INTRODUCTION

Landscape Urbanism is an assumption of urban development arguing that the right

way to arrange cities is through the plan of the country’s landscape, rather than
the plan of its buildings.

The phrase ‘Landscape Urbanism’ first appeared in the middle 1990s. Present time,
the phrase ‘Landscape Urbanism’ has taken on many dissimilar uses, but is most
often cited as a Postmodernist response to the “failings” of New Urbanism and the
shift away from the inclusive visions, and demands, for fresh architecture and
Urban planning.
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 toconstruct and retrieve innumerable plans, images and other
records. Christopher Alexander was right:’A CITY IS NOT A TREE ,IT IS A LANDSCAPE’
In pairing landscape with urbanism, landscape urbanism seeks to reintroduce
critical connections with natural and hidden systems and proposes the use of such
systems as a flexible approach to the current concerns and problems of the urban
condition.
 HISTORY
The formative period of Landscape Urbanism can be traced back to RMIT University
and University of Pennsylvania in the late1980s, at a time when Peter Connolly,
Richard Weller, 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
The combination of a relatively long history in sustainability and green
infrastructures, and theability and skill to read the environment to create new
combinations and patterns in built form poised landscape architectures to develop
a landscape-urbanism perspective. There was only one thing missing: the experience
and ability to plan extensive urban environments.
Landscape architects worked with large landscapes, such as national parks and
forests, but not necessarily the complete urban environment to form a city. Instead
they would work on the design of pieces (sites) or parts of networks. Warren
Manning, a landscape architect, worked on a national plan for the nation, but such
work was the exception. After World War II, the profession of urban planning
drifted towards social and economic planning . Many urban planners could not
draw, or design like landscape architects could.

The landscape architects filled the void that was left by American urban planners.
Instead of just being a primarily design profession, landscape architecture became
a planning and design profession. It was a natural fit but unforeseen 40 years
earlier. This was the final skill and ability necessary that led to the rise of
landscape urbanism by primarily the landscape architectural community.

IDEAS
James Corner is the author of an essay entitled "Terra Fluxus." He has
identifiedfour general ideas that are important for use in Landscape Urbanism.
They are as follows:
1 Process over time - Understanding the fluid or changing nature of any
environment and the processes that effect change over time. A respect for natural
processes (Ecology) - the idea that our lives intertwine with the environment
around us, and we should therefore respect this when creating an urban
environment. Landscape Urbanism is concerned with a working surface over time –
a type of urbanism that anticipates change, open endedness and negotiation.

2 Horizontality - The use of horizontal alignment in landscaping, rather than

relying on vertical structuring.

3 Working Methods /Techniques - Those who practice the idea of landscape

urbanism should be able to adapt their techniques to the environment that they are
in.

4 The imaginary - That in many ways the failing of twentieth century planning can be
attributed to the absolute impoverishment of the imagination to extend new
relationships and sets of possibilities

CRITICISM
Landscape urbanism has been criticized as an idea that is only loosely defined from
a set of flashy projects.
These are expensive schemes with a commercial and esthetic purpose that satisfy a
local or regional ambition to invest in ecology or sustainability without posing a
more globally applicable approach.

A truemmerger of landscape architecture with the field of Urban Ecology lacks.

From this criticism Frederick Steiner introduced landscape ecological urbanism as
an approach that can include the field of urban ecology and Wybe Kuitert has
shown how such integrative planning and management of the city should rely on
analysis.

Discerning the potential quality of wild nature in the city is a first step to see how
new urban ecology might be developed. Potential vegetation maps for a city are the
tool to this end.

One opponent to Landscape Urbanism is New Urbanism, which promotes walkable

communities and smart growth with itsTransit Oriented Development (TOD) and
Traditional Neighborhood Design(TND).

In response to landscape urbanism’s focus on expansive green space in urban

development, Duany stated that “density and urbanism are not the same.”Further,
“unless there is tremendous density, human beings will not walk.” The result is
patches of green sprawl that lose connectivity to the greater network.

Landscape urbanism is still in its formative stages. It takes time to build cities that
are expressive of landscape-urbanism ideals. It took time to build cities that have
city-beautiful components, and these cities are still under development (such as
Chicago and Washington, DC), adding features and civil structures. Finally, there
is no guarantee that this movement, emerging primarily from the landscape
architectural community, will make any significant contributions to truly improve
the broad urban setting beyond a few interesting projects.

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