Innovative fire stewardship techniques to reshape landscape design to better adapt to and coexist with wildfire-prone environments

Over the past few decades, many parts of the world have experienced record-breaking wildfire events—a trend that is, unfortunately, expected to rise. These extreme events not only result in mass evacuations, but also release greenhouse gases like carbon dioxide, pose risks to life, devastate buildings and essential infrastructure, and fundamentally disrupt and detrimentally transform native ecosystems. In response to the increased risk of catastrophic wildfires, many planning and site design practices have sought to protect the trends and status quo of land development. These measures strive to resist and, ultimately, suppress fire, raising questions of how more innovative and diverse approaches could be employed in land-fire stewardship (i.e., the intentional act of working with fire to reduce risks, support eco-cultural practices, and regenerate ecological processes and landscapes) by those involved in planning and designing landscapes.

This article which was published on the journal of Landscape Architecture Frontiers and entitled “The Expanding Burning Field: Advancing Land-Fire Stewardship in Landscape Architecture”, shares a sample of fire tending techniques presented in Design by Fire: Resistance, Co-Creation, and Retreat in the Pyrocene—the first book of its kind to outline a range of design and planning strategies for fire-prone regions. The book curates 27 global design case studies situated within the dynamic and vulnerable wildland-urban interface and its adjacent wildlands, and catalogs them into three approaches: those that resist the forces of fire and landscape change, those that embrace and utilize such forces, and those that strategically retreat to minimize human intervention in fire-prone landscapes.

“Beneficial fire,” also known as controlled, prescribed, and good fire, involves intentionally setting low-intensity fires during cooler months or allowing the landscape to safely burn during a wildfire. While the support for beneficial fire has grown over the last few decades, it is still a relatively underutilized strategy in the fields of landscape architecture and planning.

This article highlights co-creative strategies that embrace and utilize pyric forces. It discusses how landscape architects can broaden their wildfire adaptation toolbox to incorporate land-fire stewardship techniques. The article also acknowledges the agency of landscape architects to pursue (or not pursue) projects in fire-prone areas, promotes collaboration with existing fire stewards to gain insights and include them as key members of project teams, and explores how landscape architects could become active stewards themselves.