Cybernetics and the Constructed Environment

Grounded in contemporary landscape architecture theory and practice, this book blends examples from art, design, and engineering with concepts from cybernetics and posthumanism, offering a transdisciplinary examination of the ramifications of cybernetics on the constructed environment.

Zihao Zhang is a designer, educator, and scholar in landscape architecture. He currently serves as an assistant professor and interim director of the landscape architecture program at the City College of New York.

Introduction: The Upscaling of the Cybernetic Imagination Part 1: The New Machine in the New Garden 1. A Transformation Formula 2. The Technology-Nature Edge: From Pastoralism to Anthropocene 3. The Human-Technology Edge: From Ready-made Artefacts to Dematerialized Humans 4. The Human-Nature Edge: The Three Waves of "Nature Study" 5. Posthumanism, Co-Production, and Assemblage Part 2: Posthumanism, the Environment and Intelligent Machines 6. Searching for Nonhuman Agency 7. From Nonhuman Agency to Speculative Ontology 8. Coproductive Intelligence Part 3: The Cybernetic Environment 9. Cybernetics and Landscape: From Uncertainty to Opportunity 10. Reframing Cybernetics 11. Sensing as Coding: The Episteme of the Digital Age 12. The Rise of Intelligent Agents: A Non-Model-Centric Paradigm 13. Actuating Leads to Attuning: Cultivated Wildness 14. Cultivated Wildness and Speculative Ecology Conclusion: Design and Cybernetic Environment