DEFTSPACE LAB

We create media about better places for people and the environment.

We coach and consult on projects, education, and designs focused on sustainability, healthy environments, clean energy, and social justice.

Our work serves community members, activists, students, local governments, and professionals in design, planning, and engineering.

Susan Dieterlen RLA PhD

Founder, DeftSpace Lab

Susan's CV

Meet Susan

Susan is a landscape architect who started asking questions about big topics and never stopped.

The answers led her to become a researcher, a professor, an author, and a podcaster passionate about helping people understand their surroundings and why they matter.

Susan is committed to connecting real places with real research for a more sustainable and inclusive future. Climate change, inequality, and public health problems can all seem hopeless, but we *do* have knowledge and strategies to make things better, right now, for all of us. Susan is passionate about helping people understand the places around them and empowering them to make those places healthier and stronger.

Susan’s Inspiration

30% Wild Inspiration

Bears and the hiking trail in my backyard inspired me to create 30% Wild, a podcast about the stories and science of living near nature, to make life in the nearby outdoors more comfortable and more fun for more people. Join us for Season 1 about scary animals right in the backyard!

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Design by Deficit Inspiration

I stumbled across a grand but overgrown staircase in the woods behind a city school, and wrote Design by Deficit, a book about how neglect creates accidental cities, out of sight behind our backs.

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Immigrant Pastoral Inspiration

Outdoor parties and Spanish on stores in rural Indiana changed me from a park designer to the author of Immigrant Pastoral, about Midwestern landscapes and Mexican-American Neighborhoods.

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When not working, Susan is probably outside on a trail or in her garden, peering into the woods and looking for bears.

Susan has been teaching all her life, but started getting paid for it in 2007. Now she does classes, workshops, and talks on all these topics, and a lot more
There’s nothing more fun than kicking ideas around through coaching and consulting with people excited to get their own projects off the ground
Susan loves pushing design into where it’s needed, like bringing clean, renewable energy into distressed urban neighborhoods, first in a semester-long design class and then in a year-long research project on microgrids
Susan studies how nature makes us healthier and happier, and what happens when cities unravel

The Complete Collection from Season 1

Ebook cover, with title in dripping black text on orange banners, black and white raven logo, and white block text with author name. Background is a mysterious yet lush forest.

Every coyote, disappearing farmhouse, and Green Man,

Ready for a campfire near you

Plus “No Heroes,” a bonus story only in this e-book

A Season of Abundance and Doom

by Deftspace | August 14, 2026 | City Wild, Climate Change, Design, Resilience, Sustainable Home, Uncategorized | 0 Comments

🍅August brings with it summer abundance, and the old holidays of Lughnasa and Lammas celebrating the first fruits of the harvest season. In my house, that's tomatoes, chiles, eggplant, basil, cukes, and a few zucchini, plus some new everbearing strawberries doing...

How to (Re)Build Your City for $10/Gal Gas

by Deftspace | April 16, 2026 | City Wild, Climate Change, Design, Energy, Health, How to (Re)Build Your City, Infrastructure, Planning, Resilience, Sustainable Home, Uncategorized | 0 Comments

Or $8/gal or $15/gal or whatever’s three times what you’re used to paying. What can we do in places built around driving everywhere with fuel that’s suddenly unaffordable? Plenty:Insulate buildings - roofs, walls, windows, doors, floors. Behold the power of...

A Tiny Daily Vacation

by Deftspace | February 18, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, Behavior, Climate Change, Design, Design X Deficit, Health, ReForest, Resilience, Sustainable Home, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Everybody’s worried What’s on your mind today? Everybody’s got a worry or six - what’s your top one today? Or maybe your top seven? Who couldn’t use a refuge, a place to find a respite from the incessant mayhem of the world? We’ve all got that in common, that we’re...

Cryptid Guilt

by Deftspace | February 17, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, Behavior, City Wild, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

This page may include affiliate links. Buying through them adds *no* additional cost to your purchase, supports "30% Wild," and supports independent bookstores via Bookshop.org. What a deal! Thanks so much for your support!Guilt How about this: we’re afraid of nature,...

Is Every Impossible Animal a Hoax?

by Deftspace | February 13, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, Behavior, City Wild, Invasives, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Hoaxes You knew this was coming: The Hoax. There’s people who genuinely think they saw an Impossible Scary Animal and are simply mistaken, which could happen to anyone. Anyone can make a mistake. But what about people who *deliberately* mislead others? Not just...

Awe and Impossible Animals

by Deftspace | February 13, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, Behavior, City Wild, Health, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Awe Maybe we see Impossible Scary Animals because we need nature to be bigger, badder, and wilder than it is, at least the nature around us. Maybe we crave awe. The year 2024 gifted the US with both a total solar eclipse and multiple dazzling displays of the aurora...

Your Impossible Brain

by Deftspace | February 12, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, Behavior, City Wild, Climate Change, Health, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

How many sightings of Impossible Scary Animals are exactly this: seeing an animal or a human-like shape in a totally unrelated object? We Want to Believe Do we simply want to believe? That there’s more out there, that the wilderness is still untamed and closer than we...

Possible Perception or Impossible Reality?

by Deftspace | February 12, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, Behavior, City Wild, Climate Change, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Have you ever something unsettling happen in the woods that you couldn’t explain? Well - have you? If I ask you this question, how would you answer, and what question are you answering?Most of my guests have understood it as being about the test of real situations in...

The Coyote of Resilience

by Deftspace | February 12, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, Invasives, ReForest, Resilience, Ruins, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Never bet against coyotes Never bet against Coyote, the trickster and sometimes god in the stories of various Native nations of North America. He’s both an irritating trickster and admired for his creative anarchic energy. Sometimes the hero. Sometimes chaos, the...

Our Frenemy the Bear

by Deftspace | February 10, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Nature is our frenemy We love nature, when it’s butterflies and sunsets, when it’s soothing waves or rain, when we’re hugging a tree. But we hate or fear nature, too, when it’s wildfires, hurricanes, or simply a swarm of mosquitoes. This isn’t new. You can look back...

The Rise of the Machines – or Feral Pigs?

by Deftspace | February 10, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, Invasives, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

When is a pig not a pig? When it’s the worst invasive species anywhere. Whether wild boar, razorback, or wild pig, feral swine top the list of ecological worries across most of the US, and much of the world. What makes feral pigs so scary and so very hard to control,...

No Bison, No North America

by Deftspace | February 10, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, Climate Change, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Bison *are* North America Bison have been here so long and have been living with humans for so long that they actually co-evolved with us, with the humans who have lived in North America for millennia. Bison changed physiology over that ocean of time to better...

What Is and Isn’t a Fisher (Cat)

by Deftspace | February 6, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

What's a fisher, what's not a fisher, and why do they freak people out? Fishers are mythical Not because they don’t exist. They very much do. They aren’t a myth, but myth-like. Mythical. Or, if you like, “mythic.” Virtually everyone treats fishers as though they...

For Love of the Dark Scary Woods

by Deftspace | February 6, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, Behavior, City Wild, Design, Graffiti, Invasives, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

What makes a place creepy? Spooky season is getting underway as I write this. Halloween decorations are going up and haunted houses are opening up, as a great wave of pumpkin spice rolls across the land. The long anthropocene summer is hanging on, but the mists of...

Rewilding, but with Zombies

by Deftspace | February 6, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, Design X Deficit, Health, Invasives, ReForest, Resilience, Ruins, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

What if campfire stories were about rewilding? Stay with me here:The ghost of your yard is a forest. Or a prairie, or even a wetland. Maybe it’s your neighborhood or your whole town, but in any case, what’s haunting your house is this past: what grew on the ground...

Mountain Lions Everywhere

by Deftspace | February 6, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

For a lot of us, mountain lions are the scariest animal potentially in our backyards. A panther underwater Apparently that’s held true through the centuries, since long before the immigrant ancestors of Americans like me arrived. The Ojibwe/Anishinaabe people, who’ve...

A Wolf at Your Door?

by Deftspace | February 5, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Track the Big Bad Wolf from fairy tales and metaphors to the real animal, and learn that everything you think you know about this elusive predator is probably wrong. The Big Bad Fill-in-the-Blank If it’s a fairy tale or a cartoon, we all know the Big Bad Wolf. He’s a...

Return of the Thunderbirds

by Deftspace | February 5, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, Climate Change, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

What’s America without thunderbirds? Or any wild place without some big scary, semi-supernatural Monster Birds? What do we lose when we lose big raptors - or more happily, what have we regained from their return? Bald Eagles If you’re young, this may surprise...

Terrors of the (Inland) Seas!

by Deftspace | February 4, 2026 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, Design X Deficit, Health, Infrastructure, Invasives, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Ask yourself: are you afraid of sharks? Who isn’t?Everybody knows sharks are savage bloodthirsty killers, the scariest animal in the ocean by far, the stuff of nightmares. Right? But how about this: *where* are you afraid of sharks?You can rate your shark fear/phobia...

How to (Re)Build Your World for Wildlife

by Deftspace | December 23, 2025 | 30% Wild podcast, Behavior, City Wild, Climate Change, Design, Design X Deficit, Health, How to (Re)Build Your City, ReForest, Resilience, Sustainable Home, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Radical idea: our places can be places for wildlife, too. But radical ideas are just talk without specific actions. Actions like: Cover the basics: shelter, water, food, spots to raise young. For prey *and* predators. Native plants everywhere. Or at least 70%...

Impossible Scary Animals: Seeing What’s Not There

by Deftspace | December 16, 2025 | 30% Wild podcast, Behavior, City Wild, Climate Change, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Find us where you listen to podcasts at thirtywildpod.com“30% Wild” podcast episode summary What is it we see, when what we see is “impossible”? Have you ever had something unsettling happen in the woods that you couldn’t explain? Whether animals way out of place,...

Never Bet Against Coyotes

by Deftspace | December 2, 2025 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, Health, Invasives, ReForest, Resilience, Ruins, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

"30% Wild" podcast episode summaryWily hero, despised villain, or something in between? Love coyotes or hate them, don’t bet against them being in your backyard, under your porch, or even trotting down your city’s streets. What makes these wild canines icons of...

Bear-anoia

by Deftspace | November 18, 2025 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, Health, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Find us where you listen to podcasts at thirtywildpod.com“30% Wild” podcast episode summary Is that dark shape outside your window a bear or just your imagination? As black bears move into new places and get closer to humans, the answer may surprise you. Are backyard...

Apocalypse Pork: Feral Pigs

by Deftspace | November 11, 2025 | 30% Wild podcast, Invasives, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

"30% Wild" podcast episode summaryConquistadors, pulled pork, and an invasive species "bomb," as we follow feral hogs through the centuries and across the country. Where are wild boars now, is eating them the answer, and what is and isn't dangerous about wild swine?We...

Eat Burgers, Save the World: Bison

by Deftspace | October 28, 2025 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, Climate Change, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Find us where you listen to podcasts at thirtywildpod.com“30% Wild” podcast episode summary Fluffy cow or climate hero? Which is scarier - how much our past and future depends on the bison’s unbelievable impact, or how close we came to losing that impact forever? Or...

Legend of the Fisher (Cat)

by Deftspace | October 21, 2025 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Find us where you listen to podcasts at thirtywildpod.com“30% Wild” podcast episode summary If any animal in the eastern US has a myth, it's the fisher, also sometimes called the fisher cat. What's true about this giant weasel and what's just a story around the...

Fear in the Woods

by Deftspace | October 14, 2025 | 30% Wild podcast, Behavior, City Wild, Design, Graffiti, Invasives, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Find us where you listen to podcasts at thirtywildpod.com“30% Wild” podcast episode summary What makes a place creepy, and most especially, what makes the woods spooky? Is it just the animals that are scary, or is there something else waiting off the trail? From...

Back from the Dead, aka Rewilding

by Deftspace | October 7, 2025 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, Invasives, ReForest, Uncategorized, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Find us where you listen to podcasts at thirtywildpod.com“30% Wild” podcast episode summary What past life is in your yard, waiting to be resurrected? What do zombies have to do with ecology? In the spookiest way possible, we dig into rewilding your yard,...

Protected: Closing the ‘Book

by Deftspace | January 22, 2025 | City Wild | 0 Comments

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Mountain Lions in the East

by Deftspace | October 17, 2024 | 30% Wild podcast, City Wild, ReForest, Wildlife | 0 Comments

Find us where you listen to podcasts at thirtywildpod.com “30% Wild” podcast episode summary Mountain lions, cougars, panthers, pumas - by any name, they’re the scariest animal out there, at least in our imaginations. On “30% Wild,” we look at the prospect of these...

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