USC offers a unique living laboratory of a diverse, multicultural and geographically sophisticated territory, which is exemplar for many of the world’s most pressing landscape challenges within the context of a major urban research university. Los Angeles, in particular, and California, more generally, are extreme natural and social geographies, where the evolving interplays of infrastructure, landscape and urbanism require innovative and systemic thinking.
Los Angeles, which Reyner Banham famously interpreted in 1971 as a construct of four ecologies, is an ideal urban nature setting for studying landscape architecture—where urgent contemporary issues can and must be addressed while testing the boundaries of design research, design thinking and implementation. The growing ecological crises and intense population pressure of the city’s coasts, flatlands and foothills are a pars pro toto, a microcosm, of the challenges facing state, nation and globe, ones that necessitate a paradigm shift to complex systems thinking.
Graduate landscape architecture at USC is based on the knowledge and skills to engage complex issues, and to undertake ambitious design explorations. Upon completion, graduates are prepared for both design and leading leadership opportunities in professional practice, public service as well as in higher education; they are able to address the necessary balance of ecology and development our future environments will require.
The USC Landscape Architecture + Urbanism program develops real-world issues, formulates and re-formulates problems, explores and proposes operative strategies and becomes part of the discourse with stakeholders and cities. The resistive capacity of the landscape to the ever-globalizing, homogenization of territories is created as a means to shape possible futures for parks, neighborhoods, city districts and the larger stewardship of the landscape.
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