By Teri Nye, Park Pride’s Director of Park Visioning
For Gena Wirth, designing for resilience isn’t a nice-to-have or a cherry on top — it’s a necessity.
Gena is Design Principal & Partner at SCAPE Studio, a landscape architecture and urban design studio based in New York that focuses on new ways to knit nature into urban life, creating enduring landscapes and a more resilient future for all. She is also one of three keynote speakers for Park Pride’s 2026 Parks & Greenspace Conference on Monday, March 23.
As Design Principal, Gena works with various stakeholders to reveal the ecological and cultural potential of public spaces and leads the design and implementation of complex landscapes. In 2025, Gena was honored as an American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) Fellow — one of ASLA’s highest honors, which recognizes the contributions of landscape architects to their profession and society.
Teri Nye, Park Pride’s Director of Park Visioning and a landscape architect, sat down with Gena to discuss the role design plays in addressing mounting climate stressors, the importance of designing with resiliency at the forefront, and how parks play a crucial role in strengthening and fortifying our cities.
TN: What role do you see parks playing in efforts to create more resilient communities?
GW: There are so many ways. Here in New York, we’re facing a big affordable housing crisis, and as unit sizes are getting smaller, we need more of these common spaces for people to interact.
From a more ecological or technical perspective, we look at park spaces to provide so much more physical infrastructure for cities — water retention infrastructure and managing stormwater and flood events. Parks also help deal with urban heat island issues. It’s really heartening to see people beginning to really understand the role that parks can play.
TN: Has the increasing frequency of climate and social stressors changed how you approach your work at SCAPE?
GW: Definitely. One of the earliest projects I worked on at SCAPE was Oyster-tecture — a funky idea about how an oyster reef could be constructed as an urban landscape in the harbor to help buffer and protect the edges of Brooklyn, and it served as the original inspiration for what is now Living Breakwaters, located off the coast of Staten Island.
Taking that idea through to execution [required] almost two decades of research, energy and expertise-building, and our teams have really deepened our resilience expertise. We’re also building specific technical teams within our office focused on resilience and understanding how we plan for resilience, thinking about flood elevations and vulnerabilities, and how that translates directly into the construction of our coastal projects.
TN: Meaningful community participation strengthens both the resilience of parks and the resilience of the people who rely on them. Do you have any ideas about how designers, policymakers, and advocates can ensure that investments advance equity and belonging rather than displacement or exclusion?
GW: It’s really important that we don’t shy away from those conversations and that we establish an early baseline where conversations around gentrification are embraced and encouraged. It’s not something that is swept under the rug; it’s something that’s a very important community-focused design conversation.
When we did our work along the Chattahoochee RiverLands (a vision for a 100-mile linear network of greenways, blueways and parks), we made sure that we had different types of meetings in different locations to pull in different audiences, so you weren’t just speaking to the same people. Having that range to make sure you’re attracting diverse voices to the process is critical.
TN: One of our major climate risks in both Atlanta and the Southeast is extreme heat. How do you see heat influencing the design for projects in our region?
GW: We’re thinking a lot about the qualities of shade with different tree species and the density of tree spacing. We often think about climate risks as heat, stormwater or coastal flooding, but biodiversity is equally important. The trees we’re planting will likely live the longest on an urban site, and [we need to consider] how they can adapt to changing hardiness levels and climatic conditions of the future. We need more tests and experiments, because we’re living in a very rapidly changing, dynamic system.
TN: Can you share an example from your work where a park or public landscape was intentionally designed as a climate adaptation strategy, while still serving as a beloved community space?
GW: We designed a project called the First Avenue Water Plaza. It’s a really beloved public realm and gathering space with a plaza and interactive fountain, which all exist on top of a layered stormwater management system. Portions of the landscape are lifted to be out of the floodplain, and portions are designed to flood. [Implementing] climate adaptation strategies is something we have to do in today’s contemporary landscape design environment. It’s not really an option.
This is just a snippet of what you can expect from Gena’s keynote talk at our Parks & Greenspace Conference on Monday, March 23 — you won’t want to miss it! Tickets will go on sale on Thursday, January 15. Click here to learn more.
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