Landscape urbanism is a theory of urban design arguing that the city is constructed of interconnected and ecologically rich horizontal field conditions, rather than the arrangement of objects and buildings. Landscape Urbanism, like Infrastructural Urbanism and Ecological Urbanism, emphasizes performance over pure aesthetics and utilizes systems-based thinking and design strategies. The phrase 'landscape urbanism' first appeared in the mid 1990s. Since this time, the phrase 'landscape urbanism' has taken on many different uses, but is most often cited as a postmodernist or post-postmodernist response to the "failings" of New Urbanism and the shift away from the comprehensive visions, and demands, for modern architecture and urban planning.
The phrase 'landscape urbanism' first appeared in the work of Peter Connolly, a student from the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT University) in the title of his 1994 Masters of Urban Design proposal. Here, he suggested that 'a language of "landscape urbanism" barely exists and needs articulating', and that 'existing urbanisms ... are limited in the exploration of the landscape'. He also used the term 'landscape as urbanism' in his 1994 essay, '101 Ideas About Big Parks'. In 1996 Tom Turner wrote that The city of the future will be an infinite series of landscapes: psychological and physical, urban and rural, flowing apart and together. They will be mapped and planned for special purposes, with the results recorded in geographical information systems (GIS), which have the power to construct and retrieve innumerable plans, images and other records. Christopher Alexander was right: a city is not a tree. It is a landscape.In the late 1990s, concepts of 'landscape urbanism' were often used by landscape architects in the United States in the reorganization of declining post-industrial cities, such as Detroit. From the 2000s, it was used in Europe by architects to mean a highly flexible way of integrating large-scale infrastructure, housing and open space. By the late 2000s, the phrase became associated with highly commercialized, multi-phase urban parks, such as Olympic park design. Landscape urbanism strategies in the U.S. are now widely used in waterfront redevelopment, recapturing urban vacancy, urban agriculture, and green infrastructure. LU, EU, and IU strategies are rising in importance with growing concerns over climate change.
History The first major event to do with 'landscape urbanism' was the Landscape Urbanism conference sponsored by the Graham Foundation in Chicago in April 1997. Speakers included Charles Waldheim, Mohsen Mostafavi, James Corner of James Corner/Field Operations, Alex Wall, and Adriaan Geuze of the firm West 8, among others. The formative period of Landscape Urbanism can be traced back to RMIT University and University of Pennsylvania in the late 1980s, at a time when Peter Connolly, Richard Weller, Ann Spirn, James Corner, Mohsen Mostafavi, and others were exploring the artificial boundaries of landscape architecture, urban design, and architecture, searching for better ways to deal with complex urban projects. Their texts cite and synthesize the ideas of influential modernist methods, programs and manifestoes that appeared in the early twentieth century, rediscover the methodologies of seminal landscape architects and planners Frederick L. Olmsted and Ian McHarg, ad build on the work of contemporary architects of the time such as OMA-Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi. The Charles Waldheim, Anu Mathur, Alan Berger, Chris Reed, among others, were students at the University of Pennsylvania during this formative period for Landscape Urbanism. After the Chicago conference, European design schools and North American design institutions formed academic programs and began to formalize a field of Landscape Urbanism studies, including the University of Toronto, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Oslo School of Architecture Urbanism and landscape, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Landscape+Urbanism at MIT, Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium Landscape Urbanism – KU Leuven, the University of Illinois at Chicago and London's Architectural Association.The development of an operative response to the broad and often vague concepts surrounding landscape urbanism was largely developed at the Architectural Association in London. Prior to this period of design exploration, landscape urbanism had never been clearly developed as an actual design practice. Today, much of the design culture that has come to be associated with landscape urbanism was initiated and developed in the AA Landscape Urbanism program during its early formative period and its influence persists in many educational institutions. A number of practices that have chosen to adopt the design and conceptual approach towards urbanism have also adopted many of these design strategies.
Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism Both the theories of Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism emerged as responses to modernist architecture and planning practices. Both intended to address the rigidity of the existing urban form as well as the lack of environmental consciousness informing urban design. New Urbanists prioritize interconnectedness of the neighborhood through well-defined streets that generate walkability. Landscape Urbanists place the importance of urban order on a “thin horizontal vegetal plane”, using the concept of green-space as the base for urban planning as opposed to the streetscape. In this way, Landscape Urbanists wish to circumvent the inflexibility and “uninspired failings” of postmodern urban planning practices. At its core, the theory of Landscape Urbanism addresses problems of urban sprawl, de-densification, and environmental change in what is referred to as “a disciplinary realignment… in which landscape is usurping architecture’s historical role as the basic building block of city making”. It is primarily this principle that is debated between New Urbanists and Landscape Urbanists.
Themes James Corner is the author of an essay entitled "Terra Fluxus." He has identified four general ideas that are important for use in Landscape Urbanism. They are as follows:
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