The Landscape Urbanism Reader, Charles

Waldheim
Landscape Urbanism, in a globalized capitalist society, argues for an ecological
integration as a cultural and social relief to urban environments. Charles Waldheim
explains the emergence of landscape and the need for ecological integration within
the urban planning and urban landscape practices and the available methods to
reach ecological connections to the contemporary city. Within “The Landscape
Urbanism Reader”, the author aims to describe the ever changing American societal
context and the interest for an alternative approach to the current city environments.

 Since the 1970’s, the architectural profession has expressed itself with an emerging
aspiration for ecological integration to the urban life through numerous architectural
historians, critics, and architects alike critiquing modern architectural planning “for its
inability to produce a ‘meaningful’ or ‘livable’ public realm”, described by Kevin
Lynch, “and its failure to come to terms with the city as an historical construction of
‘collective consciousness’”, expressed by Aldo Rossi in The Architecture of The City.
(38)1 Both architects express a strong concern for the architectural practice and the
urban planning field with a weakness that derives from the industrialized economy of
the nation.  Less than a decade later, the 1982 Competition for Parc de la Villette
showcased prime examples of what landscape urbanism was to become. The 125-
acre site in Paris served as an urban transformation “in which landscape was itself,
conceived as a complex medium capable of articulating relations between urban
infrastructure, public events, and indeterminate urban futures for large post-
industrial sites.” (40)2 A wide range of architectural figures took part in the Paris
competition of which two winners laid out the strong potential of landscape
urbanism and the landscape practice. Bernard Tschumi, winner of the competition,
was able to reinterpret the social approach to landscape urbanism by addressing
though programmatic order that would be adaptable to societies needs over time.
Alongside Tschumi was Rem Koolhaas who strongly followed Louis Sullivans “Form
follows function” aspect of design through “function” that became increasingly
popular in the 20thcentury. The primal idea behind such approach to design was to
design for human activity which he applied in his entry for the Parc de la Villette
competition. The unbuilt project linked relationships between park programs that
would be adequately adaptable for future use. Both projects approached an urban
infrastructure design that aided for future social changes developing a sense of
timelessness to the layout of the projects that would adapt and thrive throughout
time. Rachel Carson, American author and biologist, describes the agricultural land as
soil that “exists in a state of constant change, taking part in cycles that have no
beginning and no end”.  (53)3 The adaptation of the landscape Urbanism practice
requires more than the awareness of change in society and needs to address the
change in soil life simultaneously. A dual task that is unique to a rare few professions
but contributes greatly to the reintroduction of neglected spaces.

 The ecological approach to many of the sites in todays developed landscape

urbanism practice includes the rehabilitation of abandoned and toxic environments
as a useful framework for landscape practice. Infrastructure can be described as a
backbone for landscape urbanism that is gradually making a greater presence in the
built environment. Contemporary landscape urbanism should “use infrastructural
systems and the public landscapes they engender as the very ordering mechanisms
of the urban field itself, shaping and shifting the organization of urban settlement
and its inevitably indeterminate economic, political, and social futures”. (39) 4 Victor
Gruen, Austrian born architect, stated that landscape, for him, is the “environment in
which nature is predominant”. (26)5 Practicing Urban landscaping is described as a
new found relationship that aims to integrate a broad range of professions
simultaneously such as civil engineering, real estate development, as well as other
design professions while addressing social factors simultaneously. Alan Berger’s
essay “Drosscape” proposes an analytical framework for de-industrialization
(industrial abandonment) similar to the architectural scene of adaptive reuse that
further explores the ecological capabilities of abandoned sites.