Nancy Rottle

Professor Emeritus

Over her four-decade career in landscape architecture Professor Emeritus Nancy Rottle, MLA, PLA, FASLA has rigorously explored how to create cities and regions that are ecologically healthy, culturally meaningful, and educationally and experientially resonant. A registered landscape architect, she applies her comprehensive professional experience to advance solutions that improve quality of life and well-being for all, focusing on regenerative infrastructure, public space, and water environments.

As Founder and Director of the Green Futures Lab (GFL), Rottle has spearheaded diverse research and design projects addressing urban and regional green infrastructure, including parks, active transport and open space networks, artful stormwater planning and design, urban habitat integration, climate protection, and equitable public realms. Through her teaching and the GFL she has facilitated community engagement and conducted collaborative research to envision ecological urban futures, impacting local processes, visions, plans, and regulatory codes. Her leadership has generated over $6 million in grants and gifts for research, internships, learning, and community processes.

Committed to the transformative value of international education, Rottle served for over a decade as UW’s Endowed Chair in Built Environments for the Scan Design Fellowship program, enabling hundreds of students to study in Denmark. With Scan Design Foundation support, she sponsored internships with prominent Danish offices, brought Danish urban design luminaries to teach in Seattle, and annually led the Scan Design Interdisciplinary Design Studio (2008–2024), which begins with a two-week Denmark and Sweden study tour examining exemplary public space design. She co-taught two term-long study abroad studios in New Zealand, fostering student and community learning and visioning after the devastating Christchurch earthquakes, and sponsored several international visiting scholars to study at the UW. Nancy has lectured in the US, New Zealand, China, Canada, Russia, and Europe.

Rottle’s professional and academic career has earned numerous planning and design awards. She won American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA) awards for the Cedar River Watershed Education Center, the Regional Open Space Planning Strategy for Central Puget Sound, and Open Space Seattle 2100: Designing Seattle’s Green Network for the Next Century. She received a Fulbright Senior Scholar award to study green infrastructure and climate change in New Zealand, and merited teaching honors from the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA). Her studios, thesis students, and interns have won college, local, and national awards, while both she and the GFL received UW recognition for their legacy in sustainability service. In 2014, she was elevated to an ASLA Fellow for her research contributions to the discipline.

A prolific author, Rottle has published in books, proceedings, and peer-reviewed journals; led dozens of white papers and professional reports; guided over thirty illustrated design studio documents; and initiated, mentored, and published fifteen downloadable public space design guides. She co-edited Climate Change and Place (2008, Places Journal) and Green Infrastructure Implementation (2014, WEF), and co-authored the visual textbook Ecological Design (2010, AVA Publishing) with Ken Yocom. Her latest peer-reviewed book, The Art of Sustainable Stormwater: Designing Blue-Green Cities, is drawn from her professional experience, teaching, and global study of stormwater from watershed to site scales. The book is available in print and PDF from Routledge.