lindholm landscape urbanism

8/3/2019 Lindholm Landscape Urbanism

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Landscape Urbanism 1(6)

Landscape urbanism

large-scale architecture, ecological urban

planning or a designerly research policy

GUNILLA LINDHOLMSenior lecturer, landscape architectDepartment of Landscape Architecture, SLUAlnarp, SwedenTEL: +46 (0)40 415429

[email protected]

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 researchand 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.


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2(6) Landscape Urbanism

intro what this is aboutLandscape 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 togetherturns 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 CharlesWaldheim 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 post-

modern expression in landscape architecture,

though for some interpreters it is most of allmodern, 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 theanswers 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

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!

characteristicsAfter 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


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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.

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.

history and driving forces

The ongoing perceived establishment of therhetoric 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 competitionof 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.

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

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).

why landscape urbanism?

With my background in landscape architecture, Ihave 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 inpractice, 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 industrialperiod, 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.

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 andthereby provide a uniting landscape for those

disciplines.

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 purposeswithin 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

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 andlandscape architects, for

mainly two reasons; 1) the perceived lack of

understanding of the processes changing urbanfabric over time and 2) the perceived unability to

creatively use ecological knowledge and thinking

in urban design and planning projects.

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 borderbetween 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 infra-

structures, different scales, multiple interests,

movements, visions and imaginations, at the same

time.


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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 post-

modernist 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 besuperficial, aesthetically revolutionary but

politically unconscious. The ecological non-

formalism 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 thecontext 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

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 co-

operation and contextualisation will have some

time to grow too.

landscape urbanism from a

theoretical point of viewIn my two last research projects I have studied 1)

concepts of green structure in different contextsand 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.

Design theory has been dominated by post-

structural 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 onehand, 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 co-

dependence 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 thevirtual 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

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.

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