Kerb is one of best journals out there for landscape architecture - and you can be part of their next issue around the topic 'speculative narrative'. Here's the call for submissions:
KERB 20 IS SEEKING SUBMISSIONS OF ESSAYS/PROJECTS/ ARTWORKS/ STORIES ETC
Speculative narrative and the potential of imagination are important factors in creative production. It is considered that a multitude of small stories are the “quintessential form of imaginative invention” (source).
Speculation through narrative offers an apparatus through which we may investigate the concept of ‘reality’. Immersed within our current understandings, speculation is influenced by our contemporary condition. In these fictional dispositions, the variables and constraints of ‘reality’ can be controlled, omitted completely or utilized as key motives for the foundations of new territories.
Speculative Narrative can be an exploration of idealistic scenarios, the fossilization of information, or the creation of fantastical realms.
This allows the model of design to move beyond problem solving, crisis management and project liberation from the constraints of our existence. The augmentation through speculative narrative, enables the reshaping of current processes, understandings and disciplines.
Speculative Narrative makes it possible to redefine ‘present’ and ‘future’.
Kerb is an annual cross-disciplinary design publication produced by the RMIT University School of Architecture and Design in Melbourne, Australia.
Kerb is a progressive design journal focused on contemporary landscape architecture issues from an international and national perspective. Submit to: kerb@ems.rmit.edu.auby 4 May, 2012 and for more information regarding submission requirements please visit our website at www.kerbjournal.com or our Facebook page at www.facebook.com/kerbjournal
I was struck by a recent mis-use of the term landscape urbanism in this article from the Atlanta Journal Constitution on the need for climate change inspired floating homes. Quoting Thai landscape architect Danai Thaitakoo on the need for dealing with innundation.
"Climate change will require a radical shift within design practice from
the solid-state view of landscape urbanism to the more dynamic,
liquid-state view of waterscape urbanism," says Danai, who is involved
in several projects based on this principle. "Instead of embodying
permanence, solidity and longevity, liquid perception will emphasize
change, adaptation."
While amphibious architecture is nothing new, and i agree that it will become more common in the future there are two points. The first is minor - that of the mis-characterization of landscape urbanism as 'solid-state' and 'embodying permanence, solidity and longevity'. If there's any flavor of urbanism that emphasizes change and adaptation, it's landscape urbanism - so i think there's a disconnect in that above paragraph. Just saying.
Second, and more troubling, is the idea that we must react to climate change by building floating structures - rather than address the topic at hand. It's similar in nature to dealing with semi-urban forest fires by designating fire-safety clearing zones of tinder and brush around houses, rather than looking at not building homes in these areas - or heaven forbid - letting them burn. Or coming up with vertical farms due to our misguided agricultural subsidies and policies that make it impossible to grow a variety of food on terra firm.
Its cause. Not effect. We spend way too much time on solutions to problems and calling it need-inspired innovation - rather than getting to the real root of the problems themselves. May not be as press-worthy of sexy, but at least its real.
The Porter House project by SHoP Architects doesn’t quite sit right with the eye. Greg
Pasquarelli, one of the founding principals of the New York firm, gave a great lecture at the
University of Washington last year in which he elaborated on the achievement of finding an
innovative solution to the challenge of expanding the 1905 6-story condominium building.
Rather than competing with the historic architecture, the new addition distinguishes itself
with a modern zinc façade.
While the strategy seems logical, the image of the building is
still daunting for the sole reason of what it visually implies. The new addition, though
connected to the existing building below, starts to suggest a different kind of development,
a different kind of cityscape where buildings start to layer on top of each other. The
phenomenon of air space and air space rights is not a new concept yet with the increasing
density of our urban areas, it has become more relevant than ever. If the elevator was an
invention that enabled us to build vertically, then can air space rights start to shift our
infrastructure “plane” up as portrayed in the movie The Fifth Element?
The movement has begun. Whether it’s to trek through New York City on The High Line or to
connect seven separate Linked Hybrids via skybridges in China, these projects offer a form
of route alternate from the ground plane. The visual impact on the city’s skyline is hard to
overlook and as a collective, they makes the vision of The Fifth Element city more plausible
than ever. More significantly, air space rights provide a different lens in looking at some of
the similar (but smaller scale) local projects. One can only start to imagine the unraveling of
the vertical plane in Seattle.
Ji Shon is currently pursuing a dual degree in Master of Architecture and Master of Science in
Real Estate at the University of Washington while working for the Neighborhood Design
Build Studio. Upon graduation, she intends to combine the two fields and pioneer in
bringing excellent design and responsible development in urban areas. She could be
reached at jshon@uw.edu for questions or comments.
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.
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!
Continuing the thread of review for the new landscape urbanism website, I'm discussing 'The Re-Representation of Urbanism' by Gerdo Aquino, SWA Principal as well as educator and author of the book 'Landscape Infrastructure' (see L+U review here). As a fundamental opening to his essay, Aquino mentions the major shift that has taken place towards urbanization and linking it to Odum's ecological idea of the 'carrying capacity' as these areas continually add more people. It's interesting to think in these terms in numbers we can related to, so the example of the resource base for Los Angeles being about to support 1% of the current population is troubling - as it is a case in point (and a poignant example) of us living well above our means.
The other major theme mentioned is the use of adjectival modifiers of urbanism - ecological, new, everyday, combinatory, to name a few of the many. The question isn't which of these is most appropriate, or 'right' but do they address the complexities of the city in meaningful ways and do they lead to appropriate actions. In our search for solutions we tend to choose a dominant paradigm and stretch it to fit, rather than asking whether it is the right tool for a particular job. As Aquino mentions:
"The study of cities needs to include many points of view in order to
move beyond outmoded planning diagrams that no longer describe how to
improve our cities. Despite so many variables, each of these terms
argues for an ideas-rich platform for public debate, competition, and
academic research in which the specificity of a particular factor can be
magnified, examined, and explored in context."
Which is another way of saying a phrase I just heard again for the first time - "If you have a hammer, every thing looks like a nail". So no self-respecting carpenter would carry one tool, but a box (or truck) full of potential solutions that work at varying scales. Not to oversimplify cities - but you get the idea. One of the most interesting ideas that landscape urbanism brings to the discussion, mentioned by Aquino in the article is that of a new relationship to graphic methods and imagery. Many of the formative theories of LU look closely at mapping, representation, and as Aquino mentions: "The collective visualization of our world..." which "...is even more important in influencing how we understand and
think about urbanism and landscape."
The representation within disciplines is very important but sometimes missed as a key part of the discussion. A softly rendered static watercolor perspective suffices for a view of a product, primarily because it is easier to convey than the complexity of urban systems and their dynamic properties. The integration of science, particularly landscape ecology, chaos theory, and social dynamics, ramps up the number of urban variables to a degree where traditional representation crumbles. Is the solution to retreat back to what is known and understandable (or more importantly, easy to convey as simplification to clients and others)? Or do we take on the challenge of this, in Aquino's words - re-representation?
In this regard the essay references a 1997 article "Design by re-representation: a model of visual reasoning in design" by Rivka Oxman [link to PDF here] which Aquino summarizes below:
"...understanding design proposals requires both cognitive knowledge and
visual literacy. Oxman’s research explores how emergence, or the way
complex systems arise out of relatively simple connections, informs
creativity and, particularly, the process of design. Design then can be
understood as a culmination of thousands of decisions—and each
representation offers a layer of meaning behind these complex ideas."
This is on the same theme as preliminary writings in 'Recovering Landscape' so again, this isn't really a new idea, but good to reinforce the concept of landscape architecture as a profession well suited for representational experimentation and the ability to capture fluidity and complexity, which is referenced in some of the major graphic convention evolutions during the first decade of this century. Computers have became a significant tool not just in being able to automate techniques of collage, but also are beginning to aid in crunching significant quantities of data and more specifically, along with video and other media, represent motion and change over time, interrelationship of site actors, and to portray changes that occur on timelines too slow for our comprehension.
The second part of Aquino's essay focuses not on representation, but on actual places and the lack of a modern method of visual vocabulary for landscape architecture. The profession is still mired in the pictorial scenery in the Olmstedian tradition (especially in North America) and architecture/urban design in the 'Main Street' utopia - so it becomes more difficult to give tangible examples of new ideas when the dominant visual and cultural paradigm is based on powerful, established imagery. As Aquino mentions, "Landscape architecture... suffers from a poor collective visual
vocabulary. The absence of prevalent and progressive design precedents
hinders our ability to communicate our ideals for a better urbanism to a
broader audience."
Part of the issue is in communication, the other part is more political - in actually convincing people that there is a better urbanism, and that the natural (or native) should not be the proper 'frame' for the ecological. The debate of cultural frameworks and perceptions will continue to evolve as mentioned as we integrate more ecological thinking and systems into projects - but will they be required to fall into the fate of such techno-ecological marvels as Olmsted's Back Back Fens project - a landscape ecological urbanism in disguise as a natural wetland park?
Aquino then comes to the crux of the solution - and that is to build the work. As he mentions: "Educate through practice. Landscape architects, planners,
and urbanists need built precedents to demonstrate that a more
integrated approach to landscape and urbanism is possible. Policy and
planning does not spark a collective re-imagination of our future in the
way that tangible, built work does."
This goes to the heart of the debate about landscape urbanism - and really becomes perhaps the wicked problem that we all face in trying to elaborate a new representational and methodological process. At this point we have some of the fundamentals we want to achieve... flexibility, adaptability, indeterminacy and multiplicity... driven by ecological principles and woven into complex social and economic milieu - in response to cultural and market conditions. This is the urbanism parts - the working aspects of cities and systems we want to address.
The problem with implementation - and with re-representation, is that we haven't actually figured out the representation part - so it is a giant leap to building. While he offers examples - these are good works of urban planning and design, interdisciplinary landscape architecture, and innovative ecological solutions at work - but they aren't built works of landscape urbanism, and they aren't even really physical examples of the representational transformation of the disciplines... which haven't yet matured on the drawing boards, and definitely haven't been realized in the field.
I just don't see the connection between theory and practice being strong enough to justify a new label - and resistance within disciplines to new ideas notwithstanding, perhaps it will just become a natural maturation of all of the above disciplines with infusions of some aspects of new theory from all of the various 'urbanisms'. It isn't really worthy of a label like 'landscape urbanism' or even 'landscape infrastructure' - although we do love new labels. Is is okay to modify urbanism as 'study' and keep the disciplinary frameworks of applied methodology intact - so LU can influence and change and expand landscape architecture or architecture or planning without being considered a failed theoretical attempt? I'd much rather see that than to try to formalize it into a method (ala New Urbanism) or to force projects into a new category of definition as Landscape Urbanism.
Either way, I'm with Aquino partway, and agree that: "Over the next decade, as the work communicated in words and pictures
transforms into real places in the world, the public understanding of
both urbanism and landscape architecture will expand, while new
challenges and opportunities emerge for designers to tackle."
What we will call these works... these re-representations and re-implementations... that's the question?
So as promised, I was planning on posting on some of the great content related to the initial issue on the Landscape Urbanism website. The introduction by Sarah Kathleen Peck and Eliza Shaw Valk brings up some of the questions around the concept - with a focus on 'indeterminacy' and 'multiplicity' as well as looking at what drives the theory and discussion around landscape urbanism - namely what it is (or can be).
Surprising to many (but not surprising to most) - the goals of LU and many of the questions are not simple. They are not about supplanting new urbanism, promoting suburban sprawl, evoking a nostalgia for le corbusian mega projects, or the many ill-conceived criticisms that have been thrown about by those threatened or at least too lazy to actually understand what's going on before condemnation. The LU project, if you could call it that, is very succinctly presented in by Peck and Valk:
"We believe that we are trying to do something different. We are in uncharted territory because we are
spinning new narratives. We are taking on new responsibilities, and we
are approaching challenges with faceted lenses, recognizing and
incorporating—with sense and sensibilities—the vast variety of
interests, concerns, investments, and collisions that are the landscape
of cities."
The interesting twist in all of this, and the reason for all this speculation - is also the root of most of the criticism of landscape urbanism. The endeavor is about 'urbanism' as a concept related to study of urban areas, and not about creating solutions to specific problems. This is old-school scholarship and theorizing - not using those two pathways in order to provide some semblance of a framework on which to hang an operational method. So LU is criticized for its messiness, it's lack of coherence and clarity, and its willingness to acknowledge some of the ugly truths in our society. Guess what? That's what is being studied - so the methods have to match the context. Cities are messy, they lack coherence and clarity, and often they are ugly both historically and currently - in terms of environmental pollution, social inequity, and as is being made evident in the recent occupation movement, economic disparity.
So we do the one thing we can. We look, interpret, gauge, measure, hypothesize, and theorize. As mentioned by Peck and Valk, "We err in the belief that landscape urbanism is a study, with parameters, but not an ideology. One conundrum among many." Or, simply, we don't know - so we ask. These are educated inquiries, but are driven by a lack of knowledge, not the knowledge that we have things figured out and want to offer a solution. I feel that perhaps that is what is missing in the world right now. The ability to look, and discuss - not in terms of solutions but in terms of asking the right questions and defining the right problems.
So the issue tackles many of these themes in this vein, as Peck and Valk explain in their introduction, such as landscape urbanism "origins and future potential; its coherencies and incoherencies; and
working definitions that hold the seemingly conflicting factors of
space, time, indeterminacy, and multiplicity." These are not just isolated questions about landscape urbanism theory that involves uni-disciplinary verbal masturbation or lionization of "new" methods for solving the worlds problems, but are related, fundamental questions about urbanism in general. The goal is neither purely theoretical or academic or disconnected from on-the-ground practice, but is also fundamental to a greater understanding and application in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, planning, and urban design. The study, not as mentioned by the editors, is not an idealogy. It is a journey and not a destination.
In subsequent posts I will look at some of this original content on landscape urbanism (the site) and focus on these fundamental questions related to landscape urbanism (the concept)... starting next with Gerdo Aquino's essay on 'the re-representation of landscape'. Stay tuned.
Right before I took off on my travels, the brand new Landscape Urbanism website launched with its first issue. Due to the rigors of travel (you know, scenic vistas, wine, great food, etc.) I was not able to dig into the content before I left - but finally did manage to get all of it absorbed. And there's a ton of great content, as founder and editor-in-chief Sarah Kathleen Peck has assembled a wonderful group of editors, advisors, and amassed a great initial take on LU on this issue.
A bit about the overall concept of the site.
"Landscape urbanism (dot) com is a website for and about landscape, architecture, and urbanism—a resource
and ongoing publication for people interested in cities, landscape, and
design. Landscape urbanism is an idea that process matters in design,
that collaboration between disciplines is critical, and that complexity
should be embraced as part of urbanism and landscape architecture. While
many have argued that the ideas of landscape urbanism are too undefined
or complicated, we think that through this publication and website, we
can better explain and explore the ideas of landscape urbanism."
I think the key to this site, and perhaps it's most engaging idea, is the concept of a forum for understanding the concepts around landscape urbanism. The ongoing debate varies widely, and to date there hasn't been an attempt to collect and more importantly engage with some of the key issues that make up the foundations of LU theory and practice. It has the potential to provide a more systematic methodology (than a singularly authored blog) - proposing to explain all of the varying modes of thinking and the connections within - rather than to promote a particular ideology. It also has the ability for ongoing dialogue and debate (not possible in print media). The multiplicity of voices, some not typically heard until now, is another strength, in addition to the inclusive approach and interactivity - seen in this initial offering that is definitely exciting.
The focus of Issue #1 is fundamental to understanding of landscape urbanism, talking the concepts of indeterminacy and multiplicity, with a wide range of contributors including "...Christopher Gray and Shanti Levy illuminating the antecedents and legacies of landscape urbanism, SWA president Gerdo Aquino calls for more built works to bolster its role. Editor Eliza Valk haunts New York City’s parks puzzling terms and definitions, while Laura Tepper scurries across Dutch highways wondering what happened to a West 8 installation. Finally, website founder Sarah Peck interviews longtime blogger and landscape advocate Jason King; while further south, architects Thom Mayne and Karen Lohrmann and a UCLA design studio examine the future of America’s regional cities."
In addition to the issues and an on-going blog, another aspect of the site in its initial phase is the section on 'Strategies' which aims to amass "a collection of built projects + conceptual work advancing the ideas and
practice of landscape architecture and landscape urbanism." The realization of work related to landscape urbanism has definitely been an ongoing topic of conversation, and a collection and critical dialogue related to works, if they do in fact exist, is long overdue.
I will provide some review of the content (maybe even a somewhat self-referential meta-review of my own interview on the site) in subsequent posts, so check
out the articles and be ready with comments - as it is some
thought-provoking stuff.
To everyone involved - a well-deserved thank you and congratulations!
The next essay from the Landscape Urbanism Reader is by David Grahame Shane, entitled 'The Emergence of Landscape Urbanism'. This essay builds on Waldheim's essay and further elaborates on the origins of the theory - with a broad take on the historical foundations and precedents around landscape urbanism as mentioned in the introductory text: “Shane surveys the growing body of literature attendant to landscape urbanism, while tracing the institutions and individuals implicated in the discourse, especially as they relate to the disciplinary formations and discourses of urban design.” (17)
As far as defining landscape urbanism, Shane mentions that the concept "has recently emerged as a rubric to describe the design strategies resulting in the wake of traditional urban forms.” (58) and echoes Waldheim in describing it as encompassing: "the practices of many designers for who landscape had replaced architectural form as the primary medium of citymaking. This understanding of decentralized post-industrial urban form highlighted the leftover void spaces of the city as potential commons.” (57-58) Furthering this defintiion that provides a way out of the current methodologies of urban design practice.
“Landscape urbanists want to continue the search for a new basis of a performative urbanism that emerges from the bottom up, geared to the technological and ecological realities of the postindustrial world… implies an opportunity open urban design out beyond the current rigid and polarized situation to a world where the past building systems and landscape can be included as systems within urban design.” (65)
Shane mentions this in terms of creating new "recombinations and hybridizations, liberating the urban design discipline from the current, hopeless, binary opposition of past and present, town and country, in and out." (65) but does mention that although filled with potential as noted above, "All of landscape urbanism’s triumphs so far have been in such marginal and ‘unbuilt’ locations.” (62) This is another common refrain from critics of landscape urbanism, and it is worth noting that the ideas of contemporary urbanism and its potential solutions are very different in distant open spaces as opposed to dense urban fabric, which is valid, but also misses the point that the theory is attempting to address this situation, not, as many posit, blindly accepting sprawl as a given and deciding to operate within the residual post-industrial or generic Koolhaasian fields of landscape within the periphery. Rather there is a residual fabric of corridors, edges, and other surfaces that can be re-engaged within this ideology.
The precise operational dynamic of works of landscape urbanism is one thing - but to move beyond this and think of ways in which the concepts that interweave into practice is a different approach altogether. The landscape urbanist project, if you would call it such, is addressing all of this (hence the term distiguished from the suburban), and Shane does explain that “The recent discourse surrounding landscape urbanism does not yet begin to address the issue of urban morphologies or the emergence of settlement patterns over time. The problems of this approach is its amnesia and blindness to preexisting structures, urban ecologies, and morphological patterns.” and concludes that “Landscape urbanists are just beginning to battle with the thorny issue of how dense urban forms emerge from landscape and how urban ecologies support performance spaces.” (63)
This essay is way to dense to capture in any detail, but does offer some thought provoking historical origins of theory spanning the last century. The change in urban form and dynamics through this time period are exp
ressed by 'decompression', evolving from the ideas of Post-Fordist modes of production, deindustrialization leading to shrinking cities, and the resultant postmodern organization that "became obvious in the 1990s with the proliferation of sprawling cities, gated enclaves, residential communities, megamalls, and theme parks.” (59)
This context of contemporary urbanism is best captured by the provocatively wonderful 'City as an Egg' diagram from Cedric Price, which contrast three city morphologies "traditional, dense, ‘hard-boiled egg’ city fixed in concentric rings of development… the ‘fried egg’ city, where railways stretched the city’s perimeter in accelerated linear space-time corridors out into the landscape, resulting in a star shape… and the postmodern ‘scrambled egg city,’ where everything is distributed evenly in small granules or pavilions across the landscape in a continuous network.” (64)
A wide array of projects are included as examples. Some are more obvious or oft-mentioned, such as the Parc de la Villette, Downsview, and Freshkills competitions, and also the East River Competition conducted by the Van Alen Institute. There are some new ones, includingWest Market Square by West 8 (1994) which is a space owned, maintained and programmed by the city, but "which is also free at times to be occupied by local people of all ages, under the surveillance of cameras and local police.” (60) marking a new example of heterotropic space. The New Town Competition entry from Koolhaas/OMA from 1987 is another precedent where the residential form is shaped by, in the words of Corner, "linear voids of nondevelopment." (60) hinting at the concept of privileged site over architectural form.
Other examples include the unbuilt Greenport Harborfront project in Long Island (1997), which is an example of “the concept of ‘performative’ urbanism based on preparing the setting for programmed and unprogrammed activities on common land.” (59) which is reflective of some of the later work from Field Operations as well. A built example of the idea, in a more architectural and site scale context, is the sculptural Osaka Ocean Liner Terminal by FOA, where the architects "turn the concept of the green roof into a dynamic, flowing, baroque parkland setting… Pier and park, two previously separate urban morphologies, are hybridized so as to become inseparable.” (65)
Shane references an even more extensive list of references, which provide some great historical precedents. Many of these cover basic historical urbanism, such as the work of Kostof (The City Shaped, The City Assembled), history of the Western/US landscape by Slater and Conzen, and early 20th century writings on garden cities from Howard and regionalism, specifically 'Cities in Evolution' by Patrick Geddes from 1915. Other writings include later writings of Lynch, Rowe, as well as McHarg's 'Design with Nature' and shifts to more contemporary discussions from Harvey and Soja for exploration of postmodern urbanism, writings from Guy Debord 'The Society of the Spectacle' from 1995 and the explorations by Garreau of the edge-city phenomenon from 1991.
:: Tyson's Corner Edge City
A fundamental aspect discussed by Shane is the connection to landscape ecology, specifically the work of Forman (Landscape Mosaics) and Forman & Godron (Landscape Ecology) and mentioning that its strength "is the consideration of the geographical landscape and the ecological cause-effect network in the landscape.”(61) The connections of landscape ecology and its roots in Europe are important due to the differing relations between nature and culture (rather than just dealing with landscape sans humans). As Shane elaborates:
"European land management principles merged with post-Darwinian research on island biogeography and diversity to create a systematic methodology for studying ecological flows, local biospheres, and plant and species migrations conditioned by shifting climatic and environmental factors (including human settlements.” (61)
Finally, the essays captures some of the more recent writings tied closely to LU theory, mentioning 'Stalking Detroit' (2001), 'Mississippi Floods' by Mathur & da Cunha (2000), 'Reclaiming the American West' by Berger (2002), 'Sub-urbanism and the Art of Memory' by Marot (2003), and 'Recovering Landscape' edited by Corner and published in 1999 - which i would consider a close precedent to the currrent discussion. Stalking Detroit is also an important contribution, offering essays by Waldheim and Corner and provides context, within the prominent shrinking city model of Detroit for a changing city typology. "After Ford' by Schumacher and Rogner, “provides a most convincing explanation for the relation between modern urbanism and Fordist economic imperatives, as well as the surreal spectacle of decay and abandonment found today in many North American industrial cities.” (57)
The work in Stalking Detroit, although unbuilt, provides some examples of potential operational methods of landscape urbanism. One project discussed was Waldheim's 'Decamping Detroit', which illustrates a four stage process for recolonization of space in the shrinking city, including "Dislocation (disconnection of services); erasure (demolition and jumpstarting the native landscape ecology by dropping appropriate seeds from the air ); absorption (ecological reconstitution of part of the Zone with woods, marshes, and streams); and infiltration (the recolonization of the landscape with heteropic, villagelike enclaves.” (59)
This context of deindustrialization and surburban sprawl is a consistent theme, moving away by necessity from the modernist planning ideology and including a different reading of the city, focus on urban morphology, activated with new strains of thinking from landscape ecology with a goal, as explained by Shane: “A determination not to accept the readymade formulas of urban design, whether ‘New Urbanist’ or ‘generic’ urbanist megaforms a la Koolhaas.” (64) The key this is a reversal of normal processes, which "opens the way for a new hybrid urbanism, with dense clusters of activity and the reconstitution of the natural ecology, starting a more ecologically balanced, inner-city urban form in the void.”(59)
Check out as well a longer version of this article from the Harvard Design Magazine (pdf) and I would highly recommend 'Recombinant Urbanism' from 2005 for an exhaustive study of urban modelling processes.
The next essay in the Landscape Urbanism Reader, following 'Terra Fluxus' and the initial 'Reference Manifesto' is a longer essay by Waldheim exploring the idea that landscape is most suited to the modern metropolis, being "uniquely capable of responding to temporal change, transformation, adaptation, and succession... a medium uniquely suited to the open-endedness, indeterminacy, and change demanded by contemporary urban conditions." (39) This idea could be considered one of the formative structures on which landscape urbanism is built, explained by many writers as a response the failings of architecture and urban design to cope with the complexity of the urban situation, leading to Waldheim's apt, but somewhat hyperbolic statement that "the discourse surrounding landscape urbanism can be read as a disciplinary realignment in which landscape supplants architecture's historical role as the basic building block of urban design." (37)
Ironically, this essay explains clearly that landscape urbanism theory has its origins in the same rejection of modernist architecture and planning, and the retreat to "policy, procedure, and public therapy." (39) This is a common refrain from contemporary planners as a way to distance themselves from top-down, totalitarian schemes of the mid-twentieth century, which has led to a renaissance of engagement in both community and context that makes all urban design and planning better but also a tendency to favor specific strategies. Corner is quoted as well, mentioning that "only through a synthetic and imaginative reordering of categories in the built environment might we escape our present predicament in the cul-de-sac of post-industrial modernity, and 'the bureaucratic and uninspired failings,' of the planning profession." (38)
I think at heart it means there is room for both a rejection of modernist planning, along with a rejection of some contemporary approaches as well which may be suited for some situations but not appropriate for all. As an alternative path to new urbanism, rational planning and similar strategies, the fixed nature of deterministic planning must be questioned - thus forming the heart of this debate, Waldheim mentions:
"the very indeterminacy and flux of the contemporary city, the bane of traditional European city-making, are precisely those qualities explored in emergent works of landscape urbanism." (39)
The context here is important, as many critics of landscape urbanism point out some form of 'anti-urban, pro-sprawl, pro-car' agenda within the writings, whereas proponents of LU might be summarized as arguing that the current forms of urban planning and design are alternatively 'anti-reality,' as they don't acknowledge the messy reality of shrinking, decentralized, globalizing, capitalist, sprawling, market-driven, polluted, socially diverse and complicated nature of the modern city. Thus beyond a palliative that uses greenery to mitigate urban ills, the definition includes a more expansive field of view, including infrastructure systems (water, waste, transportation), post-industrial sites, waterfronts, linear systems, public open space, as well as more traditional urban-scaled landscape projects.
:: The Contemporary Context - image from Drosscape - Alan Berger (link)
The context of environmental movements is important as well, as this drives the landscape architecture to a new relevance in sustainability (yet a marginalization in such contemporary processes such as LEED). Invoking ecology as a "model for process" (39) where projects "appropriate the terms, conceptual categories, and operating methodologies of field ecology: that is, the study of species as they related to their natural environments." (43) Corner warns of the ecological being solely about advocacy that leads us into the distance of humans from the natural environment, summing current environmentalism as "nothing more than a rear-guard defense of a supposedly autonomous 'nature' conceived to exist 'a priori' outside of human agency or cultural construction." (38) Applied in a holistic manner to a range of systems and project types listed above, this fundamental advantage of landscape urbanism and its ecological viewpoint allows for "the conflation, integration, and fluid exchange between (natural) environmental and (engineered) infrastructural systems." (43)
These fundamentals of cultural ecology draw on historical precedents like Olmsted's Emerald Necklace, urban development in Barcelona in the 1980s and 90s, and the human-shaped landscape of the Netherlands, which is often used as a model for a non-pastoral idea of shaped (i.e. cultural) landscape that differs from the American frontier model of verdant wilderness). More specifically, Waldheim mentions some of the other formative competitions, including the less ecological Parc de la Villette (1982) as well as more recent examples of Downsview Park Toronto and Fresh Kills Landfill which strongly incorporate the ideas of ecology.
La Villette, on the other hand, focuses on ecologically inspired idea of indeterminacy in spatial arrangement and programming, with both Tschumi's winning entry and the OMA/Koolhaas plans providing "a nascent form of landscape urbanism, constructing a horizontal field of infrastructure that might accommodate all sorts of urban activities, planned and unplanned, imagined and unimagined, over time." (41) Thus the fluidity of the plan is the generation of adaptable, not fixed, form - able to react and change, quoting Koolhaas from 'Congestion without Matter':
"the program will undergo constant change and adjustment... the underlying principle of programmatic indeterminacy as a basis of the formal concept allows any shift, modification, replacement, or substitutions to occur without damaging the initial hypothesis." (41)
Other current practice that fits into landscape urbanism derive from global context, such as the work of West 8 in the Netherlands, which allows for a wider latitude in cultural conceptions of open space that have been implemented including the Shell Project (Eastern Scheldt Storm Surge Barrier), Schipol Amsterdam Airport, and Borneo & Sporenburg, the last referenced as "an enormous landscape urbanism project... suggests the potential diversity of landscape urbanist strategies through the insertion of numerous small landscaped courts and yard, and the commissioning of numerous designers for individual housing units." (46)
In addition to the work of West 8, inventive work in the post-industrial realm is evoked, including historical precedent like Seattle's Gas Works Park by Richard Haag, and the more expansive contemporary Duisburg Nord Steelworks Park by Latz & Partners - the model for reclaiming post-industrial landscapes as a cultural landscape.
The list of references is long, with some of the formative writings that have been incorporated in the structure of landscape urbanism, including ecological regional perspectives of Geddes, Mumford, McHarg (Design with Nature), the urban city-theory of Lynch (Image of the City; A Theory of Good City Form), and more recently the expanded realm of the polycentric city with Rowe (Making a Middle Landscape), Lerup (Stim and Dross) and Koolhaas (Delirious New York; S,M,L,XL). Koolhaas marks the shift in thinking towards landscape using Atlanta as a prototype, stating that "Architecture is no longer the primary element of urban order, increasingly urban order is given by a thin horizontal vegetal plane, increasingly landscape is the primary element of urban order." (42)
An important contribution to this is an 1995 essay by Kenneth Frampton entitled 'Toward an Urban Landscape' in which he expands on the early essays on critical regionalism with a focus on the "need to conceive of a remedial landscape that is capable of playing a critical and compensatory role in relation to the ongoing, destructive commodification of the man-made world." (42) He continues with two main points privileging landscape: "First, that priority should now be according to landscape, rather than to freestanding built form and second, that there is a pressing need to transform certain megalopolitan types such as shopping malls, parking lots, and office parks into landscaped built forms." (43)
The second source worth exploring in more detail is the essay 'Mat Urbanism - the Thick 2-D' by Stan Allen (2001) - which expands the flat horizontality of the field with imbuing these suficial space as a process landscape. "Increasingly, landscape is emerging as a model for urbanism. Landscape has traditionally been defined as the art of organizing horizontal surfaces… By paying close attention to these surface conditions – not only configuration, but also materiality and performance – designers can activate space and produce urban effects without the weighty apparatus of traditional space making.” (37)
This essay is another building block in the tradition of urbanism as exploration and study, not yielding specific answers to these questions but looking at the history of critical thought and linking to some of the formative analyses done, as well as some of the preliminary precedents that have emerged in the past century. Critics have claimed as well that many of the concepts of landscape urbanism theory is not necessarily new - which is true, but is also a claim which sort of misses the point. We should always look back to sources to inform our current thinking as there is much to be learned from both successes as well as failures - and by looking at new ways to apply these lessons to our current context (which I would posit is unique to cities throughout history).
Thus, Waldheim encapsulates the context of landscape urbanism within this historical framework, where: "…the ability to produce urban effects traditionally acheieved through the construction of buildings simply through the organization of horizontal surfaces – recommends the landscape medium for use in contemporary urban conditions increasingly characterized by horizontal sprawl and rapid change.” (37)
This essay, Terra Fluxus by James Corner, from the Landscape Urbanism Reader is considered one of the seminal texts in formulating landscape urbanism theory. Obviously it has had an impact on me personally, as I used it for the name of my firm, with a respectful tip of the hat to Mr. Corner. The concept and imagery associated just with the term 'terra fluxus' is powerful, and encapsulates what I consider a new methodological paradigm for landscape architecture (which is the lens in which i tend to read and incorporate LU theory) that gives prominence to process while retaining the role of design.
While formulating the conceptual basis of landscape urbanism, Corner mentions the dual binaries of landscape and urbanism - with the assumption that there are different states of 'being', mentioning "the total dissolution of the two terms into one word, one phenomenon, one practice. And yet at the same time each term remains distinct, suggesting their necessary, perhaps inevitable, separateness." (24) This sort of hedging is pretty common - leading to some of the gray area within discourse - is it landscape, urbanism, or both? (often leading people to throw up their hands and say - well what the hell is it!). I think of it as indicative of the inherent urbanistic challenges which landscape urbanism seeks to address whereas the complexity of the urban condition cannot be oversimplified, at least in analysis.
In the true sense of urbanism, this is about analysis and development of theoretical positions in which to operate - many of which are not fully realized but are nonetheless, thought provoking. As Corner mentions: "the union of landscape with urbanism promises new relational and systematic workings across territories of vast scale and scope, situating the parts in relation to the whole, but at the same time the separateness of landscape and urbanism acknowledges a level of material physicality, of intimacy and difference, that is always nested deep within the larger matrix or field." (33)
Corner's main argument includes development of four provisional themes, which include processes over time, the staging of surfaces, the operational or working method, and the imaginary. In brief, these include the following summaries:
Processes over time: derived from ecology, the temporal aspects of landscape urbanism eschews the deterministic modes of modernist planning and new urbanism, addressing "how things work in space and time" leading to a "more organic, fluid urbanism" (29) The movement away from fixed, linear, mechanistic models complicates the development of solutions (including both design and representation, much less construction), but is captured in the title of the essay as oppositional to 'terra firma', and opens the new view of terra fluxus, which values "shifting processes coursing across the urban field." (30)
The Staging of Surfaces: gives proimance to the horizontal surface as a "field of action," and able to operate at a wide range of scales, from the sidewalk to the "entire infrastructural matrix of urban surfaces." (30) This derives from Koolhaas in his 1995 essay "Whatever Happened to Urbanism" where he prioritizes urban infrastructure by the, "irrigating of territories with potential... staging the ground for both uncertainty and promise." (31) Mechanisms to achieve this include the grid (an overlay of flexibility and legibility) that is operated by users through choreography (aka diverse groups of people interacting with space in time, creating "an ecology of various systems and elements that set in motion a diverse network of interaction." (31)
The Operational or Working Method: the complexity inherent in the first two themes means development of a new mode of representation that require new techniques "to address the sheer scope of issues here are desperately lacking." While in the tradition of urbanism, the solutions are unresolved, Corner does imply the importance, stating that "this area alone, it would seem to me, is deserving of our utmost attention and research." This implies a direction for future study in the contemporary metropolis to test and vet these techniques.
The Imaginary: Corner provides distance from his predecessor, McHarg, but invoking the need for creativity, not just rationality in coming up with solutions within this framework. The implementation of design within public space engages the spirit of the urban population, acting as "containers of collective memory and desire" and furthermore "places for geographic and social imagination to extend new relationships and sets of possibilities." (32)
These four themes connect the temporal aspects of ecology with the intellectual history of design - something that at least for landscape architecture goes hand in hand, as we deal with the organic materials that never rest in a state of completion but are always active and evolving. The distinction here is not purely literal, but captures landscapes' conceptual scope, in Corner's terms "its capacity to theorize sites, territories, ecosystems, networks, and infrastructures, and to organize large urban fields." (23) This has parallels not just in manipulation of open space, but as a way to tackle the ongoing complex nature of cities, this yields a "looser, emergent urbanism, more akin to the real complexity of cities and offering an alternative to the rigid mechanisms of centralist planning." (23)
Therefore rather than a method to expand landscape architectural discourse, it addresses the much larger dichotomy of nature versus culture, repositioning landscape not as the city's 'other' but as coterminous in overlapping with the purview of contemporary urbanism. This moves us away from the purely rational, oversimplification of the city process, and the blind faith in market forces to shape our urban areas and at the same time exploring new methods, such as Kahn's diagramming of Philadelphia vehicular circulation, aimed at "representing the fluid, process-driven characteristics of the city." (30) and derived from central place theory modelling of Christaller and Hilberseimer showing "flows and forces in relation to urban form." (28)
:: Diagram of Christaller's Central Place Theory
In the context of this nature/culture divide, there are two elements of importance in relation to built work. First, although acknowledging the early integration of landscape in urban settings (epitomized by Olmsted's Central Park and the work of Jens Jensen) - there is the need to move beyond the idea of landscape as pure scenery or as a palliative (which is encompassed in the hollow, Radiant City concept of the 'green complex' championed by Le Corbusier, which is both formless and anti-contextual). The towers in the park lacks purpose in its rationality, but there is also a need to expand the environmental rationality of McHargian analysis into a realm of philosophical grounding that is not anti-urban, but allows for creativity and imagination in combining the ecological to the urban. The extension of the natural combined with the infrastructural is mentioned selected precedents, such as Olmsted's Back Back Fens projects in Boston, which is an oft-citied example of ecological urbanism, and a precursor to landscape urbanism, despite its cultural leanings towards the natural, as well as the configuration of the city of Stuttgart, Germany in funnelling mountain air through the city to both cool and cleanse the environment.
An interesting modern precursor to the landscape (and) urbanism worth noting is reference to Victor Gruen's idea of 'Cityscapes' from the 1964 publication 'The Heart of the Cities: The Urban Crisis, Diagnosis, and Cure', which are part of a variety of different 'scapes' that define the city. This distancing from landscape as urban 'other' is vital in forming a new view of urban nature and landscape as including "the built environment of buildings, paved surfaces and infrastructures... not the 'natural environment' per se, as in untouched wilderness, but to those regions where human occupation has shaped the land and its natural processes in an intimate and reciprocal way." (26)
While mapping a potential conceptual approach to landscape urbanism, the essay also provides some of the fuel to current fires of competing urbansim, the viewpoint of desire for a new, more flexible planning alternative is clear. Referencing Harvey's 1990s 'The Condition of Post-Modernity' in clarifying this line of thinking the aforementioned theme related to processes over time and yields the terminology of indeterminacy, as Corner mentions:
"In comparing the formal determinism of modernist urban planning and the more recent rise of neo-traditional 'New Urbanism,' the cultural geographer David Harvey has written that both projects fail becasue of the presumption that spatial order can control history and process. Harvey argues that 'the struggle' for designers and planners lies not with spatial form and aesthetic appearances alone but with the advancement of 'more socially just, politically emancipatory, and ecologically sane mix(es) of spatio-temporal production processes,' rather than the capitulation to those processes 'imposed by uncontrolled capital accumulation, backed by class privilege and gross inequalities of political-economic power." (28-29)
To return to the distinction between terra firma and terra fluxus, from the fixed to the fluid - the power of the ideological shift is immense, whether you agree with the tenets of landscape urbanism or not. The power of this essay, removed from the context of the debate over 'urbanisms' is that we need to develop a different, more expanded set of values in design and planning that will are response to a true accounting of the complexity of cities, whatever your ideological leanings. I fall into the camp that gives us the ability to focus on multiple 'urbanisms' to exist to address these complex urban phenomena. In this view, the role of 'urbanism' is understood as the study of urban systems and not the development of solutions - providing an understanding and not a blueprint. If one can take anything from this essay, it provides some possible tools to address complex systems in planning and design, to understand a wider contextual viewpoint, and develop new methods for understanding and representing these systems.
In the ensuing application of disciplinary practice, we can then use this information and employ the imaginary in crafting solutions armed with our best information, not a predetermined idea of what should happen. The sum total of this approach and these solutions are grounded in the view, from Corner, that "the projection of new possibilities for future urbanisms must derive less from an understanding of form and more from an understanding of process - how things work in space and time." (29)
Our previous excursion into online readings was sort of disjointed, sparsely commented, and for the most part not terribly fruitful. There was some good discussion, but I think a combination of format, content, and time constraints added to the difficulty in exploring the Landscape Urbanism Reader to the degree I would have liked to see. Also, the planned weekly updates on chapters never materialized - beyond the first introductory missive on Waldheim's 'A Reference Manifesto'. Nonetheless, we may retool the concept for another book in the future - but in the meantime, I wanted to explore the content, as I took a somewhat more methodical approach to the essays - breaking it down to tease out some key points... including:
Definitions of Landscape Urbanism
Urban Context - what conditions are LU responding to?
Key Urban Concepts that shaped LU?
Representative Projects/Precedents
Key References
Sso in the next couple of weeks I'll post on these chapters, starting with Corner's 'Terra Fluxus', and would love for some comment and discussion to ensue, as these formative essays are some of the most powerful (and misunderstood) in the landscape urbanism discourse. In addition to the essay-by-essay exploration, there seems the need for some more cross-concept analysis (i.e. a focus on precedents, various definitions, etc.) that could be analyzed and displayed in some infographic analyses...
Will probably do a similar thing for some of the other key texts, such as Kerb 15, Topos 71, Center 14: Landscape Urbanism, Large Parks, A Manual for the Machinic Landscape, Stalking Detroit, Recovering Landscape, The Mesh Book, and selected essays from other key texts and sources... (along with continuation of the 'Red Brick Chronicles') - so lots of good stuff that would be great to construct the foundations.
'Landscape Infrastructure: Case Studies by SWA' published in 2011, is edited by the Infrastructure Research Initiative of SWA including Los Angeles office principals Gerdo Aquino and Ying-Yu Hung. This is supplemented with contributions from Charles Waldheim, Julie Czerniak, Adriaan Geuze, Matthew Skjonsberg and Alexander Robinson. While ostensibly about landscape infrastructure, this type of book is a new sort of publishing hybrid that has emerged, combining the firm-specific work of a monograph within a more topical subject matter on a particular typology or approach to project work.
I think this may become a new trend in publishing, as it provides firms with the opportunity to showcase work, but also offers a more expansive vehicle for exploration of themes and inclusion of more collaborators, making the book both more widely marketable while putting the work of the firm in the forefront of emerging trends. This differs somewhat from the Dutch examples and their production of brick-like graphic tomes of research and work. This collection of essays and case studies benefits from the inclusion of more voices, although is similarly directed at positioning a firm within a certain intellectual and conceptual frame of reference.
This frame of reference, landscape infrastructure, is not altogether new, but is definitely one of the more emerging ideas within landscape architecture and urban design, which is reflected in the description of the book, per the SWA website:
"INFRASTRUCTURE, as we know it, no longer belongs in the exclusive realm of engineers and transportation planners. In the context of our rapidly changing cities and towns, infrastructure is experiencing a paradigm shift where multiple-use programming and the integration of latent ecologies is a primary consideration. Defining contemporary infrastructure requires a multi-disciplinary team of landscape architects, engineers, architects and planners to fully realize the benefits to our cultural and natural systems."
The book exhibits some of the exploration of these topics, picking up on what Aquino mentions as the aim of SWAs Infrastructure Research Initiative "as a testing ground for engaging and redefining infrastructure in the context of future growth in our cities and towns." (p.7) This is echoed by Waldheim, and the research of the firm and the position of infrastructure as a way to "enter contemporary discourse on landscape as a form of urbanism." (p.9) and is thus connected to the more well-known broader goals of landscape urbanism and other 'adjectivally modified' forms of urbanism. (for more on this, read Aquino's interview on Archinect 'What is a Park?')
Waldheim's essay is followed by exploration of landscape urbanism and infrastructure by Hung, which gives some more detail on the history and specificity of these connected trends. The distinction offered is that this is a 'next step' "for the further inquiry as a city's development and economic future is in direct proportion to its ability to collect, exchange, distribute goods and services, resources, knowledge, and people across vast territories." (p.16) The ideas of landscape infrastructure therefore are given more detail, including the relationship to 1) performance - allowing for metrics; 2) aggregation - scalable collectivity; 3) networks - working towards connectivity; and 4) incrementalism - allowing for changes and adaptation, as well as expansion over time. While I'm not convinced this is altogether new territory, it is important nonetheless, and the sum of this exploration in defining what I would call a subset, not an expansion of what falls under the rubic of landscape urbanism.
Further essays include Czerniak's exploration of making infrastructure more 'visibly useful' (p.20) and additional discussion by Geuze and Skjonsberg on 'Second Nature' expanding on previous writings derived from John Dixon Hunt and the expanded concept of the cultural landscape that is not pastoral, but is made up of the entire working landscape (infrastructure) that is shaped by man through direct and indirect means. The final essay by Robinson takes on the ability to modulate, not to suppress or to make off-limits, flows by implementation of new infrastructural systems, using examples like the Los Angeles River, with the goal of providing expanded open space opportunities in the metropolis. All offer ideas worth exploring, giving an additional dimension of understanding to the infrastructural landscape.
If this new type of book is the trend, it's a welcome one. The idea of a monograph is somewhat anachronistic and indulgent - so I can see how firms and publishers alike would move towards this value-added approach. The book is richly detailed and provides interesting exploration of topics. The 14 case studies of projects - organized per Hung's four areas of performance, aggregate, network, and increment - are introduced with a concise description and many graphics, exploring the process as well as the product - showcasing innovation beyond merely showing off a project.
While not comprehensive case studies with data and other information, there is some meat on the bones of these cases, making it useful beyond the 'wow' factor in informing other projects. Obviously the urban scope of SWAs work makes this a broader geographic range of work that touches North America, as well as China and South Korea. This gives the work a context of both our indigenous urbanism as well as developing solutions in rapidly expanding globalized urban areas as well.
This cross cultural and multi-scalar range of projects offer a glimpse into the complexities inherent in tackling large-scale infrastructural projects. This applies to both the content as well as the visualization, with interesting graphical representations that attempt to communicate temporality, adaptability, and fludity (which is no small feat). I will leave you to check out the book for more and decide if the $70 (US) price tag is worthwhile, but the breadth of information makes this a valuable addition to the library of those landscape and urbanists working in these arenas and interested in ways, as Waldheim mentions in wrapping up his essay, to identify "the discourse around landscape urbanism generally, and infrastructure more specifically, as an entry point into contemporary readings of landscape as a cultural form." (p.13)
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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