, which portrays class inequality in Korea through body smell (Ho 2019).

The particular context of the Irish Northwest Border Region also poses another and more pragmatic problem for environmentalist frameworks such as Geodesign that rely heavily on existing governmental data—namely, dealing with two different jurisdictions. If census data is always limited by simplification that serves partisan interests, then, in a cross-border context, available data comes from two different countries and, hence, from two different “legibility projects” (Scott 1999; Zacka 2017). In other words, the data do not match in either its categories or in its scale and resolution. And it does not even capture the multitude of “informal” cross-border practices around which people in the Irish Northwest have built their everyday lives, including leveraging different housing regimes and school districts and navigating two currencies to fill their car's gas tank at a better price. How can we even begin to draft a shared mobility plan when data gathered on both sides of the border does not coincide or even report any form of mobility beyond formal and aggregate travel-to-work times?

It is against the limits to both city planning and environmentalist approaches to regional design that we defend the need for an ecosophical approach. One that brings together Guattari’s environmental, social, and subjective ecologies and engages in fieldwork to grasp the sensitivities and complexities of the landscape and its people and generate insight that is more attuned to its reality on the ground.

5 Taking an ecosophical approach to the Irish Northwest

So, what does an ecosophical approach to a region entail? If a landscape includes environmental, social, and subjective ecologies, then we need to understand the social and subjective components with the same complexity that we do the trees, plants, soils, and rocks that give form to landscapes (Gobster and Xiang 2012; Spirn 1984; Steiner 2002, 2016, 2022; Steiner et al. 2019). Such pluralization of ecologies has been challenged by some, including biophysical ecologists (Pickett et al. 2022). Yet if we are to work across fields, we need a common conceptual grammar and a set of methods to understand and work with these entanglements and complexities. We need methods that work with the systems of interrelationships that constitute the landscape rather than territorial, city-centric approaches that privilege certain forms of economic exchange. And we need site analysis methods that engage with the social and subjective with the same depth that environmentalist approaches deploy when it comes to ecological dynamics. Here, the embodied engagement of fieldwork, particularly landscape fieldwork, offers a method to understand landscapes from a multi-faceted perspective.

Landscape fieldwork is a way of understanding the complexities of landscape through analyzing lived experiences and relationships with humans and non-humans, such as plants, animals, and materials. It combines landscape architects’ projective skills and tools for site analysis, such as drawing, measuring, photographing, and remote sensing, with the ethnographic methods of anthropologists, including participant observation, unstructured interviews, and writing reflexive fieldnotes—all as an integral part of a design process (Doherty 2025).

In the context of this project in the Irish Northwest, we combined research with the teaching of two courses (one in design, one in design and anthropology) in a grounded and embodied approach that took the form of collaborative, multi-sited fieldwork. This is somewhat analogous to what anthropologists used to call “multi-sited ethnography” (Marcus 1995; Tsing 2005), which is better conceptualized now as “multiscalar ethnography” (Xiang 2013), albeit in a collaborative and multi-fieldworker format. This meant that 27 student–researchers were placed to live in towns, villages, people’s homes, and farms across the region on both sides of the border for 1 week, amounting to 29 weeks of fieldwork to add to our own 18 months of research. Anthropology and design students were paired up, and they were all asked to keep fieldnotes, drawings, photographs, sketches, and other forms of media to capture and reflect on their embodied engagement. These notes and materials were then collectively shared and interpreted.

Such a grounded, collaborative approach allowed us to cover an extensive geographical area in a short period of time while keeping the type of nuance and sensitivity required to discuss not only the environmental but also the social and especially the subjective ecologies. It allowed us to begin to understand the complex web of sensitivities and everyday practices that had flourished in the border context of the Irish Northwest, as well as its many complicated stories and memories. It also helped overcome the logistical problems that working with two administrations entails—namely, two forms of data gathering, two sets of planning rules and regulations, etc.—while adding insight and richness to the highly polarized discussion of Brexit.

The actual shape that this grounded type of landscape fieldwork took was varied. For example, a pair of landscape architecture and anthropology student–researchers based in the town of Donemana in Northern Ireland gave disposable cameras to residents to gather a visual portrait of their practiced landscape (Fig. 4). Another landscape architecture student–researcher based in Raphoe in the Republic tapped into their own interest in boxing to engage the Irish Northwest sport-scape and better grasp their leisure activities. Yet, another student–researcher stayed with a family of farmers and attended a series of agricultural meetings that offered a window into their forms of organization, production, and interdependencies. The aggregate results of these apparently minute and mundane experiences were palpable, as outlined below.

Fig. 4
figure 4

Mosaic of images showing everyday life in Donemana, Northern Ireland, taken with disposable cameras by residents of Donemana. This form of image collection was part of the collaborative fieldwork conducted by PhD in Anthropology candidate Courtney Wittekind and Master in Landscape Architecture student Estello-Cisdre Raganit for the seminar on Design Anthropology seminar offered by the Department of Landscape Architecture and cross-listed with the Department of Anthropology at the Harvard University

Full size image

First, engaging with people’s everyday lives showed very clearly the limits to the idea of city-region, flagging the many practices that would have been rendered illegible by this planning and policy designation. We learned from landscape fieldwork that sports like boxing or activities such as fly fishing lead most people to drive around and cross the border rather than home-to-work commuting. We also learned that most people leverage the border and the possibility of operating with two administrations and currencies in their favor, from purchasing lotto tickets to filling the tank of the car to changing residency for tax purposes or selecting schools. These were some of the key reasons why most people actively engaged with and superseded the border and some of the key practices that would have been first affected by a return to a hard border. By living with farmers and attending their meetings, we learned about their complex interdependencies and the very real ways in which they feared how a hard border might affect their livelihoods—something that big trade reports were obliterating by focusing, instead, on the large revenue figures linked to tech companies or freight transport. We learned, for instance, about the complex ways in which the border is sewn together by farming interdependencies, with a constant zigzag between ports receiving primary products from Latin America and the region’s animal feed producers that utilized them, the local cattle farms, the regional butter and milk factories, and the island’s main consumer centers (Fig. 5). In other words, we learned about the very tangible ways the Northwest farmers were experiencing the looming Brexit question—“To whom will I sell my milk?”—and the less recognized forms of cross-border exchange that needed to be protected.

Fig. 5
figure 5

The “Following Food” map provides a snapshot of the highly convoluted food flows that weave the Northwest together. Using a farm located near Strabane as a case study, this map traces the cycle of food necessary for the production of such basic products as milk and cheese. Map drawn by Pol Fité Matamoros and Master of Landscape Architecture student Jiyun Jeong

Full size image

In turn, the practices and memories that people in the Irish Northwest shared with us and our archival dig into the region’s history offered suggestive imaginations of how a cross-border region might be institutionalized (without imposing the foreign, simplistically territorial, and city-centric imaginations of a city-region). As we were told, the island of Ireland, and especially its rural areas in the Northwest, had already undergone a massive transformation during the mid-twentieth century with the Rural Electrification Scheme—a profound transformation not only in the island’s infrastructure but also in its lifestyle. However, rather than applying the new scheme to the entire territory zoned as “rural,” each parish or local area communally decided whether or not they wanted to join the electrification scheme. Word would spread by having schoolmasters knock on doors asking: “Are you getting the light?” (Doherty 2015). This not-so-distant memory interestingly suggested a bottom-up, people-based (rather than territory-based) form of membership—something not dissimilar to what was done in the Good Friday Agreement by redefining the Irish nation as its people rather than its territory. It suggested that other avenues for institutionalization in the Northwest may be conceivable as the region’s complex mosaic of social and religious groups could decide whether or not to join in a community-based manner, evaluating whether it makes sense for their everyday practices while maintaining a sense of self-determination.

Second, the array of insight gathered by doing grounded, embodied fieldwork pointed at the many entanglements between the environmental, the social, and the subjective ecologies that most environmentalist frameworks obliterate. For example, by engaging in landscape fieldwork, we learned about the complex social practices and memories entwined with bogs and hedgerows. We learned that residents of the Northwest identify with its yellow-flowered gorse (Ulex europaeus) and that its colors and smells are one of the ways in which different social and religious groups find common ground—a regional identification mark, as the Northwest playwright Brian Friel put it (2000). We learned that the Northwest residents can tell a Catholic farmer from a Protestant one by looking at their hedgerows since the former do not mind them looking unclipped, and the latter prefer them well-trimmed and clean-looking. We also learned about the histories of de- and reforestation in the region and about the very real draw to continue burning peat despite its environmental impacts because of its nostalgic smell (to the point that, in the Northwest, you can find peat-scented candles). It is, of course, fundamental to understand how hedgerows function as key ecological corridors and bird-nesting spaces in a mostly forest-less region. It is also fundamental to understand the effects of harvesting carbon-absorbing bogs and burning peat. But it is shortsighted, if not outright dangerous, to attempt to craft an environmental plan that ignores the meanings and social practices associated with those hedgerows or with those bogs. It is shortsighted because a plan that neglects how people actually live their lives and make their decisions, their social and governance arrangements, and their forms of subjectivity is doomed to fail—see, for instance, the past century of modernist planning. And it is dangerous because these apparently minute practices in which human and non-human actors come together (be it fly-fishing, hedgerow-cropping, or bog-harvesting) are key elements that weave together the social and political fabric of the Northwest. These activities enable social groups to assert differences and come together in a mosaic that recognizes one another through something akin to a regional identity.

Taking an ecosophical approach to the Irish Northwest thus allowed us to overcome the limits of narrowly city-centric planning approaches and single-minded environmentalist ones. It enabled us to provide both Derry City and Strabane District Council and Donegal County Council with an adequate set of tools to imagine and plan for the future through a series of insights that the type of “hard data” used in both city planning and environmentalist approaches tend to obliterate.

Most importantly, by focusing on such “soft” and mundane instances, everyday practices, and subjectivities, as well as their relationships with environmental dynamics, we discussed the otherwise intractable problem of two territories and a border—the very same that all “data”-heavy reports were perpetrating. As one official put it when presented with our final report, “This is diplomacy through drawing.” Indeed, whether focusing on the everyday practices of the inhabitants of towns like Donemana as an inquiry into ways of producing and navigating religious differences or exploring the hedgerows of the Northwest as a means to understanding not only ecological dynamics but how something akin to a regional identity is produced through their colors and smells, or attending farmers’ meetings as a way to unpack how the region’s primary sector operates as well as the fears of its farmers in the face of Brexit and climate change, these inquiries allowed us to overcome the binaries that often define border contexts and bring together different actors to imagine and plan for their shared future.

It is such granular, minute, complex insight that, in our view, renders the Guattarian ecosophical approach to landscape design presented here as “political” rather than “going big.” And what makes it big or regional in scale is not an attempt at unveiling laws through copious amounts of georeferenced data à la Steinitz, but rather an understanding that the yellow-flowered hedgerows and the farmer’s meetings are as much a vital means through which to grasp the broader processes that weave the region together as its rivers and geological formations. They are significant nodes that illuminate broader dynamics in an acupuncturist manner, however small and mundane they may seem at first glance (Solà-Morales 2006, pp.152–153; Boeck and Baloji 2016, pp.77–79).

It is in light of this experience that we defend the distinct contribution that landscape architecture can make not only to urban studies and environmental design but also to international politics: An ecosophical approach to a border region—one that deals not only with the environmental but also the social and the subjective ecologies—can grapple with the otherwise intractable problem of two territories and one line and offer better tools to imagine and plan for the shared future of their landscapes.

6 Conclusion

In this paper, we argue for an ecosophical approach to regional questions in which landscape architects can play a central role. Echoing the critiques of Steinitz and others about the need to actualize the agency of landscape architecture, we, too, have attempted to articulate a way in which landscape architects can have a say in large and politically complicated issues. Issues such as the transformations of the Irish Northwest Border Region in the wake of Brexit are often addressed by city and regional planners or by environmentalist landscape planners.

However, the ecosophical approach presented here is distinct from city planning and environmentalist landscape planning in that it puts people and human perception at the core. Using Guattari’s three ecologies as a conceptual framework, we were able to assay a fieldwork-based approach to the Irish Northwest that, if not comprehensive, complemented the overwhelmingly quantitative studies both governments had received. We maintain that this multi-sited, collaborative landscape fieldwork method can offer a complimentary set of tools with which both councils can operate. It also offers a situated approach that can be replicated elsewhere in other regional contexts. We demonstrated that such an ecosophical approach to regional questions could leverage the grounded, haptic skills of the landscape architect and yield somewhat different results than city and regional planning and environmentalist landscape planning.

First, it overcomes bounded, territorial, and city-centric imaginations of what constitutes a region (which, in the case of the Irish Northwest city-region, were also projecting dubious assumptions about how and where economic activities unfold or why people move around). Instead, by engaging in multi-stied, collaborative landscape fieldwork, we demonstrated that the region is interconnected in myriad ways and that home-to-work commuting was not even the primary reason why people move around. In turn, we were able to see that most social practices and cross-border interactions did not even show up in the official census and statistics, even though these were the practices that would be most affected by Brexit and the return to a hard border. Thus, by engaging in landscape fieldwork and considering Guattari’s three ecologies in an integrated manner, we could generate information that is more attuned to the region's reality—a particularly relevant engagement when dealing with two different jurisdictions and complex cross-border economies and ecologies.

Second, the ecosophical approach presented here complicates environmentalist approaches to landscape planning that work at such a level of detachment that they cannot but fail to recognize the social and the subjective—people, that is—as an integral part of the landscape. Instead, landscape fieldwork revealed that apolitical elements like hedgerows are not just a spreadsheet table of ecological diversity or a green corridor on an environmental map. They are one of the primary regional identifications that signal, through their smells and colors, a sense of belonging to the Irish Northwest and, by their trimming, the religious orientation of their owner. A failure to recognize these types of dynamics can only lead to a failure to imagine and plan the future of such corridors in the face of new development or climate change.

Third, taking an ecosophical approach to the Irish Northwest—one that not only engages in landscape fieldwork but also conceives of scale as a fluid set of flows and interactions rather than nested areas—allows us to see that a border is not a line but a landscape (Doherty and Fité Matamoros 2020). In other words, it allowed us to bypass the apparently intractable problem of two territories and one line and the binaries that too often define border contexts, addressing instead the myriad interrelationships that bind the region together. It allowed us to focus on boxing matches, the growth of gorse (Ulex europaeus) in roadsides, or the flooding of the River Foyle as the common ground on which to plan and imagine for the future, both acknowledging the generative politics of landscape architecture and moving beyond the paralyzing politics of Brexit.

As highlighted in the introduction, we believe that it is time for landscape architecture to engage in politically relevant questions by recognizing that (1) people are indeed part of the landscape and (2) the very minute or mundane is in relation to the very large. Taking what we have defined here as an ecosophical approach (one that addresses Guattari’s environmental, social, and subjective ecologies in an integrated manner and engages in landscape fieldwork throughout) offers a way for including people as an integral component of complex landscapes and for working across scales. It is thus that landscape architecture may bring to the table its distinctive set of tools to deal with highly complex and topical issues such as Brexit, bridging international politics with the sensitivities of a gardener to recognize that a border is, in fact, a landscape.