Tag: extended reality

When Ian McHarg published his seminal book Design with Nature in 1967, he emphasized “process as value” urging planners to integrate natural land resources into urban design. Yet today, amid climate change and urban land degradation, the built environment disciplines struggle to act upon this call. Set in Hong Kong, a subtropical city facing climate pressure, the teaching-research project outlined in this paper addresses the necessity to negotiate complexities of urban ecological processes. Developed in concurrence with a Year Three undergraduate landscape architecture studio, the project proposes an extended reality (XR) workflow and representation methodology that allows students and practitioners to both dynamically discuss and co-create urban-ecological processes and designs. Students were tasked to design a large urban park on a site in Hong Kong profoundly transformed by urban development. Following this studio brief, this project employs two case studies – one focused on hydrological dynamics, the other on plant succession – to experiment with XR-based methods that address both site-specific conditions and the temporal dimensions of design proposals.