In honor of Frederick Law Olmsted Sr's birthday today, April 26 (1822, so let's call it a round 190!), I would remind folks to go out and read more about the man in the great 2011 biography 'Genius of Place' by Justin Martin (Da Capo Press, 2011). Genius of Place traces Olmsted from his beginnings in 1822 up until his death in 1903. While most well known as the creator of Central Park and in some circles as the father of landscape architecture, it's telling that much of Olmsted's life was spent in pursuits aside from park-making and design - in areas of farming, public health, journalism and the literary arts. Martin does a solid job of showing the quirks and uncommon path that Olmsted took through his varied life - captured in the subtitle "Abolitionist, Conservationist, and Designer of Central Park".
Also worthy of reading is the 2000 biography by Rybczynski 'A Clearing in the Distance' and Erik Larson's more fantastical page-turner on the 1893 Worlds Columbian Exposion in Chicago in 'The Devil in the White City'. Olmsted, as the father of the profession is featured in any manner of great landscape history books (i read a good portion of the entire 7? Volume 'Papers of Frederick Law Olmsted' in college) - but for the less nerdy and bibliophilic there's plenty of summary material and locations to delve into.
While we often question is pastoral scenic aesthetic sensibilities (he was a man of his time), there is much to learn in his tireless work ethic, social sensibility, and focus on ecological as well as public health -- providing models for issues that we still grapple with today. We should also emulate his shrewdness in navigating messy politics to further his agenda and get things done, which is something we could use a lot more of these days in our somewhat timid, politically safe professional bunkers.
Celebrate the man and the profession, first by spelling the name correctly, and justly honoring his contribution to our profession, our cities, and our imagination.
My fascination with history and place is no secret. While i am intrigued with urban history in many forms, there's always a desire for a connection with the place you inhabit. Typically this fascination comes via maps, which have been well documented, but the timeline of the past 150 years plus of Portland is worth a bit of investment. For folks on the go, there's also an app that highlights historical site - prepared by the Architectural Heritage Center. Also a new site, WhatWasThere, is a crowd-sourced version that allows folks to upload history photos of their places.
In addition, there are a number of other sources that augmented by a number of great resources that are provided by city and other historical society archives. Each has some overlap but occupies a unique and often personal niche for the blogger and site owner - to scratch their particular history itch, and all make for some great information.
A veritable decoupage of historical imagery awaits at Portland History - a no-frills site that organizes images, postcards, and a few words - sorted into categories like streets, amusement parks, A good shortcut is to go the site map, which gives some links to the categories - but just randomly moving around the site isn't a bad idea either.
Council Crest, the Dreamland of Portland, Oregon
Lost Oregon is a great example of an engaging history tour, albeit typically focused on architecture and riddled with some really bad theme ideas like this one. The site is simple and delves into some more details about some of the areas, buildings, and locations - which augments what is somewhat visually based on other sites.
A spinoff of Lost Oregon writer is PDX: Then/Now which juxtaposes historic and current photos of buildings and places. Some show destruction or evolution, and some, such as the Union Bank Building in Downtown, are eerily similar over 40 years later.
Vintage Portland is another site 'exploring portland's past', through "...photographs, postcards, illustrations, advertisements, etc. ... It’s not a history lesson, it’s not an architectural critique. It’s a
forum for displaying photos of the city’s past, to show how we lived,
what we’ve lost (for good or bad) through progress and just to enjoy
some wonderful camera work."
I particularly appreciate the 'mystery' posts - which show a building, corner, streetscape - with a question to help find where the site is. Sometimes it's to fill in a missing link to an archival photo, but other times it becomes more of a game. The context over time is fascinating evolution - and really highlights the impermanence/permanence of the urban realm. This shot of MLK @ Ainsworth from the north - replace Texaco with Starbucks (old fuel/new fuel?) and Gilmore with Popeyes (old grease/new grease?).
Cafe Unknown is a new one for
me, but author Dan Haneckow pulls you in with compelling history (more
text than other sites) along with some good images. A recent post on Mark Twain in Portland is a good read, and some of the trivial pursuits are great - like Will- vs. Wall- for our fair river (which subsequently ended up 'Willamette') are nuggets of pure gold. Haneckow is a true historical writer - with the requisite head shots of historical figures quoted... along with some really solid writing and research. These walking tour images were pretty interesting finds - along with the story of a missing sculpture found. This stuff is priceless - and firmly about our place.
Check all of these resources out - It is true - you will be sucked in for a few hours/days/weeks - and might come out forever changed. I feel like a landscape or at least urbanism oriented history site wouldn't be a bad endeavor - if someone is inclined to collaborate - look me up. But the caveat on these sites, and historical maps, photos, and primary materials - it's addictive. Don't say i didn't warn you.
I am happy to report that a recent essay was published in 'Atlantis' Magazine, which is published by Polis and collects writings that make "...the link between students,
academics and professionals besides the Polis activities. This magazine
is our medium to keep you as member up to date about everything going on
in the urbanism & landscape architecture world. The issue 22.4 discusses concepts around the 'Urban Landscape' and features contributions from a wide range of authors.
The essay "Land- 'scape' / Land- 'space': Pedantic, Semantic or just Anagrammatic" is a tongue-in-cheek play on words that carries with it a more serious message. The dialogue around landscape urbanism has been called pedantic, and the splitting of hairs could be dismissed, particularly by those uninformed and who disagree with the concepts, as mere semantics. The anagrammatic is purely a place on words. The content, revolving around an exploration of the terms 'landscape' and 'urbanism', and more specifically the parallels of the anagrammatic terms 'space' and 'scape' begin the discussion.
Using definitions from JB Jackson's essay 'The Word Itself', the parallels between space and scape are delineated, as Jackson's cultural reading of landscape as "...a composition of man-made or man-modified spaces to serve as infrastructure or background for our collective existence.” (Jackson, Discovering the Vernacular Landscape, 1984) This expands our idea of landscape beyond scenery and greenery to encompass a more broad understanding of 'context'.
Urbanism is also investigated, starting with Wirth's 1938 essay 'Urbanism as a Way of Life' and tracing the divergence of urbanism as 'study' to that of action. I claim we need to differentiate between the study of urban areas and the design and planning activities. This will allow us to operate in a shared space for dialogue:
"Thus study equates to urbanism (of which there can be many types of study), and practice equates to disciplinary modes and interdisciplinary contexts, such as urban design, architecture, landscape architecture and planning (of which there can be many types of solution). The distinction allows us to avoid binary argument because there are infinite types of study and methods of solving problems – each driven by the unique context. Dialogue and critique can still operate – but there will more transparency and it won’t be summed in an either/or proposition. The complexity of urban areas in our contemporary world is too immense for only one of two solutions"
The end along with a call for more clarity in writing about these terms, specifically the need for clear definitions when discussing terms. We are too loose with terminology today, and the overall impact and reach of our discussion suffers from this. Whichever way you choose to interpret and intervene the urban conditions, there needs to be shared understanding of fundamental issues, because, as I mention: "In the end, no discussion or argument (binary or otherwise) is worth much if it happening around vague language..."
Comments and discussion, with clear definitions, always welcome.
A clip that spawned a lot of conversation within our reading group, from 1990, Diane Sawyer reporting on ABCs Primetime Live, in a series called 'Detroit's Agony' - which looks at Mayor Coleman Young's legacy, and plays on Detroit as 'the first urban domino to fall...' [More after the video]
The shock of 'Devils Night', guns, drugs, and violence has changed to a different narrative in 20+ years, but not necessarily one that is any more positive - at least in terms of media coverage. Is Detroit still the end of the road? Is this just a continuation to the story? Is what we are witnessing now is the continuation of the city as ruin? Interesting history, if only one of the media itself and it's framing of issues both then and now.
Arsenal
Moving along with the Shrinking Cities readings, the first part of 'Origins of the Urban Crisis' by Segrue recounts the development of the City of Detroit around WWII as the 'Arsenal of Democracy' which made it one of the highest paying blue-collar cities in the US. In the words of Segrue, "Mid-twentieth-century Detroit embodied the melding of human labor and technology that together had made the United States the apotheosis of world capitalism." (p.19) This height of Fordist production makes the inevitable fall even more extreme.
:: 'Criss Crossed Conveyors' from the Ford River Rouge Plant - Charles Sheeler (1927) image via Art History Archive
As mentioned, the visitors of today's Detroit marvel at the industrial ruins and disaster porn, but at the time, people flocked to the city to see the massive technologies and industrial might at work, and mostly "they stood rapt as the twentieth century's premier consumer object, the automobile, rolled off the assembly lines by the dozens an hour." (p.19) It is hard to think of the spectacular model of modernity that Detroit once embodied, one that reshaped the city with a new form of 'industrial geography' which tied factories to suppliers and workers to homes with unprecedented efficiency.
The traces of grand boulevards from Woodward's L'Enfant-inspired plan of 1807
remained - fanning out in a radial pattern of wide avenues from the city center, which added to
the idea of speed and efficiency that has characterized Detroit, and the
automobile industry for decades. Much like Los Angeles being the embodiment of the auto-centric city, Detroit is the perfect model of Fordist urbanism at work - not just in the factories - driven by mass-production along with high union wages, and the accessibility of the blue-collar worker to live in a single-family house of their own - with a dearth of any sort of apartment of multi-family housing to accommodate lower-income or those not wealthy enough, or white enough, to buy houses.
The focus on single-family houses led to perpetual housing shortages - particularly when combined with a history of official and unofficial policies that prevented blacks from obtaining housing. Unlike many of the eastern cities where the geography was a patchwork of ethnic enclaves, Detroit was much more literally black and white, as Segrue mentions, "class and race became more important that ethnicity as a guide to the city's residential geography." (p.22) While it was understood as a "City of Homes" for most, the influx of black workers from the South, who came in the 'Great Migration', were met with a consistent range of discrimination and violence, as existing residents perceived in-migration as a threat to their community, starting in the 1920s and continuing all the way through the 1970s. As mentioned in Segrue:
"White neighborhoods, especially enclaves of working-class homeowners, interpreted the influx of blacks as a threat and began to defend themselves against the newcomers, first by refusing to see to blacks, then by using force and threats of violence, and finally establishing restrictive covenants to assure the homogeneity of neighborhoods." (p.24)
There were some inroads to employment in good jobs around WWII, driven by a tightening labor market, the coalitions of unions and civil rights groups, and some federal policies, which made sure that "blacks made significant gains in Detroit's industrial economy during the war." (p.27) There was still an undercurrent of racial tension, which played out in housing and employment, a continual topic that Segrue alludes to being a 'structural' racism that played out in Detroit, and were displayed in significant riots and other violence throughout the years, but that this didn't stop the influx of blacks coming into the city, leaving the Jim Crow south for something better. It's debatable if Detroit was much better.
The Time Bomb
The availability and quality of housing was poor for blacks - driven by a number of social and policy factors. While the New Deal had instilled a new ideology of opportunity for blacks - it had also instilled an ideology for current residents that the government would protect their property and the status quo. Thus the competing ideals of opportunity and protection played out in Detroit, and although, as seen previously, some gains were made - the majority of the wins came in maintenance of the status quo and protection from the new waves of poor, black residents.
As seen in the map below, there were very specific segregated neighborhoods that were predominately populated by blacks - in particularly the original Paradise Valley and West Side Neighborhoods (which had been an areas for wealthy blacks that had deteriorated), along with the wealthier blacks in Conant Gardens and the more distant Eight Mile-Wyoming area, where they had land for gardens to grow food, which became for some pioneering blacks, "their one opportunity, as they saw it, to own their own homes and rear their families." (p.39)
The geography of race was perpetuated by the real estate community as well, who were actively involved in the exclusion of blacks from housing. Another aspect was construction, with new houses rarely being built for blacks or in a price range that was suitable. As Segrue mentions, in "1951, on 1.15 percent of the new homes constructed in the metropolitan Detroit area were available to blacks." (p.43). Another major issue that shaped this geography in Detroit, and many other cities around the United States, was the concept of redlining. Maps were produced by the Federal Home Loan Bank Board, informed by local real estate brokers and lenders, to rate the neighborhoods in cities according to a scale from A (green) to D (red). While ostensibly a methodology for determining investment risk, the process became a de facto method for exclusion, disenfranchisement, and continued disinvestment in the minority areas.
Black neighborhoods, even those with a small percentage of black residents, were given a rating of 'D', which was deemed hazardous and colored red (as seen in the unfortunately fuzzy map above, which shows significant portions of the downtown). I haven't been able to track down maps from Detroit - although they do exist for a number of cities - and tell as pretty sad tale of federally aided racism. The ratings kept out new loans for new construction or home repairs, furthering a cycle of disinvestment, as outlined by Segrue:
"Residents in areas rate 'C' and 'D' were unlikely to qualify for mortgages and home loans. Builders and developers, likewise, could expect little or no financial backing if they chose to building in such risky neighborhoods." (p.44)
When you factor in restrictive covenants (the actual and implied), and the work of redlining along with real-estate industry maintenance of status quo, it equated to an impossible position for the largest growing population of residents in Detroit to get adequate housing, which further fueled tensions. For a bit more context, here's a video about the Race Riots from Detroit 2020 offers a concise history on the topic:
The final element of the oppression of poor minority residents in Detroit came, as it did in many areas, through the disguise of urban renewal, in particular the construction of highways through 'slums' that cleared out substandard housing without replacing it with enough to handle what was lost, much less house the large numbers of new residents. From Segrue: "The most obvious problem with slum clearance was that it forced the households with the least resources to move at a time when the city's tight housing market could not accommodate them." (p.50)
This was exacerbated with landlords charging more rent (up to 35% more) for blacks for less housing, which, coupled with the lower wages and job opportunities, forced many to live in great numbers, and not have anything left over for maintenance. This further degraded already deteriorating stock, which further declined, and continued the narrative that some whites believed - that blacks would destroy neighborhoods. The cycle continued. Unlike some areas that built robust (if often misguided) public housing, the next chapter showed that Detroit, city of 'homes' had some similar issues with density, and a new-found Nimbyism which led to a slow provision of subsidized housing, which may have aided in softening some of the myriad impacts of the 1950s and 1960s.
Public Housing
The promise of the New Deal, in post-WWII era, was predicated on government intervention to solve the problems of the city. One of those things was to provide adequate housing for the poor, whether this be true building of community and opportunity, or the more commonly wielded tool of 'social engineering' to make better citizens. Through a number of acts, the US developed policy and funding for many types of affordable housing, complementing the already robust subsidies of single family home construction and highway building.
The trend toward 'modernist' totalitarian schemes emerged from this process of social engineering, embodied by the work of a group of professionals called the Citizens' Housing and Planning Council (CPHC), which took a mission of "improvement of the environmental conditions of Detroit's slums through the elimination of crowded, dirty, and substandard housing, and the construction of sanitary, well-lit, and well-ventilated public housing in its place." (p.61) This type of rhetoric smacks of much of public housing projects of the era, which provides housing, as Segrue mentions, that has "ameliorative effects on living conditions and would modify the behavior and character of urban residents... Public housing would also uplift the 'morale' of urban dwellers," which could happen through "social and individual improvement through orderly planning and urban redevelopment." (p.62)
The problem in Detroit, was that nobody seemed to want public housing, as it was fought almost everywhere by both whites, unions, real estate agents, developers and even some established black residents. The adjacency of even some black areas was problematic, and developers had to make deals with the FHA, such as the 1 foot thick, 6 foot high wall that separated the new development from the old - remnants of which still exist. This sort of approach reinforced the FHA's official policy, not of true equality, but as mentioned by Segrue, even with some of the more enlightened bureaucrats, "a separate but equal philosophy." (p.67)
:: Wall Separating Black from White - remnant - image via Detroit Fly
The official ideology of racial segregation couched in urban renewal also bled into the policies of the City Plan Commission (CPC), which continued the rhetoric of "an emerging program to create a totally planned metropolis, combining public housing with strictly regulated private development..." and the group began using zoning to start "composing a master plan to guide city and regional growth... for the 'reconstruction of Detroit's 'blighted' neighborhoods'..." (p.68) The use of condemnation and slum removal, and strategic placement of black neighborhoods aimed to 'clean up' areas and protect others from deterioration, but more often than not led to housing shortages for those most in need.
The contention over public housing locations was intense, with everyone agreeing that there was a chronic shortage, but no area wanting to be the location for housing to be built. It is understandable, as the inclusion of black neighborhoods, even those Federally-funded, would place these areas in danger of redlining, meaning that value for those living nearby would degrade, and their access to money for improvements and new construction would be significantly decreased. Many planned projects, such as the Sojourner-Truth housing project in Northeast Detroit, which was a planned 200 unit development opposed by whites as well as existing, establish blacks. The overt racism was sometimes couched in a patriotic fervor, "couched in the language of Americanism," as seen in the flags atop the blatant message below but also came with a hint of threatened violence, all with an aim, in the words of existing homeowners, to "preserve the racial and architectural homogeneity of their neighborhood." (p.78)
The Federal government flip-flopped multiple times on location and type of housing - at one point within a two week period switching from black to white, and back to black. The New Deal dichotomy of rights vs. existing protection was at play in many of these conversations as well, as mentioned by Segrue, while: "Acknowledging the 'moral and legal right' of blacks to adequate housing..." existing residents countered that they "had established a prior right to a neighborhood which we have built up through the years - a neighborhood which is entirely white and which we want kept white." (p.80) The government, with pressure from residents, unions, and other groups, implied redlining from real-estate agents, and continued white flight to the suburbs, often acquiesced to these demands, further creating a tension of high rent and little opportunity that continued to flare up in violence.
The venue of public housing debate became a political touchstone as well - with mayoral elections being decided not by the traditional means of party affiliation and union membership, but by black and white, specifically a candidates views of public housing. This conflict, as Segrue mentions, of "politics of home" versus the "politics of the workplace" was another interesting institutional element that made Detroit a large city with very little public housing compared to many other US cities.
As we shall see in subsequent chapters, the racial and social strife had already taken a toll on Detroit, even before deindustrialization, and that loss of industrial might that made the city the Arsenal of Democracy, will continue to play out in racial division, housing, and employment.
Oh the sick and twisted future... a film from General Motors in 1940 entitled 'To New Horizons' talking about the world twenty years later. Yes indeed, "Man continually strives to replace the old, with the new!"
Spotted on one of my favorite new sites - Copenhagenize. Check it out.
A class this term at Portland State involves a reading and conference on 'Shrinking Cities'. Led by professor Ellen Bassett, a group of a dozen students from PhD and Masters in Urban Studies and Urban and Regional Planning reading and discussing four diverse texts, along with a range of other writings on the subject.
:: Detroit Race Riots - 1967 - image via Brittanica
Our first book is "The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit" by Thomas Segrue. Originally published in 1996, this book has won a number of awards for history, and continues to provide an overview of the connections between racial and economic inequality as played out in the post-WWII urban landscape of Detroit.
This is By no means a comprehensive overview of the subject, but the aim of the group is to discuss the social, economic, political, and spatial phenomena at work in a number of US Shrinking Cities, to better understand this issue. Stay tuned for some thoughts over coming weeks, and if you have suggested readings to include, that would be very welcome.
An interesting article from the Economist on 'The Wisdom of Crowds' echoes much of the seminal research of William Whyte (City), Edward T. Hall (The Hidden Dimension), and others that have closely studied the behavior of pedestrians and other users of public spaces. The interplay of cultural habits that tells us to step right or left to avoid collisions on a busy street can lead to a certain inherent poetic 'choreography' when viewed. There are different theories on how these actions are coordinated, and the article focuses on new scientific methods for predicting and studying pedestrian movements.
As Jane Jacobs mentioned in The Death and Life of Great American Cities this urban realm is likened to a ballet:
"It is a complex order. Its essence is intricacy of sidewalk use, bringing with it a constant succession of eyes. This order is all composed of movement and change, and although it is life, not art, we may fancifully call it the art form of the city and liken it to the dance — not to a simple-minded precision dance with everyone kicking up at the same time, twirling in unison and bowing off en masse, but to an intricate ballet in which the individual dancers and ensembles all have distinctive parts which miraculously reinforce each other and compose an orderly whole. The ballet of the good city sidewalk never repeats itself from place to place, and in any once place is always replete with new improvisations.”
It was interesting, in this context, to remember my recent travels to Europe, namely London, where traffic on the roads occupies the left lane, but as mentioned in the article, there is not a correlation between this and pedestrian movement. While they mention that London follows pedestrians on the right, that is an oversimplification, as it doesn't necessarily follow, at least in my experience. Many people follow the walking to the left, which is culturally learned in the UK, mirroring the driving, but the influx on many non-locals that have their own rules often leads this to degenerate into chaos. Thus there is not a typical rule of thumb - and you are therefore required to be much more actively engaged in the surroundings to navigate successfully.
London Pavement Parkings - (image by Jason King)
As mentioned in the originally referenced article, culture is less important in this process as is habit and repetition: "Mehdi Moussaid of the Max Planck Institute in Berlin, this is a behaviour brought about by probabilities. If two opposing people guess each other’s intentions correctly, each moving to one side and allowing the other past, then they are likely to choose to move the same way the next time they need to avoid a collision. The probability of a successful manoeuvre increases as more and more people adopt a bias in one direction, until the tendency sticks. Whether it’s right or left does not matter; what does is that it is the unspoken will of the majority."
The importance of this sort of study (sorry thought, as mentioned, this not a 'youngish field') has long been known in urban realms. It is being rediscovered by other sciences and disciplines (seems like everyone wants to study the city now!) such as physics, who are using modeling in the context of crowd safety, particularly in a more multi-cultural world, to better understand what has long been studied the old-fashioned way - by watching people in person or through video.
While thinking of people in similar terms of particles may be helpful, as people are governed by many rules - there is somewhat of a wildcard element in human behavoir as people act as "particles with a 'will'", doing sometimes unpredictable things and non-linear behaviors. The issues with modeling are obvious, when you take into account the sheer number of variables at play even in the most simple pedestrian-to-pedestrian interaction. The article mentions this in the context of a study between Indian and German pedestrians, where the direction is also complicated by cultural spatial rules as well:
"Trying to capture every element of pedestrian movement in an equation is horribly complex, however. One problem is allowing for cultural biases, such as whether people step to the left or the right, or their willingness to get close to fellow pedestrians. Trying to capture every element of pedestrian movement in an equation is horribly complex, however. One problem is allowing for cultural biases, such as whether people step to the left or the right, or their willingness to get close to fellow pedestrians. An experiment in 2009 tested the walking speeds of Germans and Indians by getting volunteers in each country to walk in single file around an elliptical, makeshift corridor of ropes and chairs. At low densities the speeds of each nationality are similar; but once the numbers increase, Indians walk faster than Germans. This won’t be news to anyone familiar with Munich and Mumbai, but Indians are just less bothered about bumping into other people."
It would be interesting to do a lit review of cultural spatial studies, building on the work of Hall, to see if these have been updated, and if we have learned anything new in the past 20 years, since The Hidden Dimension was published in 1990. The world has changed dramatically and is much more global, thus it makes sense that even this sort of revolutionary study, while still somewhat applicable, will have changed due to a changed world.
This goes as well to updating Whyte's classic video studies of public spaces (i.e. The Social Life of Small Urban Spaces), which are great but extremely dated and not reflective of a much more culturally rich society. A screen shot of one of the videos shows a different environment than what exists even 20 to 30 years later. This doesn't mean his data are any less relevant, but that we must continue to engage in further study to learn more.
A research agenda that looks at these phenomena, how we use spaces, how we react and incorporate multiple cultural viewpoints, and more is vital to our continual understanding of proxemics, pedestrian movement, crowd dynamics, and more. This can be done by incorporation of more scientific modeling of typically non-urban disciplines, such as the complex modeling processes in physics. It is, to me, much more interesting to envision this study through updates of the seminal urban research studies, which would be a worthy endeavor in our ever globalizing world and our constantly diversifying cities.
This post originally appeared on THINK.urban on January 05, 2012.
A great little snapshot on urban serendipity from the NY Times that looks at the accidental 'curation' of spaces that the urban environment yields, such as the framed view from the subway to the Brooklyn Bridge. Perhaps the uniformity of the grid is part of the magic, as the NYT also talks about the 200th Anniversary of the Manhattan Grid, along with the exhibition at the Museum of the City. And speaking of paving here in Portland, local group Depave got some nice coverage on OPB for their continued work on rolling back pavement in the city. As for making money on the urban agriculture and gardens - a study in Vancouver, BC finds that it is still a challenge to make a living wage farming, even in the city. Perhaps we can lobby for urban farm subsidies?
Nate Berg at the Atlantic Cities sums up Los Angeles Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne's year-long project to explore his city through its literature, and some of his conclusions on where we stand. As quoted in the Atlantic article:
"“What the books have suggested to me,” Hawthorne argues, “is that we really don’t have – and need – a new framework for understanding the city at this moment in its history as it undergoes this transition.”
A review of his most recent reading of 'Los Angeles Plaza: Sacred and Contested Space' can be found here - which is an interested exploration of the role of space, and the role of social status, on the way we interpret urban histories. Related, and probably not big news, but people are less enamored with the suburbs, and are re-urbanizing, in this case, Philadelphia along with living in more dense types of housing.
More on Occupy, with the recent flurry of Global and US occupations bringing into question the 'limits' of how public spaces are. As mentioned in the story:
"The Occupy Wall Street movement showed there are often limits to how long one can stay in the town square of a “free” state to express one’s opinion. Various kinds of force were used to get people out of New York’s Zuccotti Park."
An interesting article from The Dirt on the $50 million!!!!! dollars of planning documents and designs for the Orange County Great Park, which has failed to yield much in terms of output. It brings into question the time-scale on these massive endeavors, and how much needs to happen to create a 'park' in a traditional sense to satisfy some - while allowing space (and budgets) to evolve over decades.
Finally, a new competition from the Land Art Generator Initiative asks how renewable energy can be beautiful with a planned site at the Freshkills Park - which has a similar time-scale to the Great Park above. And Freshkills may be an apt model for Mexico City, who is planning to close their massive landfill... And for the squeamish, a new report from the National Research Council changes the tune of reclaimed wastewater (aka toilet to tap) from a 'option of last resort' to a viable strategy that poses no more health risks than other sources. Drink up!
Via Atlantic Cities, an interesting film from 1959 exploring the implications for sprawl... from the National Association of Home Builders and the Urban Land Institute. I particularly like the diagrams of the monocentric city towards polycentric city form in post WWII United States.
The solutions include planned unit developments, cluster developments, townhouses, culs-de-sac, separation of auto and pedestrian uses, loop streets, and circular streets are mentioned - all of which had/have merit - but are not a silver bullet to fix issues. Interestingly, have we actually come very far in the last 50+ years? Can planning solve these issues? As summed up in patriotic fervor:
"Planning alone is not the final answer to the crisis of our land. But without wise and far-sighted planning, there can be no answers. How wisely, or wastefully, we use the heritage of our land, is not solely the responsibility of the planner, the developer, the builder, the community official. It is the responsibility of all of us, who are the American community."
The solution - more research. Some things never change.
As an example, King mentions the Sierra Pacific Megapolitan Area, seen below as a large geographical area that extends from the San Francisco Bay area all the way into Western Nevada, around Reno. The region includes 27 counties and includes over 12.4 million people, and its expected to grow substantially in the next 30 years.
As mentioned in the article, the significance of the concept of megapolitan areas is to look more broadly at a larger scale, King, quoting Nelson, mentions that "regions can be more proactive in everything from transportation planning to economic strategies... to have people look at things a little differently, the whole rather than the parts."
While explicitly not a model for mega-regional government, there are some possibilities of what this might mean for regions by looking at larger areas. As mentioned by King, "It's too early to say whether the concept of megapolitan areas will catch on as a framework for government policy, much less in terms of how regular people define where they live."
The significant of megapolitan areas, thus is undetermined.
The overall ambiguity of the defining characteristics of a 'city' has led to a lot of questions related to city centers, sprawl, and other hybrid urban agglomerations like edge cities, exurbs, and the shift from urban area to metropolitan statistical areas (MSAs). This leads to a lot of diversity in definition (outlined in the SF Gate article) - including the largest megapolitan area (NY-Phil 33.9 million people) to the smallest, fastest growing (Las Vegas 2.4 million). While Vegas booms, the Steel Corridor of wester PA is creeping along slowly. In terms of diversity, not surprisingly, the Southern California region has the largest percentage of minorities (62.7%) and the Twin-Cities are the least diverse with 15.5% of minorities.
The terms megaregion, megalopolis, megapolitan area, while similar in nature, are somewhat different historically, spatially, and statistically, so it is worth a look at some of the designations. A map of megaregions shows the eleven areas in the United States as determined by the Regional Plan Association.
This differs somewhat from a more recent version of Megapolitan areas from a recent essay by Lang and Nelson on Places from Design Observer) They identify 10 megapolitan clusters that exist in 23 megapolitan areas that are similar but slightly different from those above.
The different terms, definitions, and geographical extents makes the concepts a bit difficult to parse, but in general terms, the areas are defined by a population of more than 10 million people that exist within a 'clustered network of cities' typically delineated through transportation corridors.
The new interpretation of Megapolitan area builds on earlier concepts to describe a more general 'transmetropolitan geography' which is typically thought of more commonly in larger, global areas such as China, Japan, Brazil - which include megaregions of 120 million (Hong Kong, Shenzen-Guangzhou), 60 million (Nagoya-Osaka-Kyoto-Kobe) and 43 million (Rio de Janeiro-Sao Paulo). While the concepts are similar, the scale of these new global areas are immense in comparison to the US.
Interestingly enough, the term has been used since the 1820s, and the conceptual usage of the concept of Megalopolis as a grouping of urban areas within a region dates back almost 100 years. This includes references by Oswald Spengler in The Decline of the West (1918) and Lewis Mumford in The Culture of Cities (1938). The most popularized recent usage was from 1950s and 60s, in the book on the Northeast United States by Jean Gottmann entitled 'Megalopolis' (1961).
More on this in subsequent posts, specifically additional information on Lang and Nelson's longer essay in Places, and a closer look at the book. Stay tuned.
I am happy to announce the formation of a new organization, THINK.urban in Portland, Oregon. Along with colleagues Katrina Johnston and Allison Duncan, our group plans to promote, as our tagline mentions: "Better Design Through Applied Research." We bring a range of experience in urban design research, landscape
architecture, urban ecology, public space, and social science, combining
academic rigor with creative expression.
In short, we are a research based non-profit that connects academic research to urban
design practice through a number of means, including expertise,
scholarship, interventions, publications, and consultation with
professionals. We have current focus areas in public space, streets, and landscape - and cast a broad net across urbanism in general - with a goal to act as a bridge between theory and practice. We are currently forming the 501(c)(3) organization and recruiting board members, so more is happening in 2012.
A snapshot of a couple of the projects that we are working on in tandem and as an extension of our studies at Portland State, include:
Find out more about the activities of the non-profit on the website and ongoing blog, by following us on Twitter @think_urban or by checking our our new Facebook page.
In the spirit of economy (and my own sanity), I will be cross posting periodically between these two sites - particularly posts that are relevant to both - but will still have original content on each as it makes sense. Enjoy!
England, Spain, Italy. While a couple of weeks is not long enough to spend in any one of these countries (or cities for that matter), the agenda is set. Thus I'm considering an upcoming trip to Europe and actual vacation (what the hell is that?) and a scouting trip for further visits. The itinerary starts in London, where my sister recently moved to so definitely no shortage of things to see.
I definitely want to check out some of the early green spaces such as Hyde Park (below) as well as some of the newer public spaces but mostly, as with many of the destinations, not trying to see the sights but rather experience the place. That said, any ideas for some more contemporary must-see public space, urbanism, open spaces - drop a line.
A off-the-beaten path highlight we will travelling to our birthplace in Mildenhall (near RAF Lakenheath where our father was stationed in the early 1970s). I alas, spent my first six weeks there prior to be shipped back to the states, so this is a long-awaited homecoming and should be a wonderful part of the trip.
A quintessential English town north of London, a google search yields more photos of uniforms and jets than the actual character of the town - but this one gives you a bit of the flavor.
London and family hang-out will lead to Barcelona, a city that has held fascination for me for many years. The significance of the city has been reinforced in some recent readings discussing the transformation of the old city into the more modern gridded perimeter by Ildefons Cerdà in the 1850s. His plan shows the application of the grid on the more organic old town.
Any trip to Barcelona must of course include Gaudi's Sagrada Familia and Parc Guell, some of the amazing urban design built for the 1992 Olympic Games and and I particularly fascinated by the Catalan 'modernisme' from the late 19th to early 20th century. And of course a wander down Las Ramblas is definitely in order...
Finally, a hop over to Rome where one could spend months without making a dent in - so some of the main sights of course... what to see, is the problem. Villas, Vatican, Colosseum, Pantheon... uh, yep, its rome.
Although maybe not a problem, as I am perfectly content to do some sight-seeing by let vacation-mode take over I feel like sitting and drinking along a cafe and taking in some of the street life.
For a little variety, we are staying in two different neighborhoods in Rome as bookends with a trip up to Tuscany to see Florence and Siena in the middle. Florence to me says art and the Ponte Vecchio - with some chill time that will perhaps include a bottle of wine, or two.
While Florence is amazing - my heart is in Siena - most likely standing in the Piazza del Campo... thinking of the wonder's of history... (and why public space is so different in Europe than the US)...
Either way, for all of these cities and countries, I will be looking forward to replacing guidebooks, historical records and internet images with good actual imagery and experiences... stay tuned mid-late September for some posts - infusing landscape, urbanism, history and more in these amazingly rich areas of the world. A taste perhaps, part vacation, part urban studies, part landscape architecture research. What could be better.
A formative source in thinking about indeterminant spaces is Terrain Vague, a 1995 essay by Spanish Architect Ignasi de Sola-Morales. The essay starts with a discussion of the idea of photography, which is mentioned by the author as vital to our understanding, particularly through photomontage and their inventive juxtaposition of forms, aiding our ability to explain the urban realm. Conversely, with its ability to frame and 'edit' the urban conditions - resulting in a disconnect of image from reality. As mentioend by de Sola-Morales, "When we look at photographs, we do not see cities - still less with photomontages. We see only images, static framed prints." (109) From this jumping-off point of photography comes the 'non-space' of terrain vague, as defined by the author:
"Empty, abandoned space in which a series of occurrences have taken place seems to subjugate the eye of the urban photographer. Such urban space, which I will denote by the French expression terrain vague, assumes the status of fascination, the most solvent sign with which to indicate what cities are and what our experience of them is." (109)
The etymology of the definition is explored, due to the lack of a clear translation into English. First, the concept of terrain (as opposed to the concept of land) is more expansive, including more spatial connotations and the idea of a plot of land fit for construction, meaning that it has more direct ties to the urban. Vague, on the other hand - has ties to a range of ideas. From German 'woge' which is tied to the movement of seas - we get "movement, oscillation, instability, and fluctuation." From French, the roots lie in 'vacuus', which yields connotations of vacancy, emptiness, and availability. Another meaning is derived from the Latin 'vagus' which is most closely related to the origins in landscape urbanism thinking giving "the sense of 'indeterminate, imprecise, blurred, and uncertain.'" (110)
Thus the dual concept of a plot of land defined by indeterminacy is the key to understanding of terrain vague, which has both a spatial as well as a social connection - defined by what it is, but that being specifically defined by how the space is used. As de Sola Morales mentions, these become "spaces as internal to the city yet external to its everyday use. In apparently forgotten places, the memory of the past seems to predominate over the present." (110)
These spaces have an innate duality - due to their marginalization, they have the sense of externality ot the order and security of the city making them alluring as a way of out the typically homogenized urban realm, meaning they become "both a physical expression of our fear and insecurity and our expectation of the other, the alternative, the utopian, the future." (111) Identified as a certain 'strangeness' which has been cataloged throughout urban history as tied to the social dislocation of our shift to urban dwellers - most notably captured in Georg Simmel's 'The Metropolis and Mental Life' and our evolution to the blase cosmopolitan.
This is captured by de Sola-Morales as 'estrangement' which becomes the formative construction of the terrain vague: "The photographic images of terrain vague are territorial indications of strangeness itself, and the aesthetic and ethical problems that they pose embrace the problematics of contemporary social life. What is to be done with these enormous voids, with their imprecise limits and vague definition?" Thus these become fertile ground for artists whom "seek refuge in the margins of the city precisely when the city offers them an abusive identity, a crushing homogeneity, a freedom under control. The enthusiasm for these vacant spaces - expectant, imprecise, fluctuating - transposed to the urban key, reflects our strangeness in front of the world, in front of our city, before ourselves." (112)
Terrain Vague is a difficult concept - being essentially 'non-design'- but is also powerful in its ability to theorize on the margins of the ordered world in which we reside. On the difficult side, the actions of a designer is somewhat in opposition to the unstructured configuration of these spaces. As de Sola Morales mentions: "the role of the architect is inevitably problematic. Architecture's destiny has always been colonization, the imposing of limits, order, and form, the introduction into strange space of the elements of identity necessary to make it recognizable, identical, universal." (112) This innate desire to transform disorder into order leads to a catch-22 in the employment of design 'agency' within these structures, as mentioned in the text:
"When architecture and urban design project their desire onto a vacant space, a terrain vague, they seem incapable of doing anything other than introducing violent transformations, changing estrangement into citizenship, and striving at all costs to dissolve the uncontaminated magin of the obsolete into the realism of efficacy." (112)
While design is about form, there is still plenty of potential in exploring the concept of terrain vague, as it offers the opportunity to give shape (both spatial and social) to an existing urban phenomenon of indeterminancy, tapping into the city inhabitants continual seeking of "forces instead of forms, for the incorporated instead of the distant, for the haptic instead of the optic, the rhizomatic instead of the figurative." (112) It is still unclear how we use this, but further investigation should yield the possibilities of learning from this existing urban condition - not trying to recreate it, which is inevitably an exercise in futility, but looking at the ability to allow disorder, not fall into the trap of modernism in trying to rationalize and organize all of the spaces within a narrowly defined set of uses. Can it work? de Sola Morales posits that:
"Today, intervention in the existing city, in its residual spaces, in its folded interstices can no longer be either comfortable or efficacious in the manner postulated by the modern movement's efficient model of the enlightened tradition. How can architecture act in the terrain vague without becoming an aggressive instrument of power and abstract reason? Undoubtedly, through attention to continuity: not the continuity of the planned, efficient, and legitimized city, but of the flows, the energies, the rhythms established by the passing of time and the loss of limits... we should treat the residual city with a contradictory complicity that will not shatter the elements that maintain its continuity in time and space." (113)
More on this as we tie together threads of the 'terrain vague' with the ideas of 'heterotopias' and other models of indeterminate 'otherspace' in the urban context. In classic urbanistic inquiry, the field of study has been identified, theorized, and classified - the translation of this into actions of architecture, urban design, planning, and landscape architecture - is another, more difficult jump. But then again, that's the fun, no?
In 1995, Rem Koolhaas & Bruce Mau published 'S,M,L,XL', one in a line of oversized volumes so fondly disseminated by the Dutch. Amazon mentions the work as "extraordinary, massive, and mind-boggling 1,300-page book combines essays, manifestos, diaries, fairy tales, travelogues, a cycle of meditations on the contemporary city--and complex illustrations..." giving shape to a mixed bag of visuals and texts on the work of OMA/Koolhaas and their speculations on the city. One short essay, 'Whatever Happened to Urbanism?' by Koolhaas is fixed into the literature of landscape urbanism, quoted by many - specifically a key, oft- mentioned fragment:
"If there is to be a 'new urbanism' it will not be based on the twin fantasies of order and omnipotence; it will be the staging of uncertainty; it will no longer be concerned with the arrangement of more or less permanent objects but with the irrigation of territories with potential; it will no longer aim for stable configurations but for the creation of enabling fields that accommodate processes that refuse to be crystallized into definitive form; it will no longer be about meticulous definition, the imposition of limits, but about expanding notions, denying boundaries, not about separating and identifying entities, but about discovering unnameable hybrids; it will no longer be obsessed with the city but with the manipulation of infra-structure for endless intensifications and diversifications, shortcuts and redistributions - the reinvention of psychological space." (123)
The term 'irrigation of territories with potential' always struck me as akin to pissing in the wind - perhaps just in its alliteration, but as a phrase it does resonate with many of the formative elements of LU theory - particularly the idea of uncertainty, hybridization, infrastructure, and process above form. The other important idea that fascinates me is the concept of 'urbanism' when realized in Euro-centric terms as 'study', whereas Koolhaas definitely considers urbanism as a more active endeavor, stating in the context of rapid urbanization, that "urbanism, as a profession, has disappeared at the moment when urbanization everywhere - after decades of constant acceleration - is on its way to establishing a definitive, global 'triumph' of the urban condition?" (122)
This demise of the urban is rooted in the reactions and rejections in the professional and educational realms to the mid-century pinnacle of high-modernism - which has caused a retreat into nostalgia. Koolhaas considers the irony of this as the current form and idea of a city has totally shifted - becoming "beyond recognition," summed up as "'The city no longer exists." Thus the clinging to nostalgia comes at the exact time when the classic idea of the city, the context urbanism, was snuffed out by rampant urbanization that erased our understanding and approaches to the fuzzy realm of urban/suburban/hinterland that currently exists. Koolhaas claims then:
"For urbanists, the belated rediscovery of the virtues of the classical city at the moment of their definitive impossibility many have been the point of no return, [the] fatal moment of disconnection, disqualification." (122)
The result is that urbanism is gone, replaced with architecture... creating a gap in the overall understanding of the city beyond that of the architectural object. This focus on architecture "exploits and exhausts the potential that can be generated finally only by urbanism, and that only the specific imagination of urbanism can invent and renew. The death of urbanism - our refuge in the parasitic security of architecture - creates an immanent disaster: more and more substance is grafted on starving roots." (123)
While I would say there has been a re-emergence of urbanism since the mid-nineties (albeit an urbanism confused with urban design and planning), the overall idea of an urbanism project is still valid - and the resultant current dialogue/discussion is vital and gets to the root of non-design urbanism. As mentioned by Koolhaas, "Redefined, urbanism will not only, or mostly, be a profession, but a way of thinking, an ideology: to accept what exists." (123) Thus,
"To survive, urbanism will have to imagine a new newness... We have to imagine 1,001 other concepts of city; we have to take insane risks; we have to dare to be utterly uncritical; we have to swallow deeply and bestow forgiveness left and right." (123)
This is what we lost in the disaster of the modern project, the ability to think big, and perhaps fail, while trying to deal with this unprecedented urban condition. This has left us with small ideas tiptoeing around the crisis under the rubric of safe interventions or tepid theorizations. The final words then ring true: "What if we simply declare that there is no crisis - redefine our relationship with the city not as its makers but as its mere subjects, as its supporters? More than ever, the city is all we have." (123)
Forgive my self-indulgent post, but my lack of blogging is not an indication of lack of thinking (and walking) - as my attention has shifted from following the various blogs (i used to follow many, and now have reduced this to around a dozen) and their myriad paths of discussion towards a more rigorous engagement with some literature, journal articles and books to read and reflect. This shift has happened for a range of reasons, including a dramatically different engagement in work (btw, running your own firm is amazing), exposure to a dramatically different sphere of influence due to academic pursuits (btw, higher education is also amazing), and a general decline in interest (exhaustion?) in the ephemera of the digital realm.
This seems a turning point in the content and focus of the blog, where capturing the zeitgeist (a common theme over the past three years) has become much less important to me (and has been picked up beautifully by a number of other bloggers) - shifting instead to a more comprehensive depth in specific topics. A blog is always a personal reflection - and it's hard for me to reconcile this new-found focus, being a pure generalist. Perhaps, I hope, this signals a sign of 'maturity'? In that vein, exploration of major themes, historical origins, theoretical underpinnings and observations 'from the field' seem to occupy most of my time nowadays, and it's given my a wonderful context in which to think about landscape + urbanism. The source materials range from the hyper-academic to the more mainstream - including historical tracts to modern writings, including journal articles (which i now have unprecedented access to).
So stay tuned for some writings (probably not book reviews) in the form of ruminations on recent readings. In addition to our upcoming group reading of the Landscape Urbanism Reader (Waldheim, ed., 2006), I started previously (read here and here) but have finished the large tome Ecological Urbanism (Mostafavi & Doherty, 2010) including the afforementioned Urban Design (Krieger & Saunders eds., 2009), as well as two recent popular books: Makeshift Metropolis (Rybczynski, 2010) and Green Metropolis (Owen, 2009). Some other books I've made it through recently, one quoted previous is the collection Uncommon Ground: Rethinking the Human Place in Nature (Cronon, 1996), as well as The Machine in the Garden (Marx, 1964): Placeways: A Theory of the Human Environment (Walter, 1988); Human Ecology (Steiner, 2002); After the City (Lerup, 2000); Changes in the Land (Cronon, 1983); and Los Angeles: The Architecture of Four Ecologies (Banham, 1971).
In addition to books, I will intersperse a number of journal references into the mix, particularly as I continue to expand on my studies in ecological urbanism, historical urbanism & ecology, and methods for research (both social & ecological science-based) study of the urban conditions. Any recommendations for key readings and sources that have influenced you, please comment - and I'm always up for intriguing guest posts on a range of topics. Looking forward to a new chapter in the blog and an expanded focus in my personal exploration of all things landscape and urbanism.
Always a fan of explorations of lost rivers, this one is takes the existing urban pattern and erases the former route of the Fleet River in London (via the Londonist)
"As most readers will know (and we’ve seen first hand), the river is now entirely underground and used as a sewer, but you can still pick out its course in the sloping streets of its former banks and, occasionally, a telltale street name. Reader Simon Dovar is one of many to be intrigued by this vanished river, and has put together a map of its route: " I did a bit of research to trace the path of the lost River Fleet as it meanders under the streets of London. As you can see the map is completely hand drawn in pencil as well as the street indicators. The river is indicated by the rubbed out streets." Nice touch – a vanished watercourse marked out in erased pencil lead."
The escalation of voices in the (let's call it debate for lack of a better term) about some of the urbanisms out there - most notably New Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism, has kicked up a notch even in the past few weeks since the initial salvos. There has been a fair amount of dialogue around this (and also a lot of posturing), which from reactions I've heard has both engaged and alienated equal numbers from both camps. As most folks have heard, in Metropolis, Duany attacked (there's no other word for it), the alleged 'takeover' of the Harvard GSD with a nefarious Waldheim-led transformation so that "the Urban Design Program will morph entirely toward third world initiatives—all offshore—thereby leaving the field clear for Landscape/Ecological Urbanism to be the GSD’s only urban program operating in North America and Europe." and that "there will not be much of whatever remained of the urbane, urban design sensibility. Landscape/Ecological Urbanism will rule without dissension."
The response from Alex Krieger (soon after) captured a less reactionary tone of a natural progression of ideology over time (something the CNU may consider a valuable lesson). He mentions:
"I suspect Andres’ postulating a nefarious ‘coup’ at Harvard, in which Urban Design is erased in favor of something called Ecological Urbanism, is actually a cover for a personal worry that the term Landscape Urbanism will soon supplant New Urbanism amongst the purveyors of design sloganeering. The arrival of a new oracle, timely draped with environmental virtues is unsettling. "
Not really having a lot to say about the GSD or it's influence on the profession, I think the specifics of the exchange are less interesting than the very public 'shot across the bow' as Krieger put it, leading to what I think may prove to be a significant escalation on both sides of the battle lines (as if it were a war with only two sides...). The war continues...
Some Recent Battles
Waldheim's post on Agrarian Urbanism got some convinced that Landscape Urbanism wished for a return to the 'sprawl utopia' of Wrights Broadacre City or other utopian agro-urban visions from the twentieth century. Taking the mantle of oppositional dynamics of cities and ag lands - even when it is obvious there is a strong desire for some balance. As Daniel Nairn, who came up with an interestingly balanced proposal of urban agriculture worthy of investgation, on his blog Discovering Urbanism mentioned, "A quick background check on Landscape Urbanism suggests that he may seriously be hoping to revive the Broadacre City. When we thought Jane Jacobs had thoroughly shellacked the whole decentralist train of thought back in the 1960s, a few academics have apparently determined that the dictates of avant garde subversiveness actually swing them back into the direction of auto-dependency and vigorous fragmentation of land."
He then swings widely to a broad generalization of the opposition, which i think is the most interesting point of the arguments, as it belies the balanced approach of land (ecological, productive, useful) within the urban pattern - which can be done without the sacrifice of density and urbanization. More production in cities will impact urban form - it's inevitable and part of a conversation - but if we're really talking about where people live and what they want, it's very clear that food (for novelty, self-sufficiency, or even for apocalyptic preparation) is something than can and will be woven into our cities. It won't look like Garden Block, and it won't look like Broadacre City...
This alludes to another in a line of misunderstandings, perpetuated by a cherry-picking of thoughts from literature - similar to that of Michael Mehaffy's article before, amping up the notions of justifying sprawl (how the hell the landscape urbanists caused sprawl is beyond me), or a desire for automobile-centric cities (being realistic about culture and conditions is not the same as condoning them). I wonder what the critics would say about similar exercises like Weller's Boomtown 2050 which uses a number of utopian frameworks to envision development and density of Perth, Australia (reminiscent of the equally abstract 'Metacity/Datatown' explorations of MVRDV These are not projects to pick apart - but are, at best, inspired and relevant thought exercises that we can learn from - with no notions that these are actual solutions.
:: Datatown from MVRDV
The ideas that we understand an urban reality and 'get real' about sprawl, ecological systems, the prevalence of cars and transportation desires, amongst and other realities - is helpful, and (rather than ignoring them for some traditional ideal) reflects the sense of landscape urbanism ideology and venturing into history for precedents seems valid for any urbanist approach. Also the common assumption that landscape or ecological urbanism is about throwing out the baby by displacing urban density and elimination of walkability, compactness, transit (good city planning, smart growth, new urbanism, whatever you want to call it) in lieu of protecting the bathwater and providing 'greenery', as demonstrated in Nairn's split shot of a natural lake scene and a downtown streetscape - is also equally misguided, as there isn't a call for suburban utopia of Broadacre or a modernist tower in the park of Le Corbusier. An ecology of the city is not, like early 20th Century ecology, removed from humanity, but interwoven into it. It is also not purely based, as critics would like to admit, on avant-garde artistic expression at the detriment to good urban principles. It is rather not deterministic - relying on a fluidity and acknowledgement that we set a stage, but ultimately fail when we try to control all of the details of a city.
The point made by Waldheim, (and Daniel - it's Charles, not Peter) was not a tacit agreement with the proposed projects, nor a call to an agrarian suburbia dominated by cars. Understanding the history of the agrarian urban tradition (my reaction to Waldheim's essay here) is vital - and discussion of historical examples is not to be equated with a blind acceptance of the merits of these proposals. (Yes, hindsight is good, but vilification for revisiting history is something New Urbanists may want to avoid). In fact, Waldheim seemed cautious of the proposals, not laudatory - a sort of a plea, in our rush to implement all things urban agriculture, to perhaps learn and not repeat some of history's mistakes. As stated by Waldheim, it is an exploration, as:
"...these brief notes outline a history of urban form perceived through the spatial, ecological and infrastructural import of agricultural production. The choice of projects is based on the idea of agricultural production as a formative element of city structure, rather than as an adjunct, something to be inserted into already existing structures; thus this tentative counter-history seeks to construct a useful past from three projects organized explicitly around the role of agriculture in determining the economic, ecological and spatial order of the city."
Another post from Yuri Artibise gets into the discussions of the variety of available 'ubanisms' - mentioning the concept of 'sustainable urbanism' (also echoed in Duany's essay in the Ecological Urbanism book that is supposedly the 'first official guide of the new regime'). As mentioned: "Sustainable urbanism is an emerging discipline that combines creating multi-modal places, nurturing diverse economies and building high-performance infrastructure and buildings. It is more than a synonym for green or ecological urbanism. Rather, it looks at the triple bottom line by making sure that our urban centers are socially inclusion, economically dynamic and environmentally conscious."
This seems more like 'green' new urbanism than anything else. And there's nothing inherently wrong with the sentiment - as an ecological lens to new urbanism has been much more integrated in recent years, which was a welcome addition. It's the subtext that this is unique and different from other urbanisms (underlined passage to highlight this) that seems odd. If one can reference above definition as antonymous to green or ecological urbanism, then it represents a common misunderstanding by many of green or ecological urbanism - reduced to greenery in cities with little to no regard for the actual social and economic functions of cities - which is a simplistic viewpoint that doesn't mesh with the literature. More also to come on Duany's article in the EU book - which is pretty interesting reading...
The responses above (and the current ire/debate/flame war) I believe stems from the very specific attack (there's no other word for that either) thrown out by Waldheim previously that LU was in diametric opposition to NU - as quoted:
"Landscape Urbanism was specifically meant to provide an intellectual and practical alternative to the hegemony of the New Urbanism.”
And as Krieger mentions in response to Duany: "Well, those are fighting words, I guess, and so a counter-offensive campaign among the New Urbanists has been ordered. ". This kind of provocation is kind of asking for some reflexive response (perhaps that was the goal?) but I think muddies the waters in terms of the debate. While it's easy to say that it is placed in opposition, I don't see Landscape Urbanism being approached in any sort of systematic way to refute or offer an alternative approach directly framed as attacks on New Urbanism. Perhaps a more nuanced reading and criticism of NU (along with some really good questions, like why West Coast Calthorpe NU seems so different than the Neo-Traditional approaches?)
:: Calthorpe's Urban Network - image via Neo-Houston
There are too obvious fundamental differences and a philosophical gulf between the two concepts but its simplistic (and diminishes the value of LU) to frame it merely as an alternative to NU (see a recent, more broadly articulated vision from Waldheim here) - as it is looking at a vastly different context, scale, and approach.
Voices of Reason
A couple of readings from both sides of the argument give a much clearer ideological breakdown and are much less divisive - which I think is much more useful than name calling and stereotyping based on simplied notions of either NU or LU theory (both sides are guilty of reducing for the purposes of denigrating the other). These two voices seem to offer a useful discussion of the merits.
The first, from Tim Stonor from The Power of the Network, questions the divisiveness of the debate, recognizing both positive and negative overlaps between the two and understanding the potential of these to reinforce each others. From the post.
"The most striking aspect of the presentation was that Landscape Urbanism’s breakup of urban places into small enclaves is resonant of many projects of the New Urbanism, where relatively isolated “communities” of pretty, historically familiar houses are set within a green landscape. But, Waldheim was clear to present Landscape Urbanism as a critique of New Urbanism – as beyond New Urbanism. However, his critique focused on the aesthetic – the architectural treatment of the buildings within the pockets – rather than on the morphological – the pockets themselves. In terms of morphology and not aesthetics, the overlap between Landscape and New Urbanism outweigh the differences."
Stonor does go on to adopt the same 'grey versus green' assumption of NU critics of LU, stating that "The Landscape Urbanism projects that separate the green from the grey do not therefore do enough, if anything, to change the paradigm of “you can have either local or global but not both together” that the New Urbanism inherited from Buchanan." and goes on to use the New Urbanist 'transect' as a replicable model. "It should be to see the “grey” city, in itself, as an ecological object. To acknowledge that the grey city – as a network of streets and spaces that are simultaneously landscape corridors and conduits of human movement, community relations, commerce and ideas – is the green city. New Urbanism offers the concept of the “transect” as one means of doing so. This is a powerful start. One that Landscape Urbanism ought to be able to embrace."
The transect is an interest metaphorical model, again worthy of discussion (and I know for a fact that many LU folks are intrigued by the ideas - at least until it becomes a mechanism for Smart Codes). It is not, however, to be translated into a one-size-fits-all solution (unless you can find me a great monocentric model city where the categories work). Much like economic city models that use monocentric principles (simplified versions of city dynamics), they are fine for analysis, but not necessarily for action because they don't capture the complexity of the reality of cities - because no code is that smart.
I also wonder, somewhat, where these 'projects' are that are the basis of some of this criticism (as I've mentioned previously, this is still a very vague notion - and I would love some specifics, if only to evaluate what is being evaluated). I don't think there's agreement on what is a work of landscape urbanism (if it exists at all), so using project specific criticism seems a bit hollow. Is it site based? Aggregations? Districts? or just viable at a city scale... I'm slowly amassing some ideas from readers, and it's leaving me with more questions than answers - so LU proponents and NU critics - let's look for a shared understanding that at least is a point of departure for philosophical differences we can debate.
:: Crossroads Project from LA Dallman
Another post, (and belying my ideological stance) is what I think is the most elegant and eloquent response I've heard (worth all of us reading) from Charles Birnbaum, written in The Huffington Post today. voice of rationality to the entire proceedings. The sentiment from the article, which is gleaned from a number of practitioners and academics can be summed up as such:
"Since the early 1980s, Waldheim noted, landscape architects have played the role of environmental advocates, concluding, "the advocate scenario reached the limit." He added, "The rise of landscape as a design medium is bigger than all of us and none of us have exclusive access." Waldheim is building a big tent in theory and now in faculty. The approach welcomes shared values, myriad and overlapping expertise and a celebratory embracing of complex social, environmental and cultural systems. He notes, "there is a decentralization to horizontality and it is very difficult to structure urbanism out of buildings. ...
I am among those that believe that the time for landscape architecture has come and that there is sufficient evidence of increasingly greater global demand for our leadership. Our potential role has never been more central. So to Duany and those that disagree or feel threatened, go back and read Olmsted, Jr., because in addition to the principles that you have liberally borrowed for context-sensitive architecture and planning, much can be gleaned from Olmsted Jr.'s enormous comfort zone, which like the Landscape Urbanism movement, embraces a shared value, systems-based approach that is built on collaboration and open mindedness."
:: Green Networks in Olmsted Bros planning - image via Heaviest Corner
Birnbaum reaches to Waldheim, Czerniak, Pollack, and even Martha Schwartz for some of the recent thinking on the emergence of landscape architecture, who collectively provide a range of ideas in practice and academia. Perhaps for those not excited about Martha Schwartz as our defender, can look to folks like Mark Rios (both and architect and landscape architect) who offers a great perspective:
"Architects are trained to design objects. They go through design school looking at form and program. Landscape architects look at voids, space, systems, based in training in ecology. They deal with bringing spaces together -- how they are transformed through ecology. It feels to me that the basic training of the professions is different and landscape architects deal with city building in holistic ways." "New urbanism does not do that. It is a holistically fabricated place that does not look at pieces in the puzzle." He suggests, "We need to find ways to be fabric weavers -- you can't have a whole city of objects."
The 'we' in this case is all of use collectively, and divisiveness only furthers the gulf, to the deteriment of our collective impact on cities. Only with an understanding of each side can we compare and contrast - so those with issues with New Urbanism (or parts of it) need to learn what the concepts and results are. Those who aim to dismiss Landscape and Ecological Urbanism may do everyone a favor and do the same. It's a simple case of knowing thy enemy.
Getting Back to Urbanism
This is illustrated in another recent definition (from Tom Turner at Gardenvisit) for the slippery idea of what landscape urbanism (or at least the urbanism part) actually is. From some recent discussion, he states that: "LANDSCAPE URBANISM is an approach to urban design in which the elements of cities (water, landform, vegetation, vertical structures and horizontal structures) are composed (visually, functionally and technically) with regard to human use and the landscape context." I'd disagree, saying the reference to 'design' and composition make it landscape architecture, not urbanism. A good case in point is the High Line - which can be understood in terms of landscape urbanism through its contextual place in the urban fabric, but in application is seen as a design using compositional principles. See why this is so confusing?
:: High Line (landscape design or urbanism) - image via Arch Daily
Thus, I find it funny that the term 'urbanism' (at least how I interpret it) has become disconnected from the origins that makes it a powerful analytical and theoretical tool. Urbanism, per se, is not a planning system or urban design method, and it is definitely not a landscape design strategy or architectural approach. Rather, it is a way of reading cities in ways that yield information that is utilized towards those ends (which not being the means to those ends). As Wikipedia simplifies it: "Broadly, urbanism is a focus on cities and urban areas, their geography, economies, politics, social characteristics, as well as the effects on, and caused by, the built environment."
One aspect I think worthy of discussing is the general premise that New Urbanism is a codified normative planning strategy, meaning 'that it is indicative of an ideal standard or model', while Landscape Urbanism, which is primarily a postive (or descriptive) planning strategy, aimed at describing 'how things are'. This is overly simplified, but really constructive when you consider that landscape urbanism is looking at a different worldview that is much closer aligned to what we mean by urbanism - not seeking out or determining outcomes that is more akin to architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design.
I've even heard folks in the urban design realm (and landscape architects as well) starting to get their hackles up, criticizing LU by either saying it's irrelevant or that it is what we're already doing. This misses the point, as you are fundamentally talking about a key different between design and urbanism - which seems lost on most folks. Thus I can be an urbanist (landscape, ecological, or other...) while also being a landscape architect - not having to trade one in for the other because they are fundamentally different modes of operating in cities.
Comparing Apples to Apple Trees
The analogy that comes to mind, instead of saying these are comparing apples to oranges, is that the comparison is closer to comparing apples (NU) to apple trees (LU). One is a discreet product, the other a complex system. One is small and decipherable, the other larger and more complex. One yields understandable forms, flavors, colors and textures, while the other is more varied (not containing an inherent 'taste' or 'style') but forming an armature for myriad possible differences in its fruit. Yet they both coexist and are reliant on each other... much as the apple and apple tree are.
:: Apple Trees on the Chantemesle Hill - (Monet 1878) - images via monetalia
I think perhaps to take the metaphor a bit further let's call a city an apple tree, and the Landscape Urbanism a larger-scale, complex, rooted, system and each individual apple is a context-based product yielding a specific result. Cities, through urbanism, have a generalized structural focus on the 'how things are', while sites have a specific programmatic and spatial configuration determined through urban design, planning, landscape architecture, and architecture. I believe this is why it is so difficult to pin down 'works' of landscape urbanism - because the concept doesn't operate at the scale of works, but rather at a larger scale (what that is is undetermined), one concurrent with a true definition of urbanism.
The Future of Urbanism
Perhaps as mentioned by Mason White on Twitter, is there an opportunity to open up the debate on urbanism to a wider array, and see who is the survival of the fittest: He posits: "this new urbanism vs landscape urbanism scuffle could use more ____ urbanisms to let a full fledged Darwinian onslaught unfold. any takers?" The [blank] urbanism debate not withstanding (and frankly I'm enjoying a sort of cage match format) - the whole concept of urbanism as a term is quickly becoming somewhat comical (similar to the modification of terming ending with -urbia that preceded it) with either serious or seriously funny iterations - which if anything is going to render meaningless the concept of which we try to understand. Few of these discussions are about 'urbanism' in a true sense, but rather descriptors for planning, urban design, landscape architecture and architectural solutions. I wonder what should, and what is going to replace it, because after this we may have to abandon it's lifeless corpse, leaving it again to those who want study cities, not design them.
I do agree that, once all the huffing, puffing and chest thumping is over, there will eventually be a shaking out of a somewhat cohesive (and constantly evolving) group of approaches to urbanism. Not one of these will be the answer to all of our problems, but perhaps we can reach a level of stasis where each is mutually reinforcing and complementary to the others to allow a range of potential readings of the city. These 'urbanisms' will be reinforced by a range of strategies for portions of the urban areas, through planning, urban design, site design, and architecture. Any designer/urbanist/planner/architect - lending to the flaws of a single-purpose approach that we've seen so shallow and misguided throughout history - is going to be quickly left in the dust of the more enlightened and holistic thinkers.
Explorations in landscape architecture and urbanism, with a focus on aligning theory with practice.
Jason King is a landscape architect and Principal of TERRA.fluxus in Portland, Oregon, and currently is in the doctoral program at Portland State University in Urban Studies.
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