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Landscape architecture is not a finishing layer
The most consequential decisions in an urban project are often made before the landscape architect is invited in the room. Strategies are set, programming too, the plot ratios are fixed, the road widths are drawn, the structural grid is fixed.
Somewhere near the end of the brief comes the line: landscape architecture. If the client doesn’t mistake us for garden designers / landscapers, this term embeds all the client desires: green look, shadow, biodiversity, rain water infiltration, furniture, paving layouts. What follows is mostly cosmetic and the spatial (and financial) reality is often cruel to the profession.
Narrow planted strips because of the width of the road, parking places, pathways, networks, curbs,... Green spaces but actual lawns as anything else would look messy or insecure. Attractive spaces with flowers but low maintenance, no berries nor fruits, it would attract rats. A lush tree canopy but only in narrow pits, leftover space between infrastructure and networks. Everywhere but only in selected spaces as some people train their dogs to bite on them (true stories). Lush green roofs but actually, the budget needs to be cut so Sedums will do the thing. Landscape is the ultimate adjustment, cosmetic, finishing layer.
This is more or less the position the discipline has been given, and a large part of the profession has accepted it. The acceptance is visible in the vocabulary: landscape as amenity, as softening, as integration. The green-credentials version - landscape as climate adaptation, biodiversity offset, stormwater management - is framed as a service rendered to a project whose form was decided before a landscape architect stepped in. The landscape architect is brought in late, to make a building feel less like a building and a parking lot feel less like a parking lot.
Landscapes as leverage (LLA) was founded as a response to this situation.
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What leverage means
The conviction that landscape is not a finishing layer is, on its own, a slogan. What gives it weight is what follows from it methodologically: that the landscape project should be positioned at earlier stages. Before the masterplan. Before the building. Where the question is still being formed.
This is what we mean by leverage. Not as a metaphor but as an actual mechanical leverage. The fulcrum is placed upstream, and what was a costly intervention at the end of a project becomes a structuring move at the beginning. A synergetic, landscape-based strategy produces fully functional ecosystems, benefits to inhabitants and visitors, and creates urban development gains no architect alone could have written. A material approach beginning with what is already there, in the soil of a neighbourhood produces a palette no developer would specify. A planting strategy spanning across twenty years produces a maintenance commitment a municipality would never otherwise have made.
This position is not new. Gilles Clément has argued for forty years that the gardener does not impose a form but reads the site and responds: the jardin en mouvement (Garden in Motion) as method. Pierre Bélanger, in Landscape as Infrastructure, names the same refusal at territorial scale: landscape is not a soft layer applied to infrastructure, landscape is the infrastructure. What LLA tries to do is to hold both claims at once (the value of the profession as a situated practice on the site itself, and as a structural actor at the territorial scale) while refusing the standard concession that one disqualifies the other.
The catalyst is the reading that precedes the design.
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What this looks like
In Saint-Étienne, the Furan valley has been engineered, buried, paved, and forgotten across two centuries of industrial reorganisation. Standard practice would treat the river as a constraint on the masterplan, avoiding flooding areas. Instead, we treated it as the masterplan. The river becomes the agent of change, the spine of a productive ecosystem and regenerative process along which housing, industry and public space are organised, not the other way around. The river is the leverage and starting point of the reorganisation of the location.
In Issoudun, a 1970s lycée had reached the end of its asphalt life. Standard practice would have depaved the courtyards, planted micro-forests, and added standard furniture. We proposed the depaving of 2,400 m², stacked the broken slabs in-situ as dry-stone retaining walls, and let the ground breathe for the first time in fifty years. In parallel, a maintenance plan proposed to gradually transform the existing lawns to meadow or shrubs over time with little effort. Here, demolition becomes the construction material, time an ally for renaturation.
In Cuzion, maintenance of a private garden in the Creuse has been quietly tested over a decade: what works, what fails, what teaches. This hobby became a laboratory for maintenance, plants, materials and a cultural barometer feeding our projects. The garden became a research instrument of experiment and an agent of change, not a decoration.
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What gets unlocked, and where the friction is
Once the landscape project is positioned upstream, it unlocks opportunities that were structurally impossible before. The conversation changes from what it should look like to what it enables - from where to fit it within the structure to what should the structure be in order to allow it - from a maintenance line item to a long-term ecological commitment and accompaniment.
This is also where the friction lives. Working this way takes longer, it requires consistent dialogue and a deeper understanding of every actor, it does not instantly produce glossy renders. A leverage practice asks for time standard contracts rarely give, and proposes commitments standard organisations are rarely equipped to make and follow-up on. The discipline has been complicit in its own marginalisation partly because the alternative is genuinely complex.
But by now, the cost of not doing it is visible everywhere. It is the cost of every public space that does not survive its first summer. Of every ecological development whose biodiversity scores are met on paper and contradicted on site. Of every neighbourhood improvement whose green layer is the last thing built and the first thing cut from the budget.
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Where we stand
We do not believe that landscape architecture is a more important discipline than architecture or planning. We believe it is differently positioned, that its specific work, when done seriously, is about negotiating between scales, between timeframes, between actors, between human and non-human, between what a site already is and what it could become. The landscape architect, in this reading, is a spatial negotiator.
Anna Tsing has a name for this kind of work: friction. As she explains: “Friction reminds us that heterogeneous and unequal encounters can lead to new arrangements of culture and power”. It is the productive encounter between systems that do not necessarily share the same logic, where something new can be assembled if you are patient enough to stay engaged. LLA’s work, through its 3 main ambitions (re-entangling, re-wilding, re-rooting), follows from that.
Landscape is not what you add at the end.
It is the lever you reach for first.
FURTHER READINGPierre Bélanger, Landscape as Infrastructure: A Base Primer (Routledge, 2017).
Gilles Clément, Le Jardin en mouvement (Sens & Tonka, 1991); Manifeste du Tiers paysage (Sujet/Objet, 2004).
Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing, Friction: An Ethnography of Global Connection (Princeton University Press, 2005).