By Alia Johnson
Beyond being a powerful tool for understanding large-scale landscape change over time, historical photographs provide profound insights as a decision-making tool for the designers of our built places. When design professionals look at the historical and repeat photographs of the vast Mountain Legacy Project (MLP) collection, we find clues to an ecological past that can inform how future human-centred development might rebuild ecological function and act in reciprocity with the landscape.
Images taken in the years 1915, 1998, and 2019
The Visualization Lab (under which the Mountain Legacy Project operates) has an active research collaboration with Christine Lintott Architects Inc., an architectural consulting practice in Victoria, British Columbia. Together we are exploring frameworks, tools, and collaborative learning in Regenerative Ecological Design, asking how we can shift the practices of human-centric development away from extractive models and towards practices that restore ecological processes.
As a designer, it can be challenging to stand in an altered and damaged place slated for redevelopment and try to visualize what this return to a functioning ecosystem might look like. A downtown parking lot, a derelict building, or a vacant site brimming with invasive species aren’t immediately forthcoming in sharing the stories of their lost ecologies. Especially in cities and other degraded landscapes, the ecological past is often buried beneath multiple layers of development. Over time, city-builders have made decisions to bury the rivers and streams that once fed our communities, to fill in wetlands to make way for agriculture or development, to alter the shapes of shorelines, or to radically reshape the topography of a place. The cumulative effect of these changes is a fundamentally different place with altered hydrological regimes, plant communities, species, and ecological function. Historical and repeat photography can offer insight into the ecological past of a place, daylighting some of what has been lost, challenging our shifted baselines, and bringing a new understanding to how ecological abundance and biodiversity may be returned to a site.
When I think of the influence of historical images in shifting our understanding of a place, one set of repeat photography from the MLP collection immediately springs to mind. Dr. Eric Higgs first shared this repeat photography triplet from Powerhouse Cliff in Jasper National Park with our (then fledgling) research collaboration in 2023. The first photo was taken in 1915 (M.P. Bridgland), the second in 1998 (E.Higgs & J. Rhemtulla), and the third in 2019 (Mountain Legacy Project). Apparent in this image sequence was the transition from a complex, mosaicked landscape into a coniferous forest, represented by the first two snapshots almost a century apart. But what to make of this transitioning landscape? Was I seeing the gradual transition of ecological communities as the result of fire or some other disturbance event? Or was this a mosaicked landscape once managed through cultural burning or other traditional land management practices, now erased under a colonial regime of land management and fire suppression? The third image in the triplet shows the telltale red colour of trees damaged or killed by an outbreak of mountain pine beetle, which will have significant implications in the near future. For instance, how did the outbreak contribute to the 2024 Jasper Wildfire Complex? While not associated with a development site, this image sequence holds for me the types of questions that historical photography, with insights rooted in the past, can bring attention to in design for the future: What does it mean to develop in partnership with the land in a specific place? How can we foster ecological resilience through times of uncertainty, fluctuation, and rapid change? How can we build, through design decisions, an ongoing relationship to the places we design and inhabit over time?
The collaboration between the Visualization Lab and Christine Lintott Architects Inc. allows us to explore big questions like these through an interdisciplinary lens rooted in the practices of both design and ecological restoration. By working together, we are able to bring new layers of understanding to both spheres of practice. Our collaboration offers a safe space to sit in the discomfort of not knowing and uncertainty, and to question the entrenched teachings, understandings and practices of our respective professions through fresh perspectives. It also offers a sandbox to test new and emerging ideas in real-world development projects, evolving practice as we work together.
The Visualization Lab currently has three PhD students (Shima Tajarlou, Emilia Hurd, and Alia Johnson) working in partnership with Christine Lintott Architects (Research at CLA headed by Christine Lintott and Hayley Johnson), exploring various topics at the intersection of regenerative ecological design, restoration, and historical ecology. We look forward to sharing more of our work with you in upcoming blog posts.
This research collaboration is funded by Mitacs Accelerate – Our continued gratitude for their support!