Erz

As a landscape architect, I've come to understand that our relationship with the natural world isn't just about aesthetics or resources - it's fundamentally about ethics. The way we interact with landscape shapes our moral understanding. Our moral compass doesn't form in a vacuum. It emerges from the complex web of relationships we maintain - not just with other humans, but with the living world that sustains us.

We may have abandoned the notion that the sun rotates around the earth, but we have yet to challenge the equally unscientific and amoral notion that nature revolves around humanity.

The IRL Web
Imagine the natural world as an In Real Life (IRL) web - a vast network of interconnected natural and human systems. This network extends far beyond the digital interfaces we've grown addicted to. Unlike the internet, this web isn't optional. We're embedded within it, dependent on it, and morally accountable to it. Every breath we take is a reminder of our participation in this system: the oxygen produced by trees, the atmosphere maintained by oceans, the soil microbes that make life possible.
This isn't just poetic sentiment; it's a framework for moral decision-making. When we understand ourselves as threads in this living network rather than separate from it, our ethical calculations shift dramatically. Suddenly, what is right must account for our impact on the entire system, not just our immediate human concerns.

Moral Myopia in the Digital Age
The digital revolution has given us unprecedented access to information, but it's also accelerated our moral myopia. We scroll through news of environmental catastrophes with the same emotional detachment we bring to cat videos. This disconnection from the physical world hasn't just changed our habits, it's altered our response to moral situations, creating distance instead of empathy, reaction instead of direct action.
Consider how differently we respond to environmental harm we can touch versus what we merely read about. A child who watches their favourite tree being felled for development will experience moral outrage. An adult reading about deforestation might feel concern, but rarely the same visceral sense of wrong. This gap between direct and mediated experience has profound implications for our moral development. The very interaction we are engaged in now is digitally mediated, and a pale reflection of a face to face discussion.

The Ethics of Embodiment
Our bodies are not just vessels for our minds, they are our primary interface with the IRL web. This embodied existence carries moral weight. When we design places that cut people off from nature, we're not just making an economic choice, we're making a moral one. We're deciding what kinds of relationships people can have with the living world, and by extension, what kind of moral agents they can become. This is especially true in the design of schools and nurseries.
Research shows that children exposed to soil have better immune systems, that natural play enhances learning outcomes, that outdoor education builds confidence, that green space enhances mood and resilience. But a deeper implication is that our physical connection to landscape fundamentally affects our capacity for moral reasoning. A person who has never experienced the intricate relationships within a healthy ecosystem may struggle to understand why preserving such systems matters.

From Rights to Relationships
Traditional environmental ethics often focuses on rights: human rights, animal rights, even the rights of nature. But the IRL web suggests a different framework: a systems-based approach to ethics - inter-relationships and shared responsibilities. Just as we have moral obligations within our human families and communities, we have obligations within the broader ecological community.
This shift from rights to relationships, to understanding the IRL Web, transforms how we approach ethical decisions:
• Instead of "Do trees have rights?" we ask "What are our responsibilities within the forest ecosystem?"
• Rather than debating whether animals deserve moral consideration, we examine how our actions affect the web of life we depend on, including how our actions will affect ourselves and other people.
The question becomes not just "What can we do?" but "What maintains the health of the whole IRL Web?"

Moral Education in the Age of Screens
When children play in nature, they're not just building immune systems, they're developing moral intuitions. They learn cause and effect in real time. They experience being part of something larger than themselves.
They develop what philosophers call "moral imagination" - the ability to understand complex relationships and foresee the consequences of actions. This has profound implications for education. If we want to raise morally competent individuals, we must ensure they have direct, sustained engagement with the IRL web.
Virtual experiences, no matter how sophisticated, cannot fully replace the moral education that comes from putting your hands in soil, watching plants grow, or observing ecosystem relationships firsthand. We have to provide green education as a complement and counterbalance to increased dependence of digital education.

Beyond Dominion
The Hebrew concept of "radah" (stewardship) was mistranslated in the Bible as “dominion”. Understanding this error is a step forward from pure dominionist thinking, but today we need an even more sophisticated moral framework. Perhaps what we need is a model of moral partnership with the natural world. This partnership approach recognizes that:
• We are both shaping and being shaped by the landscape
• Our moral choices have ripple effects throughout the IRL web
• We have the capacity to either enhance or diminish the system's ability to sustain life
• Our own moral development is inextricably linked to our relationship with the natural world

Moral Literacy in the IRL Web
The challenge we face isn't just environmental, it's moral. We need to develop a new kind of moral literacy that reads not just human intentions but ecological relationships. This literacy must be grounded in direct experience with the IRL web.
Here's what this means in practice:
• Recognize that time in nature isn't just recreational, but fundamental to moral development
• Design communities that facilitate regular, meaningful interaction with natural systems
• Make ethical decisions that account for our embeddedness in the IRL web
• Develop educational approaches that nurture both ecological and moral understanding

Double Click on IRL
The next time you reach for your phone, consider this: What moral capabilities might you be losing by choosing the digital web over the IRL web? What ethical insights await in the complex relationships outside your door?
The choice isn't between progress and nature, it's between a truncated moral understanding and one that encompasses the full scope of our existence. The IRL web isn't just waiting for us to notice it. It's actively shaping who we are and who we can become as moral beings.
If we seek dominion over nature then we may well achieve it, but we should be careful what we wish for. If we remake nature in our own image, we may not like the picture of Dorian Gray that emerges.
Step away from the screen. Go outside. Pay attention. Your very breath depends on the green leaves and is sustenance for them. To imagine ourselves as lords of all we survey is the ultimate folly.

This post first appeared on https://moral-universe.beehiiv.com/

There is such a shortage of landscape architects in the UK, that there are empty seats across the country in practices small and large. At erz we have been advertising for YEARS and we just don't get applications from chartered landscape architects. This is because of:

• BREXIT making our European colleagues feel unwelcome
• the cost of studying for a long degree putting UK students off because they don't have the means
• the dominance of overseas students learning to be landscape architects - who then go home because they can't get a visa, or feel unwelcome, or both
• and the pressure to engage our young people in "STEM" subjects even though the creative industries are an economic powerhouse in the UK and always have been

Now the latest announcement from the Government is that the starting salary for a skilled person coming into the UK to get a visa will be raised from £26500 to £38500. How unbelievably out of touch that is with the sort of salaries most people earn, especially outside London?

To make it even worse, the removal of landscape architecture from their shortage skills list (a hard-won status achieved by lobbying by the Landscape Institute), will ensure we cannot afford to employ even new graduates from abroad.

This is an existential crisis for the profession of landscape architecture at time when we are most needed – we hold the keys to design for climate change management and mitigation of the biodiversity crisis. We are at the heart of positive changes to public health and to education. We are fundamental to survival. We take policy and turn it into places that enhance our daily lives, our health, our communities and the planet. We do it for modest salaries and are superb value for money.

What makes me absolutely most angry of all – and it’s a deep nasty feeling – is when our highly valued Chinese graduate; who everyone in our office loves and respects; who brings talent, creativity, work ethic, and kindness to our team; comes to talk to us at the end of the day today because she is panicking about her job, her livelihood and her future.

Just shameful.

This could be the start of a blog about gender bias in design but it isn’t. Last week I had a routine mammogram for the first time. The mammogram machine used was taller than most women and was a chunky construction of clean lined cream and black metal. To x-ray a breast, it has a device called a “bucky” which is two large moveable plates that clamp the breast and flatten it – it rotates so it can clamp both vertically and horizontally. It also moves up and down to address people of different heights. It is an entirely functional machine. It squishes the breast into a pancake for a few seconds and then releases after the x-ray is complete.

Breasts are all shapes and sizes, but one thing they are not is flat like pancakes, unless you are very unlucky. My mammogram was routine and voluntary and the lovely nurse who did it was at pains to tell me that I did not have to do it, because it clearly hurts.

It is really tempting to explore gender issues here – would men tolerate testicle screening that involves flattening their balls into pancakes? – but the less obvious discussion is about functionality versus humanity in healthcare design.

Functionality in design is essential but should never be the only consideration. In 2017 the mammogram machine was redesigned with smooth edges, a “spa-like” exterior, a plastic “ shawl” and a much smaller softer bucky. The new design is much smaller, less intimidating and more comfortable – it performs its medical function whilst offering reassurance, comfort and privacy.

At erz we design outdoor spaces for healthcare – although often what we are actually doing is redesigning single function outdoor spaces that have been built to house cars, get folk from A-B, allow ambulances to move unimpeded – but which have removed any vestige of multifaceted humanity from the experience of visiting a hospital or health-centre. 

As an example, when I was with my friend D as she had her son at a Glasgow maternity unit, she needed to walk to keep comfortable, so we were told to go and walk around the campus but not to go to far as her waters had already broken. We went outdoors and spent the rest of the day doing laps of the packed bitmac car park, because there was no other place to go. Another example recently, was a nurse I spoke to recovering from 15 weeks in ICU with Covid, who then spent another 15 weeks in a single room in the recovery ward with a view of an empty car park and no visitors. She said the second 15 weeks were what did in her mental health.

These are examples of single function design. The outdoor spaces are not designed in an integrated way. When I am explaining what clinical and therapeutic landscapes should do, I say each intervention should have at least five benefits. A car park at a maternity ward could so easily have a beautiful path around and through it for doing laps when in labour – and seating, biodiversity, SuDS and artworks. Better still - ditch the car park altogether and create multifunctional therapeutic greenspace for exercise, labour, mums groups, physio, OT and rest and respite.

It was therefore with genuine interest that I read the recently published Scottish Government and NHS Assure Climate Emergency and Biodiversity Strategy for the next four years. The NHS in Scotland is targeting net zero by 2040. The Lancet describes climate change as the “greatest global health opportunity of the 21^st Century” and this document recognises that climate change is inextricably linked to health inequality – one of Glasgow’s biggest issues. It is a really good document exploring issues as diverse as the disposal of anaesthetic gases to the need to embed active travel.

The inherent challenge lies in joining things up in an organisation full of embedded silos. Greenspace is an effective mechanism for integrated thinking because it can deliver benefits to almost every aspect of the Government policy:

• Active travel
• Biodiversity
• Waste management
• Water and flooding
• Staff wellbeing
• Community health
• Exercise and physical therapies
• Health inequalities
• Air quality
• Microclimate
• Carbon capture
• And so on…

And yet there are not any landscape architects at policy level within the health service in Scotland. The teams at the top are mostly led by project managers and architects. We are not going to be able to deliver function and humanity well without an understanding that the spaces in between buildings are more important than the buildings themselves – landscape being the very air we breath, the food we eat, the energy we use, the spaces and places that allow us to travel, the places in which we communicate and meet others, where community is formed.

Landscape is a dynamic network that allow us to think connectively and successfully create multifaceted designs that deliver both functionality and humanity for the good of us all and the good of our planet. Landscape is a key to unlocking the wider potential of the NHS.

I grew up with a dressmaker mother and a tailor Grandmother, but never realised the huge influence that has had on my work in construction, until I was writing last month’s blog about my aunt Fiona’s RIBA Dinner Suit, lovingly tailored for her by my grandmother Louise.

When I was at University in Edinburgh I struggled with construction for the first two years. I was a bright student, but I had never been taught anything remotely related at school, so I came to university with A levels in art, geography, classical history and English literature. My work experience included a year at Clothkits – a sew-your-own dress shop, but no building sites. I had not built anything except lego houses with my sister, although I had made my own clothes since childhood.

Construction was alien and intimidating. It did not help that we were taught by a pair of elderly male architects with intricate and ancient OHP sheets of beautiful but illegible hand drawings showing window jambs and threshold details, barely reinterpreted for landscape design.

The breakthrough came at the end of second year, when I realised that construction is simply SEWING but on a bigger scale. In fact, if you can sew a dress or a bag with pockets and zips, you are working with highly complex issues of materiality, volume, form and tensile strengths. Large scale construction has its own jargon designed to impress and exclude, whereas for me the language of sewing was familiar – and directly applicable.

In my final year at ECA/ESALA, I won an EDI Award for my construction project. I approached this project, the design of an outdoor theatre, with an enthusiastic use of sheet metals that could be folded, moulded and riveted - almost like clothing the urban space.

It’s no coincidence, therefore, that I use sewing analogies all the time in my more strategic work too – the idea of a patchwork city, stitching fragmented places back together, threads, layers and webs all have their roots in sewing. This language is used all the time at erz and I suspect it is no coincidence that Rolf's mother was also a tailor and pattern cutter.

I highly recommend a book by our colleague and friend Clare Hunter called “Threads of Life: a History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle” which is sort of about sewing, definitely about cultural history, and which shows how sewing has influenced myriad aspects of our creative lives. 

“Threads of Life: a History of the World Through the Eye of a Needle”

Clare Hunter

Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton
ISBN: 9781473687936

Fifty years ago my aunt Fiona was one of very few female architects working in London and my grandmother made her an black evening suit so that she was not assumed to be an architect’s wife when attending RIBA dinners and evening events.

Nearly 20 years ago I received an email from a site manager addressed to “Gents”. I was the only female member of the design team and the only female designer in my office. My then boss, the rather excellent gent, Marc van Grieken, complained on my behalf and quite a stink ensued. It did not happen again and there was an apology.

I now jointly head a brilliant team of ten designers at erz, eight of whom are talented and empowered women. Perhaps times have changed?

Perhaps not.

In the last six months I have had three emails addressed to “Gents” from three different multidisciplinary professional teams. Each time I have pointed out that I am not a “Gent.” I did it politely, with humour, in a short email.

One person, whom I had never met, called me on my mobile to accuse me of accusing him of sexism. In the other instances nobody acknowledged my email and the use of “Gents” has continued. One of my team mused that if we addressed an email to “Ladies” we would be met by puzzlement not frustration, even though there are now many more women in the construction industry than there were twenty or fifty years ago. Another colleague notes that when she talks about "my director" in conversations about work, people often go on to talk about "he".

Do you have to be a man to be able to call out sexism in the workplace?