College of Environmental Design

The increase of wildfire disasters globally has highlighted the need to understand and mitigate human vulnerability to wildfire. In response, there has been a substantial uptick in efforts to characterize and quantify wildfire vulnerability. Such efforts have largely focused on quantifying potential wildfire exposure and frequently overlooked the individual and community vulnerability to wildfire. Here, we review the emergent literature on social vulnerability to wildfire by synthesizing factors related to exposure, sensitivity, and adaptive capacity that contribute to a population's or community's overall vulnerability to wildfires. We identify how those factors subsequently affect an individual's or community's agency to enact change, and highlight that many of the current paradigms for reducing wildfire vulnerability fail to acknowledge and address the importance of inequalities that create differential vulnerability. We suggest that paying attention to the systems and conditions that give rise to such vulnerability can ameliorate these shortcomings by centering solutions which address adaptation equity rather than landscape outcomes.

This book, which has been developed from the original presentations at the symposium, presents the thoughts of a select international group of landscape architects and historians who discuss the subject of planting design through the lens ...

The horizon represents the key datum and perceptual limit within a landscape. As we move, new territories and events cross the threshold of our individual horizons and enter our field of perception. As representations of both the corporeal world and future projections, landscape design visualizations are also conditioned by their horizons. When included in bird’s-eye views, a horizon provides lift and flight; without this critical orienting datum, the viewer may be vulnerable to perceptual vertigo. For the Cartesian projection of illustrative plans, the horizon takes the form of the edges of the page. Here, the frame separates the field of representation from the background world. In analogue representation, the first act was to define the frame before drawing could commence. However, 1:1 scaled digital mapping allows this definitive act to be deferred indefinitely. This results in weak frames that ineffectively decipher the representation of a portion of the world. Because designs are small and landscapes are apparently endless, the horizons of effective illustrative plans and bird’s-eye views are defined with great care. Only then can frames and horizons be graphically transcended.