The privatization of public space has been extensively theorized. From Lefebvre to Jacobs, Mitchell, Harvey, Zukin, Low, and many others, scholars have traced how public realms become fenced, branded, surveilled, and absorbed by capital. Landscape architects are not bystanders to this process: plazas turn into foyers, parks into marketing instruments, and designs conceived with civic intent become tools of speculation.

Before the Paris 2024 Olympics, public spaces redesigned through “Nature Based Solutions” became sites of class struggle: homeless citizens were displaced so the city could appear clean, inclusive, and green. The spectacle of unity hid exclusion. In New York, The High Line remains the canonical case of neoliberal urbanism and eco-gentrification, still celebrated by the discipline despite many years of critique. Such spaces may appear progressive through performative planting, yet they convert conflict into spectacle and gentrify their surroundings. Legally public, they are socially privatized through the economies that sustain them. 

These contradictions expose a deeper problem within landscape architecture: a recurring detachment from politics when reduced to technique. “Nature-Based Solutions” are often framed as technical measures rather than social acts, allowing the discipline to celebrate design quality while ignoring its complicity in gentrification and displacement. This disjunction, between technical solutionism and political consequence, marks a structural blind spot at the core of the field.

The familiar critique of privatization is not an endpoint but the ground from which a new relation between ownership, ecology, and aesthetics begins to emerge.

Freedom’s Exhaustion

With the privatization of the public, an inverse process unfolds: ownership itself becomes a public responsibility. Climate is public; heat, water, and soil ignore fences. What one owns affects all. Suburbia is one of the West’s largest urbanized landscapes and the emblem of situated freedom. Lawn chemicals, pools, and bylaws maintain a high-resolution order where nothing may get out of hand.

When floods, heat, or biodiversity loss breach the fence, private gardens become de facto POPs; still exclusive yet publicly accountable. If Elinor Ostrom demonstrated that commons can be sustained through collective governance, climate reverses this logic, extending common responsibility into private ownership.

The suburban garden embodies this tension. As Paul Robbins shows in Lawn People, the lawn cultivates “responsible domestic subjects”. Citizens are being disciplined through maintenance and property value. Mowing on Sunday becomes ritual of conformity, not care. What once signified freedom now reads as ecological harm. Obligations to biodiversity and soil health are already re-scripting the backyard as a public matter, a challenge to the old ideal of private freedom.

Land ownership has always been political, never absolute. As Bruno Latour noted, there is no exterior to politics: every garden, field, and balcony now participates in collective negotiations of survival. In this sense, the private garden is ontologically embedded within the public domain of ecological accountability.

Obligation extends beyond law or zoning; it reshapes daily life. As past cultural shifts showed, from smoking bans to COVID measures, new norms can re-script behavior. So if community laws that prescribe lawn neatness are considered an obligation to the community, the existing volume of obligation should now redirect toward ecological goals.

Feminist scholar Maria Puig de la Bellacasa in the book Matters of Care defines care as material obligation, not so much sentiment, as the labor of maintaining conditions for life. Caring is never innocent; it decides what and whom to sustain. This reframing aligns with landscape architecture’s shift from maintenance as afterthought to maintenance as ethics – no longer a secondary act but ethical site in itself. To design is to organize care, scripting obligation spatially and aesthetically, to emplace it beyond its sentimental image.

Landscape architects work at the junction of care and its image, still pressured to prioritize pleasant appearance. This expectation defines the aesthetic regime from which the discipline arose.

The private garden is the most intimate stage for this unavoidable confrontation, right outside the suburban door and backed by a vast lawn-care economy worth tens of billions.

David Lynch’s Blue Velvet opens with this very contrast. A man tends his immaculate suburban lawn; the scene is calm, domestic, pure. Then the camera dives into the grass, revealing the frantic ecosystem beneath: soil, insects, decay, consumption. The garden’s neatness masks abundance and decay. This is precisely where the shift in landscape architecture tends to occur; between surface harmony and the reality beneath it. In this sense of the expanded multispecies community, the soil is in fact public space, that had been privatized and the $60B market facilitates private efforts to keep the underground under.

Climate and urbanization expose the instability of ownership, forcing new negotiations over who bears the cost of adaptation. Private land, especially the suburban garden, is increasingly being reconceptualized as a form of privatized public space, not through access but through ecological regulation. In many countries, climate policy already transforms ownership into obligation, turning gardens into sites where aesthetics, policy, and ecology converge as instruments of shared responsibility. Irrigation bans in drought regions, France’s Zéro Phyto pesticide law, and North American ordinances for pollinator lawns all began as unpopular interventions yet recalibrated daily life.

Such policies succeed in some places, emerge in others, and remain absent elsewhere. The point here is not to catalogue them but to investigate their mechanics; how privatization, ecological collapse, and aesthetic transformation together make design a medium of obligation. In this frame, ownership introduces civic duty, and landscape architecture becomes the instrument through which this duty is articulated.

The position outlined here departs from conventional notions of stewardship. Whereas stewardship rests on voluntary care within the security of ownership, ecological obligation recognizes that ownership itself has lost autonomy. Climate pressure leaves diminishing space for optional virtue; agency now unfolds within shared necessity. The freedoms embedded in stewardship: to choose, to act, or to abstain, are quietly being replaced by a collective ethic of interdependence. In this sense, the argument aligns less with liberal self-management and more with the ecological values of reciprocity, limitation, and shared responsibility — essentially, a structural reorientation of freedom itself.

Aesthetic Confrontation

The deeper challenge follows: aesthetics is not separate from politics. The task is not to translate messy ecosystems into orderly frames but to perceive mess as the sensible trace of a deeper, inaccessible order that sustains life.

Landscape architects are cast as harmonizers, expected to polish, reconcile interests, and blend whatever infrastructure into the background. Harmony in landscape architecture works like a happy ending in cinema. It is a fiction in high demand, and it is how capital packages public space as lifestyle through comfort that excludes disruption.

Climate demands confrontation: a readiness to question norms and comforts that obstruct ecological obligation. This is not conflict for its own sake but rejection of the false tranquillity of consumerist landscapes. The designer’s task is not to mask conflict but to acknowledge it, relate to it and emplace this dialogue, the process of adaptation itself. Landscape architecture can reform perception, turning what once looked like failure, like fallen fruit, weeds, spontaneous growt, into the possibility of a more ecologically inclusive future.

Perception lies at the center of landscape architecture, not only of space but of process and time. Rob Nixon’s “slow violence” describes harm that accumulates invisibly, bypasses attention, and deposits directly into the background. Landscape architecture may assists in this deposition when it ‘blends-in’ and harmonizes infrastructures whose ecological or social consequences remain unexamined. Design can puncture this habitual perception, making slow processes visible. Aesthetics is the political instrument that can cut into continuities and reveal their strata.

Too often, aesthetics is reduced to the pursuit of beauty. Beauty can conceal violence and inequality; harmony can intimidate. Aesthetics is most productive when perception hesitates, when a landscape resists easy classification as beautiful or ugly. That moment of uncertainty compels reflection and interpretation. Aesthetics also concerns the distribution of the sensible—the organization of what can be seen, said, and shared. Landscape architects always participate in this arrangement, deciding what counts as acceptable and who belongs. 

Confrontational landscapes push further. They redistribute the sensible, recasting what appears as disorder as resilience and care. Gilles Clément’s Third Landscape valorizes neglected ecologies, but capitalism repackages their aesthetic potential into simulation that manifests as a trend: scattered stones, insect logs, and aestheticised “pioneer” ecologies branded as the naturesque; a picturesque updated for sustainability. Such gestures repeat the same capitalist logic, beautifying and commodifying critique itself.

The confrontation is embodied in the LILA-recognized project Krater, where commodification is absent. It asks: can we grow parks instead of building them anew? In the Anthropocene, perhaps the park’s role is to host evolving ecologies and let the public witness succession as process, be aware of the time required, shifting perceptions of “overgrowth” and, by extension, the suburban lawn.

Krater resists capitalist appetites and high-carbon footprints. It offers a low-resolution, unscripted experience that makes visitors resilient to change. Here, aesthetics affirms landscape as an unstable flux. Confrontation is not chaos but emancipation from consumerist comfort. Confrontational aesthetics makes obligation visible, reframing it as possibility and acceptance of the coming otherness and uncertainty.

Resistance to rewilding suburbia shows that ecological obligation is also aesthetic. Society must confront and process disorder and flux: palm trees climbing the Swiss Alps, shifting species, unstable seasons. Landscape architecture’s task is to reform perception so that these instabilities read not as errors but as the new logic of a mutable planet.

Genius Mutabilis

Climate change ends the stability of Norberg-Schulz’s evergreen Genius Loci, reducing it to ‘keeping up appearances’. Centuries-old ideals still bind the discipline; emancipation lies in attending to the perception of change as it manifests across sites. In this sense, Genius Mutabilis replaces Genius Loci: an aesthetic of perpetual transition rather than existential permanence, acknowledging design as a species-wide endeavor entangled with shifting climates and evolving ecologies.

When ecological measures are embedded within capitalist systems, critique turns into fuel for greenwashing. By translating messy ecosystems into orderly, marketable frames, ecological design starts dissolving into compliance. Insect hotels and patches of curated “wildness” become banners of ecological declaration, easily re-absorbed into the very logic they seek to resist. Each time ecology is made compatible with market metrics or branding, it loses its power to obstruct.

Puig de la Bellacasa writes: “Thinking with care attracts attention to ethical interrogations meant to seem untimely and worthless from the perspective of predominant unilinear futurities, but we cannot let productivist stories, or even the earnest economies of service, define how nonhuman worlds will be appreciated.”

Ecology easily becomes an orderly frame to be repackaged and resold. Aesthetics can stabilize that frame or destabilize it—the latter holds political potential. As social activism, aesthetics can dismantle the fantasy that harmony signals health or justice. “More green” still reads as “better,” while the neat POP plaza performs inclusion through design and exclusion through surveillance.

The challenge is not to make ecology or inclusion market-friendly but to preserve their friction, to let them slow and obstruct capitalist production and perception. These aesthetic struggles matter: they shape opinion, regulation, and policy. Friction is the condition of relation: the space where social and ecological processes exchange energy, become visible. As it introduces inner distances and gaps, it invites discussion and political action. Emphasizing traditions of a site through Genius Loci limits this potential; it reduces the distance between expectations and outcomes, diminishing the surplus of meaning that friction, and Genius Mutabilis, can generate.

Earlier process-oriented design treated change as cyclical or progressive; ecological succession, weathering, adaptation. Genius Mutabilis concerns the breakdown of those expectations: change without trajectory, mutation without pattern. Climate change is a new world disorder, the post-predictable landscape.

Designing exclusively with native species is increasingly untenable, as the climate itself has become non-native. These changes are more radical than ecological succession. They are uncanny in their divergence, as signs of processes slipping out-of-hand. In California some mountain species (like hemlock) are shifting downhill instead of up, contrary to the expectation that plants move uphill as temperatures rise. Hybrid species are appearing as displaced ecologies overlap; swans now weave nests from plastic waste, magpies from anti-bird spikes.

Such mutations signal that ecological distress radicalizes the state of landscape, and the unframed—the things society prefers to keep out of view—now demand attention. As Joan Iverson Nassauer observed in “Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames,” visual order once made ecological design legible to the public. Yet Genius Mutabilis pushes beyond legibility toward perceptual resilience and the capacity to confront what exceeds comprehension. Perceptual resilience does not reject legibility; it extends it. The task is no longer to make landscapes appear ‘in order’ but to make disorder itself intelligible, to train perception in adaptation. We are past mitigation and firmly within the age of adjustment. Landscape architecture helps publics perceive forms of repair that look unlike anything before: infrastructures that seem provisional, vegetations out of place, climates out of sync, cracks appearing in the background.

Harmony often still speaks the language of the economy that produced collapse. The coming aesthetics of adaptation will have to continuously question mastery, control, and ownership, acknowledge what seems out of hand, and treat unpredictability as its very medium. Genius Mutabilis names this shift: a perception resilient to the unpredictable, an aesthetics from which new obligations become imaginable.

Design as Mediator of Obligation

Obligations materialize in space as infrastructure. As Michel Callon notes, design delegates ethics into form: bylaws and codes become curbs, drains, slopes, and planting schemes. Keller Easterling adds that infrastructure itself governs, its spatial protocols encode policy long before law does. Storm-water codes, biodiversity corridors, and pesticide bans are not abstractions but spatial conditions that redistribute the sensible. They decide how a yard looks, how a neighborhood feels, how a city manages water, heat, and soil. Design therefore mediates obligation and shapes how regulation is perceived and lived.

In many places, design already provides answers. In Utrecht’s Rijnvliet Edible Neighborhood, fruit trees line streets and courtyards. Obligation here becomes the duty to share, to co-own food in public space. Eating an apple becomes an act of citizenship, a reminder that the neighborhood is a commons. Similar dynamics appear in public drinking fountains: micro-architectures of shared sustenance.

Parts of the profession now delve in forestry, hydrology, pedology, or climatology. Interdisciplinarity is vital, and landscape architecture can indeed bring these sciences into the mainstream production of space. Yet they already hold their own authority. Paradoxically, landscape architects retreat from aesthetics — their most legitimate domain. Treating aesthetics as secondary to ecology, and stopping at harmonization, risks turning the discipline into green engineering and erasing its unique cultural role.

The capacity to reform perception through aesthetics remains landscape architecture’s primary political force in the Anthropocene. The centuries-old aesthetic goal of pleasure gives way to confrontation. In the Anthropocene, this becomes the profession’s ethical objective.

Ownership is Obligation

Ownership is obligation, and increasingly so. The future of landscape architecture lies in designing how that obligation is sensed, how it appears, how it is shared, and how it becomes the ground for common life. Private space grants each landowner the capacity to respond. The response-ability (in Haraway’s sense of accountability within entanglement) needs structural embedding within an obligation to the collective, the social, and the ecological commons.

The more private space we hold, the greater the demand for public space. Climate collapses the private/public divide, and landscape architecture scripts this new obligation aesthetically and politically through the design of infrastructure itself. A broader debate on how land is possessed, and what obligations that possession entails, is beginning to surface. Across many contexts, a new social contract is emerging; one that acknowledges interdependence and prepares us to sacrifice comfort for the possibility of a livable future.

The private will inevitably converge with the public. It has always been a constructed fiction, yet one with real material effects. For a livable and multispecies future to take root, those fictions must be rewritten. Landscape architecture now finds itself recalibrating the grounds of dwelling: not to perfect the old order but to expose and transform the assumptions on which it stands. What it designs, ultimately, is not form but the perceptual contract between freedom and obligation.

There is a surface, and there’s things beneath the surface. And one of the things I noticed is that all these things coming to life these days, have been going on for a long time. But now, these things are getting exposed …

— David Lynch on the opening scene of Blue Velvet

Selected References

Callon, Michel. The Laws of the Markets. Blackwell, 1998.
Clément, Gilles. Manifeste du Tiers-Paysage. Sujet/Objet, 2004.
Easterling, Keller. Extrastatecraft: The Power of Infrastructure Space. Verso, 2014.
Haraway, Donna. Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene. Duke University Press, 2016.
Latour, Bruno. Politics of Nature: How to Bring the Sciences into Democracy. Harvard University Press, 2004.
Nassauer, Joan Iverson. “Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames.” Landscape Journal 14(2), 1995.
Nixon, Rob. Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Poor. Harvard University Press, 2011.
Puig de la Bellacasa, Maria. Matters of Care: Speculative Ethics in More than Human Worlds. University of Minnesota Press, 2017.
Robbins, Paul. Lawn People: How Grasses, Weeds, and Chemicals Make Us Who We Are. Temple University Press, 2007.

Other References

Harvey, David. Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Verso, 2012.
Lefebvre, Henri. The Production of Space. Blackwell, 1991.
Low, Setha M. On the Plaza: The Politics of Public Space and Culture. University of Texas Press, 2000.
Mitchell, Don. The Right to the City: Social Justice and the Fight for Public Space. Guilford, 2003.
Zukin, Sharon. The Cultures of Cities. Blackwell, 1995.