Happy Birthday - Frederick Law Olmsted Sr.

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.

Shrinking Cities: The Forgetting Machine

One of our supplementary readings for the Shrinking Cities group is the recent essay by Jerry Herron on The Design Observer entitled 'The Forgetting Machine: Notes Toward a History of Detroit.'  The author is from Wayne State and has been a resident of Detroit since the early eighties, so it avoids some of the outsider rhetoric, but he still differentiates himself as coming from out, not within.  Read his essay, as this is more of a 'notes on notes' take that is my reaction and parsing of his essay.  Worth a look.
 
 :: image via Design Observer

The idea of Detroit as a industrial powerhouse declining into a bastion of cliched ruin-porn makes it a much talked about as a cultural touchstone of the shrunken city phenomenon of the US.  Referred to by artist Camilo Jose Vergara and 'American Acropolis', the idea of preserving the 'ruins' as a tourist attraction, much like the Greeks, leads Herron discusses a similar relationship to the Roman ruins,  After commenting on the disinterest  by locals and the seeming paradox of outsiders being more fascinated by the city than those who occupy it, he turns this around as asks a powerful question:  

"who understands better what the place really means: the person who tries to remember it, or the one who lets it go?"

This becomes a fundamental dilemma surrounding a place that will never return to it's original state - but is not dead by any means.  I think of the lively energy of the contemporary city that I visited in the Fall, surrounding the 1000+ year old ruins of Rome and see a parallel in the larger lesson - that things always change, but the way we engage in that change, and in the sense of Detroit, the deterioration, tells much about us as a society.  As mentioned, the concept of what happens in Detroit isn't special per se, but for the fact that it is happening within a crumbling environment.  Thus as art, mentions Herron:  "things once tragic become beautiful — images for artistic appreciation — with the ravages of daily life being redeemed by photographic dignity."

I share the same fascination with the City of Detroit in images and through my visit and rumination since 2007 - and it puts me in the camp of the gawkers and outsiders, at least to the point where I peruse and am fascinated, but don't buy, the coffee table 'ruin porn' books like Detroit Dissassembled, and the newer The Ruins of Detroit (with an introduction by Thomas Segrue).  What is quoted by Herron from John Berger as 'mystification', where we distance ourselves from the actual phenomena at work - good and bad - and giving them a remoteness by making things art.

:: image via The Ruins of Detroit

The statements made by the photographs, particular referencing those in The Ruins, do not capture the essential rise and fall of Detroit, but seem to bask in the 'dead zone' shivering aesthetic of destruction, which leads Herron to posit:  "Perhaps the cliché-propagating idiom of ruin porn is so powerful that it simply takes over, duping otherwise intelligent artists into a tedious banality that not even the volume's pretentious scale and price can conceal."

So i know I shouldn't like the ruin-porn, but standing in the midst of it, in Detroit, is to experience first-hand the reality.  Perhaps it is somewhat less sanitized and 'framed' as in the photography, but the fact of it's very reality and other-worldly sense that this couldn't be happening, is part of what I think the art is trying to capture.  For me, it was summed up in the spectacle of the Michigan Central Station, which was one of the first massive ruins we encountered, and I still have a vivid memory of the experience (and no photos - i was literally absorbing and didn't think about taking a photo, which is rare).


:: image via Time

It's reductive, and it limits the stories behind the former beauty, and the nasty racial discrimination that was at work in the creation of something like the large Hudson's store on Woodward Avenue, captured in this image that shows the cutaway of the various departments inside the hive of mid-century activity which was vital to the "making of shoppers, like the making of citizens, was an essential function of both store and city, especially the city of middle-class arrivals made possible by the flourishing of modern industry".  This idealistic experience is another cultural ruin that no longer exists (as it was demolished by changes in commerce) - much like the building in which it used to happen.


:: image via Design Observer

The same fates, to a differing degree, befell many sites, like Hudsons, but the overlay of the old (ruin) and the new become something similar to Rome - a cafe right outside the Pantheon, or a gelato stand at the Colosseum... In Detroit, the Michigan Theater, for instance, was an architectural gem from the 1920s, which in the words of Herron was somewhat rudely transformed into a parking garage... "The old Michigan Theater is one of the most suggestive sights in the whole city of Detroit: neither an abandoned ruin nor a precious, restored fetish, but a working statement about making do with the past. The tenants of the offices adjacent to the theater threatened to move out unless they were provided with secure parking, so that’s what the landlord improvised out of the otherwise useless auditorium. And that is the genius of the place."



:: image via Design Observer

 As mentioned, the mechanism is based on the 'mystification', but is really what Herron calls 'site-specific forgetting' in which those people who occupy the city are intertwined within the processes of destruction - and it is not a binary question of one or the other side of a coin. 

"The ruin of urban space becomes a participatory drama: memory versus forgetting, the city dead or the city alive. The trick is seeing both at once, and comprehending them as equally true and mutually implicated."

Shrinking Cities - Readings

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.

Other books include Mapping Decline: St. Louis and the Fate of the American City by Colin Gordon, Camden After the Fall: Decline and Renewal in a Post-Industrial City by Howard Gillette, Jr. and Small, Gritty and Green: The Promise of America's Smaller Industrial Cities in a Low-Carbon World by Catherine Tumber.

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.

Science of Pedestrian Movements

 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. 

:: image via The Economist

 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.

Anne Whiston Spirn Lecture in Portland

An upcoming lecture by Anne Whiston Spirn entitled Restoring an Urban Watershed: Ecology, Equity, and Design will be happening on Monday, January 23rd, from Noon to 1pm at the Portland Building, 1120 SW Fifth Avenue - Second Floor, Room C.  The brownbag is free and open to all.  Here's a synopsis.

The West Philadelphia Landscape Project is a landmark of urban design, watershed management, environmental and design education, and community engagement. Anne Whiston Spirn, who has directed the project for 25 years, will describe the story of the restoration of the Mill Creek watershed as a model for how to unite ecology, design, and community engagement to address social and environmental problems in low-income communities. Anne will also discuss her book, Daring to Look: Dorothea Lange's Photographs and Reports from the Field.
 
Anne Whiston Spirn is an award-winning author and distinguished landscape architect, photographer, teacher, and scholar whose work is devoted to promoting life-sustaining communities.  

Sponsored by:  
Urban Greenspaces Institute
Audubon Society of Portland
Portland Bureau of Environmental Services
Portland Office of Healthy Working Rivers.

What is the Nature of Your City?

Across the world, cities are bringing back nature to help address urban challenges.  We are healthier when we are closer to nature.  We have a greater respect for the environment that sustains us.  We are more adaptable to change when we let nature do its work.   

Join us for a free presentation by Dr. Timothy Beatley, renowned expert in sustainable city planning and author of the book BiophilicCities. Dr. Beatley is the Teresa Heinz Professor of Sustainable Communities, in the Department of Urban and Environmental Planning, School of Architecture at the University of Virginia, where he has taught for the last twenty-five years.  He will share his experience and knowledge of cities across the world that have made strides to integrate nature into our neighborhoods and communities. 

A Presentation on Biophilic Cities with

Dr. Timothy Beatley

January 18th, 2012

6:00-8:00 PM

Portland Northwest College of Art - Swigert Commons

1241 NW Johnson

Portland, OR 97209

This event is free and open to the public.

Sponsored by:

City of Portland's Environmental Services and

Office of Healthy Working Rivers,

Illahee,

The Intertwine Alliance, and

The Urban Greenspaces Institute

THINK.urban: Introducing Megapolitanism

A recent article from John King at the San Francisco Chronicle mentioned the concept of using the Megalopolitan scale for planning purposes. The article references the new book by Arthur C. Nelson and Robert E. Lang entitled 'Megapolitan America: A New Vision for Understanding America's Metropolitan Geography' (APA, 2011).

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.

[Originally Posted:  12/02/11 from THINK.urban - by Jason King]

Data Appeal - Making Map-Landscapes

A follow-up on new mapping tools from the author of 'The Exposed City: Mapping the Urban Invisibles' (read a review of this great book here).  Nadia Amoroso alerted me to a new endeavor called Data Appeal, which provides tools for visualization of data through mapping in order to engage people in new ways.

London - Economic activity w/ Green Space

 Ms. Amoroso sent me some information to give a snapshot of this new tool, which she describes as:  "...a new way of geo-data visualization. This web-based  application takes geo-referenced data files and generates beautifully  designed 3D and animated maps. The application is ideal for anyone  interested in transforming their data into powerful, communicative, and  visually appealing messages."

 

Toronto - Green Space in Neighborhoods

As you can see, the aesthetic variations allow users to choose from many options of shapes and graphic tweaks such as color and transparency to fine-tune the end result.  This flexibility gives option for a number of different iterations to provide more lively 'datascapes' which will hopefully engage users in new ways.  A variation includes colors and different symbology, as seen below:

Ranking of Los Angeles Restaurants

 More from the site: "This  application merges analytics, modeling and art into a new data  visualization tool. In essence, it is a simplified GIS, and visual  geo-analytics tool. The team at DataAppeal wanted to create an  application in which individuals can analyze their data visually and at  the same time have fun with their information, by designing it in a way  that expresses the subject, and by transforming numbers in an artful  way."

Chicago Green Space - alternative view angle

The exciting aspect of the service currently is that it is available free, at least for now.  In the future, a premium version with advanced features, analytic options and more data-design options will be available.   As Amoroso mentions, there has been lots of interest in the site from government  agencies, municipalities, environmental agencies, universities,  research groups, geography associations, market analysis research  companies, news agencies, media groups, national defence agencies,  healthcare institutions, social enterprise, telecommunication companies,  cultural institutes, real estate agencies are typical users groups.

This tool has been created through a collaboration of GIS specialists  and artists to ensure that data is displayed in a more visually  appealing manner to create a stronger response to information.  The tool   builds on the dialogue from Amoroso and collaborators in her book, while providing a shared platform, easy data interface, and access to robust tools for customization and creation of maps for many uses.

Map with dashboard for customization

Stay tuned, as I plan to interview Nadia to get some additional information on the development and future plans for Data Appeal and how it can continue to expand our ability to generate innovative map-landscapes.  For now, check out the site, and peruse some of the features and demos to more - particularly some interactive sites related to New York City Population and Toronto Bars and Restaurant Ratings - where you can visit the map, data, and other pieces that go into the map creation and visualization. 

Source: Terrain Vague - de Sola Morales

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?

Originally published in 'Anyplace' - edited by Cynthia C. Davidson (1995) - citations here are from 'Center 14: On Landscape Urbanism' (Almy, ed. 2007)

Source: Whatever Happened to Urbanism? - Koolhaas

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)

Originally published in 'S,M,L,XL' (OMA/Koolhass/Mau - 1995) - citations taken from Center 14: On Landscape Urbanism (edited by Almy - 2007).

Reading the Landscape: The Emergence of Landscape Urbanism

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.

:: Louisville Waterfront Park - image via LouisvilleKY.gov

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)

:: City as an Egg - image via Archiable

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)

:: Yokahama Terminal - FOA - image via Matt Kingstreet

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)

:: Shrinking Detroit - image via VIA Architecture

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)

 :: Decamping Detroit (Waldheim) - image via detroit disurbanism project

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.

Reading the Landscape: Landscape as Urbanism

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)

:: Lower Dons -  River + City + Life by Stoss LU

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.

:: Downsview proposal by Corner/Allen - image via ecosistema urbano

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) 

:: Eastern Scheldt Storm Surge Barrier - West 8

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)

:: 2008 Aerial View of Atlanta - image via Ace Aerial Photography

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)