The Green Principles for thinking about Landscape

How can landscape design help us (re)connect cities with nature?

When we talk about landscape design, we often think first of beautiful gardens, trees, flowers, and pleasant spaces. But landscape is much more than what our eyes can see.

Landscape happens through the cycles of nature: between water and soil, plants and animals, climate and cities, and people and the places they inhabit. It also holds memories, stories, and different ways of living in and relating to a territory.

This is the perspective explored in the book (Re)Connected City, which presents seven principles for thinking about landscape. More than rules for design, they invite us to change the way we look at the spaces where we live.

A kind of invitation to recognize that landscape design is also about (re)connecting.

1. Landscape is part of a living and (inter)connected system

Nothing in a landscape truly exists on its own.

A tree, for example, may seem like simply a tree. But when we look a little closer, we realize how many relationships it is part of: it provides shade, influences temperature, helps water infiltrate the soil, shelters animals, provides a home for birds, supports thousands of fungi that are essential to healthy soil, produces organic matter, and can transform a street into a more welcoming place simply through the shade it provides.

This is how landscape works: every element is part of something larger.

Thinking about landscape design in this way means understanding that a square, garden, or park does not end exactly where the project ends. It continues through the relationships it creates with its surroundings, the soil, water, vegetation, and, above all, people.

To (re)connect with landscape is to notice these relationships, these continuous and ever-changing dynamics.

2. Landscape follows the cycles of nature

Landscape is constantly changing.

Plants grow, bloom, produce fruit, and lose their leaves. Rain transforms the soil. Light changes throughout the day. The seasons change the colors, scents, and forms of a garden.

For this reason, a landscape does not need to be understood as something completely finished or static.

In landscape design, we can learn to work with time rather than against it. Choosing a plant also means choosing to accompany its cycle, its flowering, its growth, and its transformations.

A garden can look different in January and in July. That does not mean it has stopped working. On the contrary: it means it is alive.

The High Line in New York is presented in the book as an example of a landscape designed to accompany these natural cycles.

To (re)connect is also to accept that landscape is always in transformation.

3. Landscape influences climate and comfort

Landscape design is also about climate.

A tree is not only there to make a street more beautiful. It can provide shade and help reduce the sensation of heat. Permeable soil can allow water to infiltrate. Vegetation can contribute to improving the environmental conditions of a place.

In cities, this relationship becomes even more important.

Surrounded by concrete and asphalt, trees, gardens, permeable areas, and water can help create spaces that are more comfortable and better prepared to respond to climatic conditions.

The book also presents ancient oases and Persian gardens as examples of how different cultures have used the relationship between vegetation, water, and space to create more pleasant environments.

This shows that using landscape to improve comfort is not a new idea. It is knowledge that has been developed over time. To (re)connect the city with nature is also to allow nature to participate in the comfort of the city.

4. Nature awakens the senses and promotes well-being

Landscape is not only something we look at.

It can be felt — and felt in many different ways throughout the year.

We can notice the scent of a flower, the texture of a leaf, the sound of water, the movement of trees, the shade on a hot day, or even the taste of fruit picked from a garden.

This is why landscape design can create experiences. It is a practice that can engage all of our senses.

A place can make us slow down, remind us of somewhere else, awaken a memory, or simply give us a few moments of well-being.

The Japanese Zen gardens and Claude Monet's gardens at Giverny, presented in the book, show different ways of creating sensory relationships with landscape.

When we think this way, we realize that designing a garden is not simply about choosing beautiful plants. It is about asking what people will feel in that place.

To (re)connect is also to feel nature again.

5. The biosphere is a source of inspiration

What if, instead of trying to teach nature to work according to our ways, we learned from it?

Nature has spent millions of years accumulating knowledge and finding ways to adapt, save energy, deal with heat, manage water, and create relationships between different organisms.

Observing these processes can help us find new solutions for the spaces we build.

This is the idea behind biomimicry: looking to nature as a source of inspiration.

The Eastgate Centre in Zimbabwe is an example of a building whose ventilation system was inspired by the way termite mounds work.

In landscape design, this perspective can also transform the way we think about space. Instead of searching for solutions that ignore natural processes, we can observe those processes and work with them.

To (re)connect is also to learn to look at nature as a teacher.

6. Landscape is part of the culture and identity of people

Every landscape tells a story and is connected to the cultural practices of people around the world. A square can hold memories of encounters. A tree can be part of a community's collective memory. A plantation can represent generations of work. A flower can even drive an economy — as tulips have done in the Netherlands, where the flower became part of the country's economic and cultural history. A garden can carry traditions and ways of living.

That is why landscape design cannot be separated from place.

Before transforming a landscape, it is important to understand what already exists there: its history, its people, its customs, its memories, and their relationships with the territory.

The Alto Douro Wine Region in Portugal is an example of this relationship. Its vineyards, terraces, paths, and agricultural practices have been shaped over generations and are part of the identity of the territory.

Landscape design, in this sense, is also about caring for the stories that already exist.

To (re)connect is to recognize that every place has an identity and that landscape helps tell that story — so that it is not lost or erased through processes of gentrification.

7. (Re)connection contributes to healthier cities

The six principles above lead us to a broader idea: landscape can be part of the solution to many of the challenges faced by cities.

When we understand that landscape is alive, follows cycles, influences climate, promotes well-being, can teach us, and carries culture, we begin to see landscape design differently.

Rain gardens, bioswales, wetlands, ecological corridors, urban trees, and public spaces can contribute to addressing issues such as excessive heat, flooding, biodiversity loss, and the lack of places for people to gather.

But the idea is not simply to add more green spaces to the city.

It is to (re)connect the city with the natural systems to which it has always belonged.

A New Way of Looking at Landscape Design

These principles invite us to reconsider a very common idea: that nature is on one side and the city — or civilization — is on the other.

The city is also part of nature.

A garden is not merely decoration. Vegetation can be infrastructure and technology. A green space does not need to be an isolated island. It can be part of a larger network.

We move from a landscape that simply occupies space to a landscape that relates to it — where aesthetics can have an even greater purpose: to create a sense of wonder.

And perhaps this is one of the most important ideas behind (re)connecting.

Landscape design is not only about making places beautiful.

It is about creating relationships.

Between people and nature. Between the city and its living systems. Between memory and place. Between what already exists and what can still grow.

To (re)connect is to understand that we were never truly separate.