Adaptive Epistemologies and Neo-Wilds

Abstract

*Adaptive Epistemologies and Neo-Wilds* advances a practice-based theoretical framework for landscape architecture under conditions of climatic non-stationarity, ecological indeterminacy, and computational saturation. The dissertation argues that the inherited Promethean epistemology, with its commitments to prediction, control, and stable representation, is not corrected by the addition of more sensing, more modeling, or more autonomous machinery. Applied within an unexamined epistemological frame, computational power accelerates and entrenches the failures of prediction paradigms rather than resolving them. A different epistemological footing is required.

The dissertation proposes adaptive epistemology as that footing, knowledge production at territorial scale in which the territory itself participates, design propositions function as testable hypotheses, and divergence between accounts is treated as information rather than error. Six frameworks distill twenty years of practice into the operative components of this position. They are multiple intelligences, technogeographies of sensing, wetware, generational robotics, coupled ecologies, and reflexive stewardship. Three concepts cross all six. Adaptive epistemology unpacks the knowledge structure. The cultivant structures the ongoing relationship between designed intention and biological agency in which maintenance is the primary design act. Neo-wilds frames the territorial condition that emerges when these commitments are sustained across generational timescales.

The argument is generated by refraction, a method that retells the same body of work from successive vantage points until its theoretical structure becomes legible. Practice yields theory which returns to practice, recalibrating what landscape architecture can be epistemologically responsible for in the Anthropocene.