Ecological awareness can be traced back to the 1960s with the publication of Rachel Carson’s watershed work, Silent Spring, which drew public attention to the enormous environmental impact of pesticides and other pollutants on delicate ecosystems. Her work anticipated other key eco-political awakenings, such as the energy crisis of the early 1970s and the series of international environmental agreements politically defined at the Rio Earth Summit in 1992, which constituted a significant shift in global awareness and action of ecological crisis. Artists were already on high alert by the early 1990s, responding to the environmental crisis through activist and educational stances. Today, the world is faced with multiple aspects and consequences of the climate crisis, but there has been a change in citizens’ relationships to more than thirty years of overwhelming environmental issues. Works of art, architecture, and design that reside in the public realm and contend with the environmental crisis have begun to occupy a new, discursive terrain as agents of public enlightenment. They adopt an educational stance choosing to address politics, culture, ethics, economics, business, or even provide solutions. These works, which might be called “eco-didactic”, do not simply demonstrate their concern about pressing ecological issues; rather, they are driven by an urgent need to explain, to teach and maybe even implicate viewers and visitors about the crisis as well as the consequences of inaction. For this special issue of Sustainability, we invite essays that focus on environmentally-driven architecture, landscape design, and public art practices that have emerged over the last two decades (2000-2020). We are interested in practices that manifest a distinctively “didactic” environmental discourse, i.e. one that aims to educate and influence the public. This special issue invites papers that present cases and contribute to the reflection of the following: How have art, architecture, and design come together in recent decades to express ecological and environmental concerns? How does this “eco-didactic turn” cross disciplines, specifically art, design and architecture? By what means do these eco-didactic installations establish public platforms for raising awareness? To what extent do these eco-didactic works in the public realm lead to public enlightenment? How do such creative practices contribute to the potential of public space as a political forum? Can these eco-didactic art, design, and architecture practices influence small businesses, corporations, governments, and policy?
Keywords: environmental architecture; public art; landscape design; environmental design; public awareness; civic action; didacticism; educational practices; didactic devices.