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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.

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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

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

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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.

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


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. 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

why landscape urbanism?


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. 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. 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.

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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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

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. 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

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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