Aerial view of the London Olympic Parklands. Image from London 2012.
Landscape urbanism emerges
Perhaps the time has come to state, definitively, that landscape urbanism has in fact emerged. Described for so long as an “emerging” practice, landscape urbanism—with all of its ambiguity and complexity—represents a significant twenty-first century design and planning ethos. Several prominent universities promote and support its principles, design firms include it in their firm names, and the term has even begun to enter national media and press, (note 1) in fields outside its usual currency.
While its landscape urbanism’s raised profile is undeniable, an actual definition or common methodology remains elusive. Even describing landscape urbanism as a practice is at times regarded as a stretch, while it is commonly characterized as an approach, study, or way of thinking about the contemporary city. (note 2) Furthermore, built examples of landscape urbanism are still rare, if only because projects set to test its principles are still under construction.
Yet the predominant use of landscape as a restructuring process, in parallel with infrastructure and ecology, is evident in a slew of prestigious recent works, from the heavily remediated site of the London 2012 Olympics (note 3) with its sensitivity to existing watercourses, to Brooklyn Bridge Park’s careful accommodation of storm events and tidal flows in an urban space. (note 4) While the attention given to landscape urbanism may be a response to a confluence of factors—an uncertain or stagnant economy, a pressing need to re-evaluate our environmental policies and aging infrastructure, and a growing interest in the visibility of ecological processes and design—it suggests that we are beginning to tolerate and even embrace the ideas of uncertainty, process, and design complexity in already intractable and attenuated urban settings.
Definitions
Landscape urbanism appears to offer a way to consider the complex urban condition; one that is capable of tackling infrastructure, water management, biodiversity, and human activity; and one that asks and examines the implications of the city in the landscape and landscape in the city. (note 5) This framework and scholarship ranges from straightforward to abstract research, but generally stems from a sense that landscape can be used as a model and basis for urban initiatives, and a lens through which to examine our cities. (note 6) On that basis, more esoteric and theoretical theories hang—such as the concern for the field over the object and the move to consider the operative (i.e., the processes of nature and culture) over purely representational or static landscape. The changing relationship between the contemporary city and the territory within which it sits has shaped these perspectives: boundaries between city and country are dissolving, forming a homogeneous continuum that has inspired the recent influx of “insert-adjective-here urbanism,” with no one method yet prevailing.
These multiple perspectives and hybrid “-isms” have evolved from this shared critical context; some may be considered parallel practices to landscape urbanism, while some are quite different. Infrastructural urbanism (note 7), for instance, shares a concern for flexible ordering principles to accommodate yet unknown future activities, but promotes the creation of artificial ecologies rather than integrating existing environmental conditions. Mat urbanism (note 8 ) and Foreign Office Architect’s phylogenesis (note 9) suggest that underlying forces in the landscape can be abstracted and made manifest, to create “thick” surfaces and hybrid building forms that may be interpreted as both building and landscape. Ecological urbanism suggests that design is the key to balancing the conflicts between ecology (uninfluenced by humans) and the overt consumption of urbanism.
While these terms share a common background and theoretical foundation, they appear formulated to address very specific concerns rather than serve as an approach for multiple and diverse landscape issues which underpin the contemporary city. Landscape in these terms appears as a burden to be solved by mechanisms, rather than a complex and essential part of these dense areas we call cities, a fundamental which needs to be sifted and nurtured.
Retrieving special meaning
Part of the strength and depth of landscape urbanism comes from the use of two words that previously might be held in opposition, suggesting a hybrid discipline. As landscape urbanism is not a neologism or amalgam—such as landurbanism or urbanlandscapism—the compound term carries the respective complexities and critical baggage of each word. Powerful subtleties in interpretation of both words have been recovered over the past decade to strengthen and augment them; what distinguishes landscape urbanism from parallel practices is the nuanced meaning of the word landscape. Its rich etymology has been written about extensively the earliest Dutch usage to describe a picture representing scenery has evolved into a term in which human influence (even if it is simply the act of viewing) is key. Landscape literally describes the state of altered land, as distinct from virgin land before human influence: “all landscapes are constructed … they are phenomena of nature and products of culture.” (note 12) Landscape in this definition is very much about the representational, the pictorial and (at least historically) the painted.
“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.”
Cosgrove (note 13) and Corner, amongst others (note 14), have sought to reintroduce contemporary landscape associations: with scale beyond visual limits, with depth below the surface and with processes across the field. Recovering meanings from the German landschaft (note 15) and territory (note 16) acknowledges human impacts on land, a crucial and contemporary move from object to active field and recognizes that “[landscape] is organized by a multiplicity of forces without obvious formal unity.” (note 17) This final distinction is critical: the importance of deep, even invisible, rules which govern the fields that they describe, defines more readily the potential of landscape urbanism practice. It is the creative and poetic opportunity of these hidden forces that Corner proposes as a unique theme of landscape urbanism practice: where “earlier urban design and regionally scaled enterprises [failed] was [in] the oversimplification, the reduction, of the phenomenal richness of physical life.” (note 18)
