Beyond Urbanism (Listlab, 2014) traces the genealogy of the theories of landscape urbanism, within architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design. Landscape urbanism emerged in the late 1990s as a critique of urban design’s inability to deal with the expanded character of urbanization. Landscape has been intended as the medium through which to interpret the contemporary city and to develop a more ecologically informed urbanism. In the last fifteen years, several books, academic programs, and design projects have been developed under the landscape urbanism banner, contributing to blurring the boundaries between the spatial disciplines and multiplying and enhancing urban strategies. It is the project of a “school,” whose main advocates are recognizable and whose intellectual history can be traced. Beyond Urbanism reassembles this story, starting from the main figures who developed the discourse and exploring the main cultural and academic contexts in which the field of landscape urbanism has emerged and been defined: from its origins to its new recommitment as “ecological urbanism” at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A series of interviews with Mohsen Mostafavi, Charles Waldheim, James Corner, Stan Allen, Sanford Kwinter, Ciro Najle, Eva Castro, Alfredo Ramirez, Chris Reed, Pierre Bélanger, Alan Berger, Kelly Shannon, and Manuel Gausa, lets the protagonists speak of the discourse’s origins, of their main references and research projects. An atlas of recent projects looks at the emerging practices, which are forecasting innovative relationships between the urban and the environment, and beyond traditional urbanism.
From the book to now
Beyond Urbanism introduces an opportunity that landscape urbanism had opened up but not yet fully occupied: the relationship with planning. Traditional planning models of growth, peripheral expansion, and zoning have been deeply challenged by the contemporary urban condition. The control of urbanization is no longer—if it ever was—in the hands of architects and urban designers alone.
Yet the tools developed by landscape urbanism offer a way forward. Strategic interventions, multiple uses, landscape infrastructures, change over time, processual thinking, adaptive projects, and ecological performances can be tested not only in design projects but within urban plans themselves. This is particularly true when the most conventional dictates of growth and density become obsolete—as has been the case in Detroit, as is now the case in large parts of Europe, and as may be the case in Asia in the future.
Ecology, because of its scientific foundations and its qualitative outcomes, helps define and evaluate new parameters for urban transformation. It can act on the rules and regulations of planning, modifying their objectives in environmental and social terms, while also proposing new and more sustainable models of economic development. Shifting from traditional planning dictates of growth means shifting toward climate adaptation, toward the inclusion of all inhabitants, and toward landscapes that replace fixed land-use categories with dynamic, equitable, and resilient futures.
jeannette sordi 