Regenerative design

Productive landscape design and management

by Arash Alborzi

Interviewee bio:

Kieth Zaltzberg
Zaltzberg is an ecological designer who draws on his experiences as an organic farmer and permaculture teacher to create beautiful, vital, and productive landscapes. Working as collaborator, teacher, and guide, Keith empowers individuals, communities and organizations to understand, appreciate, and steward their landscape through design. Keith holds a Bachelors of Science in Environmental Design from the Department of Landscape Architecture and Regional Planning at the University of Massachusetts-Amherst and is a founding partner of the Regenerative Design Group.
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Regenerative Design Group is an interdisciplinary consulting firm and a leader in productive landscape design. Founded in 2009, RDG supports local self-sufficiency through food, resource, and energy security. RDG’s mission is to create energy efficient, agriculturally productive, and ecologically abundant habitats for people, plants, and wildlife. Their work centers around four main areas including ecological landscape architecture, regenerative agriculture, habitat restoration and ecosystem services, and community engagement. They address the aforementioned scopes by providing services including consultation, design, land stewardship, technical services, and education.

Comprised of backgrounds in ecology, farming, green building, art and design, and community engagement, RGD provides their clients with everything from broad scale master planning and site design to detailed planting design and construction documents. RDG’s mission is to collaborate with private land and home owners, farmers, building and design professionals, developers, communities, and organizations to create energy efficient, agriculturally productive, and ecologically abundant habitats for citizens, plants, and wildlife. In this interview, Keith Zaltzberg, Lead Ecological Designer at the Regenerative Design Group, who has done research, consulting projects, and has had a significant role in ecological design, is asked about the mission and experiences of their design group in the landscape industry.

Arash Alborzi (AA): The Regenerative Design Group offers a wide range of services such as consultation, design, land stewardship, technical services, and education. Could you elaborate on the relationships between your services and the title of your firm? How does the concept of being regenerative help you to achieve the targets of your design group?

Keith Zaltzberg (KZ): “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.” – Aldo Leopold in “A Sand County Almanac.”
Carol Sanford, a thought leader on regenerative practice and teacher of mine, wrote that “regenerative work” of any kind “must...be based on the understanding that every living being thrives or dies based on the whole systems within which it is nested.”

Regenerative Design Group is a landscape design and planning business that helps people with all aspects of landscape design and management. Our work encompasses traditional landscape planning and design projects for institutional and residential land owners, as well as broader-scale projects focused on increasing and protecting yields of natural and managed landscapes for farmers, forest managers, and governmental entities.

In all of our work at RDG, we endeavor to understand and serve the wellness of the multiple whole systems each project is nested within. This begins with understanding the inherent character of place and how the individual site fits into the larger social and ecological contacts. With this understanding, we revisit the goals of the client and ask, “how can your project grow into a living, evolving entity that increases the health and well-being of the systems it is embedded in? How can it activate greater resilience and adaptive capacity of the whole?”

On the technical and artistic side, we tend to seek activation through the use of interconnected green infrastructure and productive systems. However, without a transformation of the relationships people and their institutions have with the living world, no number of pollinator strips and rain gardens can address the ecological and social crises we are facing. So, in addition to designing infrastructure and plantings, much of our work focuses on resourcing our clients and collaborators in growing the purpose of their project and reimagining what long-term success looks like. This transformation often involves a move away from static one-time solutions and toward a more reciprocal, dynamic, and interactive relationship with place and community.

As designers, our primary challenge in the coming years is to rapidly help transform our aesthetics and imagination to appreciate the dynamism of living landscapes, and to build supply chains for materials that have social and ecological benefits from start to finish – cradle to cradle as William MacDonald might say – and beneficial and just social outcomes for all.

AA: How has technology been helping your group in providing your clients with the offered services?

KZ: The growth and innovation of technology in design, construction, and maintenance of landscapes has provided both opportunities and limitations to regenerative landscape design. Some innovations enable designers to provide transformational insights and services, while others render some ecological solutions impractical or unaffordable.
Take the now the near-continental coverage of high-resolution LiDAR data for North America. This areal laser-based survey provides an unprecedented understanding of the landform and land cover that can be used across scales for analysis and design. At the site-scale, our team can quickly produce topographic maps and model site dynamics for water, solar, and vegetation at a cost accessible to the average homeowner and non-profit organization. At a broad scale, it can provide transformational insights that can guide state policy and planning initiatives.

In Massachusetts, for example, we are working for the Office of Energy and Environmental Affairs to assess the health of soils across the Commonwealth and provide recommendations on policies, programs, and practices to protect and enhance soil resources in a way that enhances ecological and economic resilience while decreasing climate-related risks. This LiDAR data, combine with soil carbon accounting estimates from the NRCS, is allowing us to identify landscape patterns to guide strategic actions to unlock solutions or greater community scale resilience.

When it comes to physical interventions in the landscape, we employ technologies that enhance ecosystem health and social equity throughout the construction implementation and management processes as well as materials that enhances these things throughout their life cycles. The technologies we employ throughout the lifecycle of a project, from design through construction and into the management of a building or landscape influence the character and potential of that project. If we use design programs where it is easier to draw straight lines then curves, we might be more likely to propose straight retaining walls than on-contour terraces.

AA: As an ecological landscape designer, how responsive is regenerative agriculture regarding the worldwide food crisis in the US and other developed and developing countries? How responsive is urban agriculture in terms of food equity?

KZ: Regenerative agriculture, like any stream of regenerative work seeks to understand the entire living system and design strategic interventions that enhance the adaptive capacity and evolutionary potential of the system to serve the whole. The whole system of agriculture is comprised of smaller nested wholes including: production in the fields and forests of both rural and urban contexts; the aggregation, processing, transport, and distribution of that food; the cooking and consumption of food by people; and finally, the recycling or loss of food waste and human waste through nutrient management. A regenerative approach to agriculture requires the integration of all of these components of the larger food system, and seeks to enhance the social, cultural, and ecological dynamics. This level of integration and intentional design is a far cry from how the U.S. food system functions today.

Over the last twenty years I’ve helped dozens of farmers and organizations design and build regenerative farms and farm education centers. The thirteen urban farms I’ve worked on in the last five years, in addition to producing nutritious food close to the point of consumption, suggest that urban agriculture can offer direction for the regeneration of the larger American food system.

Because space in cities is generally in high-demand and hence expensive, urban agriculture tends to be intensive, rely on more manual labor, tends to grow a wider variety of crops for local tastes, be more visible, and touch more lives than rural U.S. farms. In this way urban farms have more in common with the larger global food system. According to the FAO’s 2014 report “the State of Food and Agriculture”, 84% of the world’s farmers grow on 5-acres or less. It has been widely proclaimed that these small farms produce more food crops per acre and support a much higher degree of biodiversity and crop diversity.

For people who live in the city, the fresh carrots and butterflies found on urban farms can help address the stresses of nature deficit disorder and fight food apartheid through more connection to nature and direct access to nutritious food. Organizations like Gardening the Community in Springfield, Mass. and the Urban Farming Institute in Boston have programs dedicated to inviting young people and people of color to engage in farming. These programs help build skills and create job opportunities, however, they also invite one of the most profound benefits of urban agriculture – the reclamation of farming by the ancestors of those who were forced into slavery historic America. Time and again, I’ve heard powerful accounts from leaders in the urban agriculture movement like Anna Mohamed from NOFA Massachusetts talk about transformation of African-heritage individuals and groups when they overcome the well-earned stigma of working soil. The reclamation of this essential component of being human and the empowering nature of providing for oneself and one’s family is a critical regenerative cultural yield of urban farming.

AA: Based on your philosophy, designing resilient and dynamic landscapes requires a design process that engages and responds to stakeholders. In your opinion, how familiar are citizens with the concept of ecological landscape architecture, specifically urban agriculture, and what is your suggestion for municipalities in order to implement these concepts into cities?

KZ: Over the past 20 years that I’ve been involved with ecological landscape design and farming, I seen a tremendous transformation and awareness of the need for greener cities and more ecologically managed landscapes. People and institutions are hungry for solutions that can provide the basic functions of their homes and cities in a way that also feeds the larger living landscape and ecology of the regions.
However, when it comes to the details of what these landscapes look like, how they function over time, and the maintenance and care the landscape need to grow and thrive, people’s thoughts are often foggy. Living landscapes are complex and dynamic. The fabric of our cities and towns, and more importantly, our cultural and aesthetic paradigm, have difficulty allowing for dynamism and management required by resilient landscapes.

In the city of Boston, significant praiseworthy work has been done to make agriculture a by-right use. The rezoning for urban agriculture which was effected through Article 89 made ground level, container, and roof-top farming allowable in most zones. However, it did nothing to facilitate the permitting and construction process of farm infrastructure through other city agencies. Because of this, a number of professionals including a civil engineer and general contractor are required to steward a farm through the process, resulting in a minimum price tag nearing $100,000 for just the basic farm systems of water, electricity, and soil.

To make urban agriculture more viable, cities should consider a whole-system review of the permitting and zoning processes for urban agriculture. This could include the streamlining of farm reviews across all regulatory agencies and subsidized water connections where appropriate.

Author bio:

Arash Alborzi
Alborzi is a doctoral candidate at the University of Florida, School of Architecture in Gainesville, Florida. Alborzi’s dissertation focuses on feasibility of urban agriculture in existing cities.