Toward a Cross-Disciplinary Framework for Landscape Architecture in Data Center Development

Information from the abstract

Data center development brings together computational technologies, facility engineering, environmental management, territorial governance, and spatial design. However, knowledge across these domains remains fragmented, obscuring how decisions concerning data demand, power, cooling, redundancy, resource use, and siting produce interconnected spatial and socioecological consequences. This fragmentation may restrict architecture and landscape architecture to downstream mitigation after principal operational and siting decisions have been established. Through integrative literature review and a hybrid deductive–inductive thematic synthesis, the study identified four themes: digital demand becomes material infrastructure; coupled operational and ecological systems; resource exchange and territorial governance; and an unresolved spatial and experiential interface. The findings reveal partial convergence among information technology (IT), cooling, and energy research but persistent fragmentation across territorial, community, and design concerns. These relationships inform a provisional framework positioning landscape architecture as a cross-disciplinary spatial interface rather than an independent solution to data center impacts. A design exploration following identified themes illustrates how landscape tools might make interdependencies visible, frame trade-offs, and support earlier interdisciplinary coordination. The design remains an exploratory proposition rather than a validated design solution. The study contributes an integrated conceptual framework for investigating data centers as infrastructural landscapes embedded within ecological, territorial, and lived contexts.

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Related topics: Urban Planning and Landscape Design · Green IT and Sustainability · Architecture, Modernity, and Design