ABSTRACT
Over the past decade, Landscape Urbanism has emerged as a robust alternative to the failures of modernist urban planning. Its followers, a collective of landscape architects, architects, urban designers and others, believe that the medium of landscape, because it necessarily privileges ecology over form, is the most able organizer of a healthy, post-industrial urbanity. Additionally, they hold that the city, the region, indeed the entire world should be understood as a kind of a landscape, not in the nineteenth-century understanding of landscape, i.e. pastoral, picturesque “nature,” but as an organization of complex, discreet, scalable systems that combine to make one unique environment. Furthermore, Landscape Urbanism employs the term “landscape” in several ways: as metaphor; the city is like a landscape: as model; the city will function like a landscape: and as a literal organizer; the design of the city will be driven by landscape as opposed to architecture. The result is a landscape-based urbanism that seeks to radically realign traditional disciplinary boundaries in the design professions while it breaks down the established dualisms between the synthetic and the natural, the urban and the wild. This is different from the ancient concept of rus in urbe, transferring the ‘countryside into the city,’ in that it is not simply erasing the city in favor of the country. This chapter introduces the reader to Landscape Urbanism by describing its emergence,
conceptual framework, how research is carried out, major works, recent developments, and also briefly touches on its critics. In design disciplines such as architecture or landscape architecture, innovatory practice is often considered as a form of research, to be evaluated through critical review, an equivalence that has been recognized, for example, through the creation of design-based PhD programs in the UK and the US. Through a review of seminal thinking by its leading theorists, the chapter will trace the development of Landscape Urbanism’s overarching theories and its major themes as they relate to the innovatory practices that characterize the professional landscape urbanist. A review of some influential Landscape Urbanism projects – both built and un-built – is used to the help describe the practical expression of the sometimes dense theoretical framing that characterize Landscape Urbanism. Furthermore, examination of the speculative urbanism of emergent studios will help articulate Landscape Urbanism’s unique approach to urbanity and its primary method of research, i.e. innovatory practice.
