Billy Fleming is the director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Ian McHarg Center for Urbanism and Ecology and, formerly, a domestic policy advisor to the Obama Administration. He wears many hats – thinker, writer, critic, advisor – all whilst finely balancing political activism with comic relief on Twitter. However, in the interest of clearing things up, he says, “I’m trained as a landscape architect and a city planner, so I’m not an architect.”

Billy was the first in his family from rural Arkansas to go to university and, he admits, he didn’t know that landscape architecture was even a profession until he got to university (as most of us don’t). “I got to college and met some of the folks in the design school, which is now the Fay Jones School of Design at the University of Arkansas, and very quickly got roped into the idea that the landscape and the environment is where all of the things I was interested in – things that ranged from, certainly, big environmental issues like climate change, but also social justice – met in space, in real places with real people.”

“Design is often an instrument for applying all kinds of ideas: sometimes good ones, sometimes bad ones and sometimes radical ones, I think, if we’re doing it right. And, landscape architecture became the way I got to play around with all those disparate parts,” he continued.

Though not an architect, Billy’s work intersects many areas that concern architects and built environment professionals across the board. Indeed, climate change is an issue that affects us all at a global scale. This sentiment is at the core of many of Billy’s ideas and the message he’s hoping to promote through his lectures in New Zealand. 

“One of the points I’ll hit on deals with this sort of angst and anxiety and crisis that the rising generation of designers find themselves in. I think this is a generation who, for the first time, are dealing with a sense of generational theft, in every sense of the word, from the people who came before them. And, they’re viewing the conventional private firm life as something that’s less desirable in some ways, and also probably less feasible, if we’re serious about taking on the challenges that climate change presents to us,” he notes.

“I think we’ve sort of reached the limits of what we can try to do through private firms only, which in most western countries, is the way we’ve approached dealing with climate change from a design and infrastructural perspective. We’ve turned almost all of that activity and then action over to the private sector. It’s done some really interesting things. It’s created some really beautiful works of design all across the world. But, we find ourselves continuously enmeshed in this crisis, this worsening, day by day, in part because we’ve tried to meet something that is global in scale with a small design office.”

It follows that other topics Billy hopes to address in his talks in New Zealand centre around the role of designers and built environment professionals in public policy, using both the American Green New Deal proposal and a recent exhibition by the McHarg Center profiling 25 projects around the world which exemplify the ideals of designing with nature and not against it. 

The namesake of the Center, Ian McHarg is what Billy calls “undoubtedly the most influential landscape architect and environmental planner of the last half century”. The exhibition is in honour of the 50th anniversary of the publishing of his book Design with Nature, and the projects it includes range from the creation of a public park from one of the largest landfills in the world in New York to solutions to rising river levels in the Netherlands to our very own Western Waiheke project.

The Green New Deal is a package of ideas that centres around three core ideas, Billy explained: “One is deurbanisation. How do we decouple the economy from the production and consumption of CO₂ and fossil fuels? The second is around climate adaptation. How do we protect the places that we have now from all of the effects we baked into the atmosphere related to climate change? Because, we could turn off all of our carbon emissions tomorrow and we still have a couple feet, at least, of sea level rise baked into the system. And the third is really about environmental justice and making sure that the transition centres around people who are at the frontlines of the impacts of climate change.”

As New Zealand grapples with its own questions about how to face the increasing climate crises and the role of architects and designers in the public sector, where will built environment professionals fit in? “In the design professions, I think people often try to talk about themselves as agents of change. And, I tend to view the design professions more as instruments of change or instruments of power,” Billy said.

He continues, “There are real limits to what a single design firm or a collection of design firms can do. And there are certain areas where the government has to get involved because some problems are at a scale that is much larger than that of a project that a firm might take on on their own. And, part of what the Green New Deal is capturing is this sort of zeitgeist in a rising generation of activists and designers, that governments not only can be an activist force for good again, but they have to be. 

“The private sector has done all that it can do in this millenium, and we need other alternatives to it that necessitate a larger and more activist public sector. That will mean lots of things for design professionals; it will mean that we probably have to hire a bunch of architects and landscape architects and city planners back into the federal government. It’ll also mean that the firms that are out there doing the work they’re doing are going to take on many, many more public projects. You know, landscape architects definitely get associated with parks and gardens and the green things you would expect to find around your neighbourhood. Those things will probably always be a core competency of landscape architecture, but landscape architecture can and should do much more.

“I think the idea that design has to be depoliticised and disconnected from forces of change is hopefully dead, and if it’s not dead, I’m going to do whatever I can in these talks to kill it.”

Billy Fleming will be giving the NZIA Resene Ian Athfield Memorial Lecture on 23 September in Auckland, on 25 September in Wellington and on 26 September in Christchurch.

Find out more about the Festival of Architecture here.