Landscape urbanism

large-scale architecture, ecological urban

planning or a designerly research policy
GUNILLA LINDHOLM
Senior lecturer, landscape architect
Department of Landscape Architecture, SLU
Alnarp, Sweden
TEL: +46 (0)40 415429
gunilla.lindholm@ltj.slu.se

Abstract
Landscape urbanism has been something in between of an ideological urbanistic movement
and a buzzword for landscape architects, for about a decade. This concept has an eager and
inspiring voice, promising new winds in an urban design and planning caught up with either
of a prolonged modernism or the so called new urbanism, i. E. remnants of old forms of
urbanism. However, those who are looking for a clear, unambiguous platform, a guideline
for urban planning and design, seek in vain. The concept of Landscape urbanism is more
than anything else a collection of projects and a card file of ideas.
The library of Landscape urbanism is systematized out from a rhizomic thinking. From any
point in this library, you can choose any line of flight, up in the free air and down again on
any other spot in this fantastic library, and make some connection. This is the beginning of a
new urban design, the design of in what way the urban landscape changes, due to this new
connection made. This Deleuzian way of starting occasionally, anywhere, in the middle of
something, is compared to anything designed according to the modernist well-structured
habits, messy and hard to grasp. Just as the everyday society, one is tempted to proceed.
The paper will study Landscape urbanism as an urban research project and as an urban
design project. Focus will be on how to understand this concept out from ordinary research
and design vocabularies; is there a theoretical framework or a methodology?; are there
recognizable patterns or forms? The aim is to gain a few steps towards understanding the
codes and the clues, to see what is behind or maybe within the tempting headline.

Landscape Urbanism

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intro what this is about

Landscape urbanism is a movement within
architecture in a broad sense; an emerging new
paradigm, bringing together professional fields
like architecture, landscape architecture, urban
design, urban planning and landscape planning. It
could well be that this bringing together turns out
to be both the most important contribution and the
most general description of landscape urbanism
The concept is actually about bringing together, in
many senses; the urban and the rural, the natural
and the cultural, small scale with large scale,
public issues with private issues etc. We will
return to this later on.
The name was coined by architect Charles
Waldheim and the paradigm has been manifested
a few times; the first one was an exhibition and a
conference in Chicago 1997 and the latest one the
anthology The Landscape Urbanism Reader,
from 2006. Charles Waldheim coined the word
and catched the historical threads from the
competition on Park de la Vilette, in Paris 1980.
This competition could be seen as the first postmodern expression in landscape architecture,
though for some interpreters it is most of all
modern, speaking of modern as urban and
artificial, which many of the entries actually were
suggesting. Outside the U.S., courses in landscape
urbanism have been given in e. g. TU Wienna and
in Versailles/Paris. A.A. in London has launched a
master program in Landscape urbanism.
When I have asked professionals and academics:
What do you think of landscape urbanism? I have
never got a very clear answer in stead the
answers vary between enthusiasm and scepticism.
Also the associations divert, from those who
worry about rather industrial, engineery projects
without articulation, to those who welcome an
ecological method, with links to Ian McHargs
Design with nature, but without its
predictability and within a more urban context.
Digitalization as well as other ways of concluding
facts, with diagrams and other graphics for

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visualizing and communicating a situation from

different perspectives, interests and values, are
also methods that have been connected to
landscape urbanism.
Unlike usual academic schemes and subjects,
landscape urbanism seems to be widening rather
than narrowing. For those of us celebrating
holistic ways of understanding rather than precise
ways of proving, this may be a promising concept.
But the problem is: we still do not want a concept
grasping everything to understand is always to
discern and it is sometimes hard to see what
landscape urbanism is not!

characteristics
After having studied quite a lot of the texts
concerning landscape urbanism and also some of
the quite different projects referred to under the
flag of landscape urbanism; one of my
conclusions is that a signifier of landscape
urbanism is contextualization. I find this concept
useful for understanding both the intentions within
landscape urbanism and, maybe as important,
what distinguish the paradigm of landscape
urbanism from other paradigms of architecture,
landscape architecture, urban design, urban
planning and landscape planning. The level of
contextualization has differed through history, but
for the last decades of the last century, it is
significant for all of these professional directions
that they have focussed on objects, with specified
delimitations. From such a standpoint you could
say that every step toward widening the questions,
see dynamics, elaborate relationships between
different scales, is a contextualization. One
characteristic of landscape urbanism is to work
with contextualization a concept which could be
more or less determining, more or less including,
but it always means an ambition to work with the
whole scheme of scales, dynamics and
perspectives involved, spatiality in different
relevant scales (which is nearly always one larger
and one smaller level than you thought of from the
beginning) and temporality in natural and cultural

Landscape Urbanism

Contingency is a characteristic which takes in

account not only the complexity within certain
perceivable systems, material or social, natural or
cultural, but also the arbitrariness in what systems
and phenomenon are actual within a certain time
or space.

way that intellectually was challenging and

innovative, but judged from its resulting design
maybe was not as high quality as some of the
single design-and-planning-projects being the
paragons for the Vilette-designers. Admired as a
forerunner, La Vilette as a project and resulting
public environment, has also been criticized and it
could well be that the most important and lasting
result was not the actual park project but the
introduction of an interdisciplinary mode of
thinking landscape architecture (which
contingency may have established some
awareness of different kinds).

history and driving forces

why landscape urbanism?

The ongoing perceived establishment of the

rhetoric of Landscape urbanism has meant, not
only a possible new direction for urban planning
(including new instrumentalities as well as new
power relations among actors or actants,
referring to Bruno Latour), but also a new context
for and a renewal of several ideas among those
used by landscape architects since around 1980.
This may have a year without spectacular global
events, but for the total of European Landscape
Architecture activities ever since, the competition
of Park de la Vilette in Paris put lasting traces. It
is however not easy to state if the admiration of
the entries (especially the second by Koolhaas and
OMA) and the significance these have had for the
outcome of hundreds of projects around the world,
should be associated mostly to the graphically
interesting surface, the representations of the
projects (with links to graphic typologies and
minimalism, as well as cartoons and emerging
computer games) or to the kind of processual
thinking deriving from McHargs Design with
Nature. It is probably relevant to assume both
associations and development directions as valid
in the wake of La Vilette competition.

With my background in landscape architecture, I

have seen a rift between the design orientation and
the planning orientation, which I perceive as an
obstacle for the professional development.
Landscape architecture has a unique combination
of nature and social science, art and the
humanities. This unique combination, that builds a
competence to perceive and understand
connections and relations, not least between
different scale levels, is developed during the time
in the academy and needs to develop even more in
practice, does not always get this development and
fulfilment in practice not always due to
professional routines and tradition, but even more
due to a public sector, built in a dualistic way,
where comprehensive planning and environmental
protection have a close relationship on the one
hand, and where urban design and public art have
a close relationship on the other hand, neither with
much contact with house building and town
planning architecture. During the industrial
period, up until 1980, this sorting of activities was
not questioned, but the vast left over industrial
landscapes initiated a new thinking and acting.
The re-shaping of brown fields actually started up
a golden era for architecture, an architecture
including landscape and affected of landscape
perspectives.

processes.
To grasp the complexity in a situation is another
characteristic of landscape urbanism, to realize the
manifoldness and to find out ways to keep the
complexity throughout a project or a process.

It is also possible, however, to look behind the

competition entries and try to understand the
parallel development directions within landscape
architecture at the time, and how they merged in a

Landscape Urbanism

The rift between designers and planners among

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landscape architects is still there though and at the

academy we have not really understood the
disadvantages with to keep the status quo. A
reason for this could well be an adaptation to
society and municipal organisation, and an
inability to see the changes in society.
This was a very long introduction to how to
answer the question: Why landscape urbanism? I
believe that landscape urbanism is a rhetoric way
of introducing the abilities and competence of
landscape architecture, in a wider forum, a way to
unify scientific and artistic activities and
ambitions, in the trials to create possible solutions
for the sustainable human society. It is an ecologic
way of understanding the city and its components.
Landscape urbanism brings together knowledge
from architecture, landscape architecture, urban
design, urban planning and landscape planning. Of
all these specialities within architecture, I believe
landscape architecture gets the most benefits out
of accepting the concept of landscape urbanism.
Such a step will not change landscape architecture
as such, but it will create a bridge of
communicating and influencing into the fields of
planning, architecture and urban design and
thereby provide a uniting landscape for those
disciplines.

sub-urban form. Scepticism against landscape

urbanism from this point of view, could also well
be a consequence of the professional power
relations of urban planning and design as activities
within a public sector, the usual hierarchy being
town planning architects together with traffic
engineers at the top, side-stepping landscape
architecture to a craft of suggesting design
solutions and plant schemes for landscapes in
already located sites (NB there is nothing wrong
with designing solutions and plant schemes for
already located sites, but this craft, which counts
many talented executors, does not form the
delimitations for landscape architecture.) So,
from this power-perspective, those sceptical to
landscape urbanism might have mis-understood
the concept as landscape architecture in
disguise. Nothing could be more wrong,
acknowledging landscape architects being the
fewest among the founders of the manifesting
texts and projects connected to landscape
urbanism. Rather, this concept is formulated in a
co-operative mode, among architects, urban
designers, planners and landscape architects, for
mainly two reasons; 1) the perceived lack of
understanding of the processes changing urban
fabric over time and 2) the perceived unability to
creatively use ecological knowledge and thinking
in urban design and planning projects.

what IS landscape urbanism?

Landscape urbanism is a provocation for any
thinking mode distinctly separating the urban and
the rural (territories as well as characteristics),
thus associating landscape with the rural,
something existing outside the urban realm or
landscape features allowed for certain purposes
within the urban field, as the other, to
distinguish the acknowledged urban qualities by
contrasting (being a background to the hard and
erected) or softening (making the artificial urban
fabric endurable and liveable). Landscape
urbanism sounds (to this kind of thinkers) like to
change the urban areas into something more
rural, e. g. a less compact city form, more loose
and sparsely connected, you may even call it a

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This could hypothetically have been relevant, in

the sense that landscape urbanism maybe in
opposition to other urbanistic concepts takes
into account also suburban and even peri-urban
areas, was it not for the basic notion missing; there
is no longer such thing as a distinct border
between urban and rural territories; and was it not
for the other basic notion missing; the concept of
landscape urbanism is an abstraction, a meta-level,
making it possible to operate socio-material facts,
objects and spatial relations, together with infrastructures, different scales, multiple interests,
movements, visions and imaginations, at the same
time.

Landscape Urbanism

The concept of landscape urbanism provides the

visionary framework for an interdisciplinary
urban discourse, counteracting several disciplinary
and professional discourses that have until this
very moment governed not the actual urban
development, but the historical as well as the
prospective understanding of the urban
development.
The critiques of modernism are manifold and
diversified. Landscape urbanism understood as an
architectural practice, the relation to other postmodernist architectural practices is necessary to
comment. Aware of that this subject is more
thoroughly elaborated elsewhere, I want to retake
the two main lines of development obvious after
1980 (when global economy and the end of the
socialist societies made it quite clear that
modernism in the way it was tied to social
engineering and utopia did not have any future). If
one line was the formal reaction to functionalism
and pureness (exaggerated with the using of
fragment from earlier style periods), the other one
was the inspiration from ecology and recycling of
resources. Listening to the early criticism of them
both, the post-modern formalism was seen to be
superficial, aesthetically revolutionary but
politically unconscious. The ecological nonformalism was seen to be unattractive, politically
revolutionary but aesthetically unconscious.
Believing the advocates for landscape urbanism,
this movement is both politically and aesthetically
conscious. It is quite easy to come to the
conclusion that the standpoint of landscape
urbanism is not fixed, it is moving with the
context and the circumstances. On its way, it
sucks up relevant knowledge, from whatever
discipline, to solve its tasks and to develop a
dynamic professional competence.
It has been claimed for decades, from the
international organisations for environmental
protection, that interdisciplinarity is a necessary
condition to find sustainable solutions, within

Landscape Urbanism

different operative fields in society, not least that

of urban planning. From a situation with long
traditions of specialization it is not an easy task to
work and think in an interdisciplinary way. Even
if both architects and landscape architects,
designers and planners, are well aware of the
interdisciplinary character of their occupations,
this means scarcely anything else than that each
profession have constructed its own separatist way
of handling manifoldness of information. This
means that there is a competition between
professions instead of competences going on, and
that a more economic way of acting would be to
bridge these specializations and require (and
provide) teams with the necessary combined
competence for the issue. This seems simple and
commonplace, but thinking of that generalisation
and separation in society has been going on for
some hundred years, we have to accept that cooperation and contextualisation will have some
time to grow too.

landscape urbanism from a

theoretical point of view
In my two last research projects I have studied 1)
concepts of green structure in different contexts
and in different scales, and 2) planning activities
in relation to development and significance of
public space. In both of these projects I have tried,
which is not an easy task to use interdisciplinary
models of understanding, since my point of
departure is the notion of interconnections,
relations and mutual influences being more
relevant for landscape planning research, than
facts locked up in time and space. This may even
be the single most important difference between
planning theory and planning practice, the latter
being about methods for handling uncertainties in
more or less specified space and time, and the
former on the contrary methods for handling
uncertainties in a general sense, taking into
account a variation of situations, i. e. elaborating
the abstract level of planning.
The first question to handle as a planning theorist

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is the intentional one why, for what purpose, to

work with planning theory? Literature on planning
theory is basically about planning practice, trying
to describe the conditions of and for this activity
or trying to outline the specifics and the
consequences of particular kinds of planning
practice. It is mostly descriptive, and the analysis
connected to history, if general and related to
national economy and political science, or causal
if connected to specific planning intentions, such
as legislations and guidelines to achieve specific
goals. These goals typically follow societal
tendencies, planning goals being mostly social
from the 1930ies (from when it is adequate to talk
about planning in other terms than pure urban
design), but from the 1970ies and onwards being
dominated by environmental goals.

philosophy. Even on the theoretical level,

landscape urbanism is a bringing-together
movement. Where earlier theorists most often
have hade quite a long distance to practice, and
vice versa, landscape urbanist theoreticians and
practitioners have not. As well as all texts in the
Reader are written by practitioners. In this way,
we could also see a knowledge building that is not
separated between practical activities and
theoretical activities. Maybe a landscape
urbanistic designerly research.

Design theory has been dominated by poststructural thinking for decades, while planning
theory until recently seem to more hesitating.
Physical planning as an activity led by authorities
has not been open to ideas that criticize the
fundaments of the power relations. However, with
the shrinking municipal bodies and more projects
and processes bought from consultants, on the one
hand, and further more the increasing acceptance
of communicative planning as a rule, it seems
quite impossible to stick with old habits and
routines. Actual tendencies and increased codependence between local, regional and larger
scales, make new thinking modes necessary and
what is needed is theoretical models that are able
to deal not only with material and social factors in
planning, but also cultural and economical not
only with the actual and tangible but also the
virtual and ephemeral not only work that is
sectorial, sorted and expert-led, but also the
interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary ways of
understanding and expressing the environment.
It is quite obvious, that a merging between design
and planning in practice, needs a parallel merging
in theory and this is actually going on, both design
and planning theorists founding in post-structural

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Landscape Urbanism