Asking More from Landscapes with Multifunctional Design

The landscapes we design aren’t wild. They’re already built, already contaminated, already committed to human use. And that’s exactly where the opportunity lives.

Earth Day is a good reminder of that. While it raises awareness around large-scale environmental issues, it can be harder to see how those challenges connect to the everyday work we do. The conversation often defaults to ancient forests, vanishing species, and melting ice. Those things matter enormously, but they can sometimes feel far away from the reality of landscape architecture. We work on the 5,000 square foot corporate courtyard, the HOA common area, the stormwater basin nobody asked to be beautiful, and the parking lot edge or trail network that could be something more.

The question has moved beyond whether to preserve what’s pristine. It’s whether the landscape in front of us is doing as much as it could. For people. For the water cycle. For the species that didn’t ask to share space with us. That’s the design challenge worth talking about on Earth Day, and every other day.

This means that every site offers the opportunity to leave the land healthier, more functional, and more connected than we found it. And in a time of accelerating climate change, biodiversity collapse, and water cycle disruption, our future well-being as a species depends more than ever on our ability to restore functionality to the landscape in as many ways as we’ve started to lose it. In other words, how well our designs can “stack functions” to regenerate truly multifunctional landscapes.

We believe that every site, regardless of size or budget, has the potential to support long-term health by improving landscape functionality in the following ways.

Restoring the water cycle

Every project has impacts on the health and resilience of its watershed. Our role as land stewards is to understand and work within our hydrologic context. Of course, this means protecting and restoring the integrity of natural infrastructure like streams and wetlands, but it also means that our sites need to capture rainfall, soak it into the soil to replenish groundwater, and slow its movement through the landscape.

Supporting regional biodiversity

Every site is ecologically linked to its surrounding landscape. Although urban environments pose many ecological threats, they contribute more to regional biodiversity than we may think. And they can do much more with our careful attention. We can support regional biodiversity on every project by protecting and rehabilitating living soils, conserving and establishing functionally diverse native plant communities that support pollinators and the food web, making sites safe for wildlife, and ensuring site stewardship over the long term.

Protecting public health & well-being

Every landscape designed for human use should, of course, take care of people. In addition to what we’ve already covered, we can improve the health functionality of landscapes by mitigating heat stress, enabling safe and inclusive active mobility (for anyone walking, rolling, or cycling), and reducing air and noise pollution. And critically, every single landscape can be designed to invite learning, discovery, and stewardship by revealing ecological processes and deepening cultural connection.

Stewarding resources

Finally, and less directly felt: every project has a resource footprint, with far-reaching impacts on climate change, ecological and human health, and future availability. Our role is to consider and reduce the embodied emissions of our material use and construction practices, eliminate the use of harmful materials, avoid waste, and maximize the reuse potential of all materials. Whereas other landscape functions deal with a given site and its local or regional context, evaluating our effectiveness in stewarding resources asks us to broaden our horizons to consider our impacts even further across space and time.

If we evaluate project potential and performance through these four overlapping lenses, we begin to see every site as an opportunity to preserve, restore, and increase the multifunctionality of its landscape—for the well-being of all life.

Here’s the sustainability conversation nobody wants to have on Earth Day: a landscape that fails in three years was never “sustainable,” regardless of how many native species it contained.

We’ve seen it in every variation: plants selected for a planting zone that doesn’t match the site’s microclimate, irrigation systems designed for establishment and never adjusted for maturity, maintenance plans written for budgets the client never had, or meadow plantings handed off to mowing crews with no guidance and cut to the ground in summer. Durability isn’t a maintenance problem; it’s a design problem. It starts with matching plants to existing conditions and tomorrow’s intensifying weather, aligning upkeep with what clients can realistically afford, and designing plant communities and materials that adapt, recover, and age gracefully over time.

Consider trees specifically. A newly planted tree can carry a significant carbon debt. The energy, water, chemicals, and other materials that went into producing and installing can take decades to offset. A tree that dies at year three didn’t sequester carbon. It consumed it. Durability, for a tree, isn’t a nice-to-have. It’s the entire premise of the ecological argument for planting one.

A landscape designed to evolve doesn’t just survive. It accumulates value. Tree canopies mesh together, creating unforgettable spaces beneath. The meadow thickens to suppress aggressive invasive species. The bioswale develops the root mass that it needs to maximize absorption and actually filter stormwater. None of that happens if the design doesn’t make it past year two.

If we’re serious about sustainability as a performance commitment rather than a marketing posture, durability must be part of the conversation from the first design meeting.

What Should We Be Measuring?

In landscape design, there are many different and viable ways to evaluate success. At the core, our designs need to be functional. We think that perhaps the best measure of design success is the extent and diversity of functions, or ecosystem services, the landscape supports. Any site that increases the multifunctionality of the landscape compared to prior conditions can be considered a success.

Delivering multifunctional landscapes always begins with design intent. But the right intent isn’t all we need. To hold ourselves to high standards of accountability and rigor, it’s also important that we evaluate and measure landscape performance to the extent possible.

Thankfully, organizations like Landscape Architecture Foundation have invested in supporting landscape performance research. Their growing case study archives form a growing body of precedents for evaluating the overlapping benefits provided by landscape projects across the spectrums of size, type, geography, and more.

Inspired by this movement in our profession to not just increase but also evaluate the functions our projects perform, we have also begun a small pilot program across our offices to track a few performance measures in each of these focus areas. We find that measuring and evaluating is sometimes messier in practice than in theory. But we are convinced that consistently asking how our projects will improve watershed resilience, support biodiversity, steward resources, and make people healthier will result in highly functional landscapes, happier clients and communities, and planet that can sustain us.

A few examples of what that looks like in practice:

Watershed: infiltration rate before and after; extent of precipitation captured on-site for infiltration, filtration, and/or reuse; reduction in water use from baseline; reduction in peak runoff volume; years to elimination of temporary irrigation; expansion of flood storage to accommodate intensifying storm events; extent of aquatic ecosystems protected, enhanced, or restored

Biodiversity: extent of regionally native plant communities; structural diversity of vegetation (number of vegetation layers); Simpson’s Diversity Index or Shannon-Weiler index; Floristic Quality Assessment; pollinator observation index; Ramboll Americas Biodiversity Metric, Xerces Society Habitat Assessment Guides; percent of site with living ground cover vs. bare/hardscape; soil organic matter trajectory over time

Resource stewardship: embodied carbon of material palette (even a rough estimate); percent of materials locally sourced; extent of waste diverted from landfill; avoidance of Red List chemical classes; years to climate positive; reduction in site emissions from a baseline

Public health/well-being: tree canopy coverage; surface temperature differential (hardscape vs. planted zones); UTCI; intersection density; vehicle speeds and traffic counts by mode share; bicycle level of service (LOS); maximum crossing distance at intersections; 3-30-300 rule for urban nature access; air quality & noise pollution levels

Resilience metric: plant survival rate at 1, 3, and 5 years

Process metric: Was a maintenance plan written? Was it funded? Was it followed?

These are just a small handful of the many ways landscape functionality can be evaluated. There are many more that will have applications to your specific projects. We recommend checking out LAF’s Landscape Performance Case Studies for examples of how real-world performance has been evaluated.

Earth Day is valuable as a call to action, but it cannot replace the ongoing work of designing landscapes that perform ecologically, socially, economically, and over time.

The shift isn’t about scale. You don’t need a single hundred-acre restoration project, you need a hundred projects at every scale, each designed to do more than the minimum: manage more water, support more species, last longer, and give people a reason to notice the landscape around them was created with intention.

That’s the Earth Day challenge worth accepting.