Jie Han designing landscapes to evolve with nature

Jie Han: Designing Landscapes That Evolve With Nature

26 August 2026

Author: Adrian Welch

For landscape architect Jie Han, an award-winning designer whose work has been honored by numerous international design programs and exhibited from New York to Venice, the future of the city is not something that can be designed as a fixed image. It is something that must remain capable of changing.

Based in California and trained in both China and the United States, Han works across ecological restoration, climate resilience, public space, and experimental landscape design. Her projects range from the recovery of degraded wetlands to climate-adaptive bus stops and speculative coastal landscapes that physically respond to changing water levels. Her proposals have been honored by the American Society of Landscape Architects and by a range of juried international programs.

At the center of her practice is a simple but increasingly urgent question: how can design help people live with environmental change rather than continually trying to control it?

Han’s answer is not to separate ecological systems from human experience. Instead, she sees landscape architecture as a medium through which the two can become intertwined.

“The environment is the foundation of all life,” Han explains. “I believe landscape architecture has a responsibility not only to create places for people, but also to protect and strengthen the ecological systems that make those places possible.”

Landscape as a Living System

Rather than beginning with a predetermined visual language, Han typically begins with the conditions of a place. Hydrology, ecology, history, topography, movement, and patterns of occupation all become part of the design process. The resulting landscape is intended to work with those forces rather than simply impose a finished form upon them. This approach has led Han toward regenerative design. It is a regenerative, forward-looking method that places her among a small group of designers pushing landscape architecture toward genuine ecological performance rather than ecological imagery.

She is particularly interested in sites that have been neglected, degraded, overheated, polluted, or otherwise disconnected from their ecological systems. These sites are not viewed as empty or defective. Instead, she sees them as places where design can help ecological processes recover.

“Restoration is not about returning a place to some frozen historical condition,” she says. “It is about creating the conditions for a landscape to become healthy and resilient again.”

That distinction is important throughout her work. Instead of treating nature as a decorative layer added after the architecture or infrastructure is complete, Han places ecological processes at the center of the design.

Recovered Wetland

One of the clearest expressions of this philosophy is Recovered Wetland, a proposal for a degraded wetland landscape in Panjin, northern China.

The site had been affected by pollution, habitat loss, and fragmented hydrology. Rather than relying on a single intervention, Han developed a system based on multiple ecological processes working together.

Water circulation is restored by reconnecting fragmented water bodies. Native vegetation is introduced to support phytoremediation and biodiversity. The landscape gradually becomes a functioning ecological network rather than simply a collection of isolated improvements.

The project also considers the role of people within that recovery. Abandoned oil-pumping structures are transformed into elevated pathways, allowing visitors to move through the landscape while minimizing disturbance to sensitive habitats. Industrial remnants that once contributed to the site’s degradation are therefore given a new role within its ecological future.

The project received an ASLA Northern California Chapter Honor Award in 2025. “It is rewarding to imagine a future where nature can thrive again,” she says. “The most meaningful part of restoration is knowing that the landscape itself can eventually do more of the work.” The award carries particular weight: the American Society of Landscape Architects, founded in 1899, is the authoritative professional body for landscape architecture in the United States, and its honors are decided by juries of the country’s most accomplished practitioners against the highest standards of design excellence, environmental performance, and public value.

Image credit: Jie Han

Small Infrastructure, Larger Change

Han’s interest in ecological transformation does not exist only at the scale of wetlands and regional landscapes.

Her project One Station, One Tree, One Garden, developed as a collaborative project with Luis Lu and Dongni Ma, explores how climate adaptation can begin with one of the most ordinary pieces of urban infrastructure: the bus stop.

The premise is deliberately modest. A bus shelter is a place where people wait, but it can also become a small ecological system.

The project integrates a green roof, tree planting, rainwater collection, underground storage, and a misting system. The result is a public space that provides shade and thermal comfort while also supporting vegetation and water reuse.

What makes the project significant for Han is its potential for repetition. “A single tree cannot change the climate of a city,” she explains. “But thousands of trees and gardens, connected together, can begin to form a network.”

The project therefore proposes a form of urban “micro-renewal”: rather than waiting for entire districts to be rebuilt, cities can gradually improve their environmental performance through a series of small, repeatable interventions. That idea earned the project a Silver Award in the 2025 London Design Awards in the Sustainable Development category. The jury cited the proposal as an environmentally advanced model of how everyday infrastructure can be converted into distributed climate infrastructure.

Image credit: Jie Han

Image credit: Luis Lu

Living With Water

If One Station, One Tree, One Garden explores climate adaptation at the scale of a single urban object, Living with Water expands the same question to the coastline.

Developed around the Richmond shoreline in the San Francisco Bay Area, the project considers a future in which rising sea levels and tidal fluctuations are not simply threats to be blocked, but environmental processes that become part of everyday spatial experience.

Han describes the concept as “hypernature”—an approach that intentionally amplifies natural processes rather than hiding them.

The project’s most recognizable element is a floating dome anchored to the bay floor. The floor inside the structure rises and falls with the tide. At low tide, the space can be occupied normally. As water rises, the usable area gradually becomes compressed. Under future sea-level-rise scenarios, the structure could eventually become submerged.

The changing condition is the point. Instead of representing climate change through maps, diagrams, or abstract statistics, Han turns water-level fluctuation into a physical experience. People do not simply observe the changing coastline. They inhabit it.

For Han, resilience is therefore not about preserving one perfect condition forever. “I focus more on how the landscape can remain resilient in the face of long-term changes, rather than trying to freeze a ‘perfect state,'” she says. “Design should reserve space for uncertainty, enabling the city and natural systems to adjust and operate continuously together.”

This philosophy has attracted international attention. The project was featured by Designboom and subsequently presented through international exhibitions and design platforms. Phoenix News, one of the most influential Chinese-language media groups, devoted a full interview to her thinking on designing for rising seas, and the work has been shown at International Art Fairs and at the Louise Hopkins Underwood Center for the Arts in Texas.

Image credit: Jie Han

Expanding Professional Influence

Han’s professional involvement extends beyond individual projects. She serves on the ASLA Climate and Biodiversity Action Committee and the ASLA Northern California Chapter Executive Committee, reflecting her growing engagement with broader environmental and professional issues. Her appointment to the national Climate and Biodiversity Action Committee was made by the ASLA President, and her seat on the Northern California Chapter Executive Committee came through a merit-based election by the chapter’s professional membership, placing her among the practitioners helping to set the profession’s climate agenda in the United States.

Han’s work has also received recognition from organizations and design programs including the ASLA Northern California Chapter, BLT Built Design Awards, International Design Awards, and Architecture MasterPrize. Her portfolio extends to cultural and heritage landscapes. She contributed to the Erquan Resonance Pavilion, a modular and rotatable structure designed for performances and community gatherings, which received a Silver Award at the New York Architectural Design Awards; and her Waterfront Carnival proposal took Silver in the Public Landscape category of the French Design Awards.

Increasingly, Han is also asked to assess the work of others. She has served as a juror for the IAI Design Award, an international competition organized by the Asia-Pacific Designers Federation, and editors of internationally indexed journals such as Land Use Policy and Planning Practice & Research have invited her on multiple occasions to peer-review submissions in landscape, planning, and the built environment. These opportunities only go to practitioners whose judgment the field already treats as authoritative.

Together, these roles and recognitions reflect Han’s broader commitment to demonstrating how landscape architecture can address some of the defining challenges facing contemporary cities, including climate change, biodiversity loss, extreme heat, water management, and the loss of meaningful public space.

Toward an Adaptive Landscape Future

Han is currently continuing her professional development, with future interests closely tied to ecological restoration, climate resilience, and public space. She is particularly interested in landscapes that can evolve over time.

Rather than designing places around a single fixed future, she explores systems that can adjust as environmental conditions change. Water levels may rise. Vegetation may migrate. Public uses may evolve. Ecological communities may shift.

The landscape does not have to resist every one of those changes. It can accommodate them.

This perspective connects the different scales of Han’s work, from small climate-adaptive interventions to wetland restoration and coastal landscapes. Across these projects, she approaches landscape as a living system—one that must respond to changing environmental conditions while continuing to support ecological processes and public life. Her work reflects a broader commitment to designing landscapes that are resilient not because they remain unchanged, but because they are capable of adapting over time.

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