SESSION 5: Recovering Landscapes

LOOKING BACK AT LANDSCAPE URBANISM: SPECULATIONS ON SITE
By: Julia Czerniak

PREMISE:
To think about landscape is to think about site – To think site is to think landscape.

The full potential of site in landscape is often overlooked. Its specified organisational systems, performative agendas, formal language, material palettes, signifying content - to generate landscape design work.

Reasons - equating sites with building lots, bound by legal demarcations ad property owenership, instead of large complex landscapes, relational network of artefacts, organisation and processes that operate at multiple spatial and temporal scales - neighbourhood, city, region of which the site is a part.

Potential - by drawing from an expanded field of information, impact can be on a larger area - eg. Cleaning storm water before it is released into a watershed - making ecological sense.

Landscape Urbanism – understood here as conceptualisation of and design and planning for urban landscapes that draws from an understanding of landscapes disciplinarity – history of ideas, functions – ecologies and economies, formal and spatial attributes – natural and cultural organisations, systems and formations, and processes – temporality which impact many scales of work. It also suggests a particular culture of and consciousness of the land that refrains from the superficial reference of sustainability, ecology, and the complex processes of our environments in favour of projects that actually engage them. There is a concern of not only how the landscape performs but also of how it appears.

Reference Projects:
1. OMA/ Bruce Mau – Tree City
2. Hargreaves & Assoc. – Guadelupe River Park, Byxbee Park
3. Peter Eisenman/ Laurie Olin – Rebstockpark Masterplan, Frankfurt

Urban Highways and the Reluctant Public Realm - Jacqueline Tatom

TATOM, Jacqueline, ‘Urban Highways and the Reluctant Public Realm’, in Charles Waldheim (ed.) The Landscape Urbanism Reader; New York: Princeton Architecture Press, 2006, pp. 179-195

The realization of limited-access divided highways in the second half of the twentieth century points to many of landscape urbanism’s ambitions, to consider environmental and infrastructural systems as primary ordering devices. Critics on the limited-access divided highways emphasized the urban malaise and impending ecological disaster. The design of urban highways today to provide efficient automobile circulation in cities might be considered an urbanistic opportunity rather than a planning liability. For this to happen, the design of highways needs to be theorized and situated historically within professional design practice.

A critical reconsideration of the Parisian boulevards, the Boston parkways, New York’s Henry Hudson Parkway, and the Barcelona Cinturón yields a set of possibilities for urban highway design and confirms the theoretical robustness of the topic. The following projects constitute, programmatically and morphologically, a complete urbanism that produces new landscapes that are a hybrid of natural and man-made systems.
1. The boulevards of Paris (19th century)
Baron Haussman was the first to formulate a metropolitan-scale response to the function of a main road and to recognize the opportunity it provided to “modernize” Paris. The boulevard system was the master element of an urban renovation that included the provision of water, sewers, parks, and housing, as well as cultural and administrative facilities. Haussman’s new interventions created new networks of boulevards, parks, place and monuments as if they were etched into the solid figure of the city. This is still the case today, as the different morphologies continue to support different uses and rituals. The programmatic breadth of this new urban form, in plan and section, supports the social breadth of experience.
2. Boston’s Emerald necklace
The Necklace’s configuration is determined by site conditions. The Fenway, the first of the “jewels” of the Necklace, was created to manage the tidal reflux of the Charles River into the Muddy River in Boston’s Back Bay. The topographical and hydrological reconfiguration of what had become a wasted swamp provided the opportunity to create parks and parkways that served circulation and recreational needs. In this way the system is both local and metropolitan in its impact.
3. New York’s Henry Hudson Parkway (1938)
Multiple agendas of the original Westchester parkways to upgrade transportation, to sanitize creeks and rivers, and to create parks and cultural and recreational amenities while improving residential development. The striking topography facilitated and inspired the rich association of parkways, railroads, recreation areas, cultural institutions, playgrounds, and residences within a section that reached from the bluff to the water’s edge.
4. Barcelona’s Cinturón (1990s)
This project had to improve the quality of life in one of Europe’s densest cities and it had to position the city as a European player with global economic reach. Besides the plan had to improve public and private transportation and it had to provide greatly needed public amenities. It is located opportunistically to take advantage of marginal sites that remained undeveloped. The central four-lane throughway is depressed, while access roads remain at the surface to distribute entering and exiting vehicles at speeds slow enough to constitute a viable street front for the residential and commercial buildings along its length. Leftover land was subdivided into parcels. In some locations the access road is cantilevered over the depressed section, further reducing the width and noise and facilitating ventilation. The interchanges accommodate programs such as intermodal stations, parking, parks, and recreational facilities.
Local circulation, public transportation, pedestrian strolling, and high-speed traffic are accommodated by the sectional integration of a classic boulevard, a raised promenade deck above parking, a depressed and partly decked throughway, and a waterfront esplanade.

The discussion above reveals that the mobilization of public and private resources, political will, bureaucratic structure, and professional vision for modernization, justified variably for “scientific” reasons of sanitation and efficient circulation, or for boosterism in the form of civic identity, can provide the opportunity for a new road morphologies in the historic city constitutes a complete urbanism that allows for the full expression of everyday urban life.
The section ensures that the pedestrian and the automobile driver receive equal consideration while maximizing the use of public resources. In addition, it re-establishes a morphological continuity of the urban fabric that rapidly overcomes the social and physical disruptions.
These exceptional realizations were all undertaken in dense, well-established historic cities. They nonetheless remain relevant for the far less dense or the new twentieth-century American cities.

SESSION 4: INFRASTRUCTURAL URBANISM_____STAN ALLAN

Stan Allen starts this text by giving three images spanning across the 20th century and explains how the shift from technologies of production to technologies of reproduction and display to mega infrastructure projects and how does the infrastructure incorporates in the discipline of architecture.
Image 1 – bow of and aircraft carrier, which stands for a moment in which technical and the aesthetic formed a unified whole, representing the instrumentality of advanced engineering design and organization of the forces of production.
Image 2 – the linear Andrea Doria(warship), recalling a iconic status of the liner in the theory of modern architecture depicting a modernist project in the postwar era.
Image 3 – B 24 bomber factory assembly line, showing the modernist dream of rational production under the pressures of wartime economy. This factory floor is the ideal space of early modernism, then the museum is the emblematic space of postmodernity.
These images mark a shift from models of formal organization and meaning that work with transparency and depth, to a condition of shallow surfaces, in which meaning resides in graphic information lying on the surface. More than the historical reference it is the presence of this semiotic structuralist model that identifies postmodernism in architecture. But once architecture’s signifying capacity has been opened up, no limit could be placed on significant content. One effect from this shift towards images and signs is that architecture’s disciplinary frame shifts and finds itself in competition with other discursive media-painting, film, literature a field in which architecture often seems to come up short. Architecture’s relationship to its material is however indirect. Unlike activities such as gardening or woodworking where something concrete is made by direct contact with material. In the united states the public investment in civic works is all time low and architects cannot be logically be held accountable for these complex political and economical shifts, it might be argued that by the production of theoretical framework to justify an architecture of surface and sign, architects have, consciously or not, participated in their own marginalization.
The author then argues that even if architects have been excluded from the development of the city(giving example of Foucault) he then says how architecture as a field has to do more than only aesthetic to go beyond deciding guidelines. Architects have themselves retreated from the questions of function, implementation, technique, finance, and material practice. While architects are relatively powerless to provoke the changes necessary to generate renewed investment in infrastructure they can begin to redirect their own imaginative and technical efforts towards a question of infrastructure. Infrastructural urbanism offers a new model of practice and a renewed sense of arcitecture’s potential to structure the future potential of the city. Michel Foucault says “architects are not the engineers or technicians of the three great variables: territory, communication, speed”. As an assessment of the current situation it should be pointed out that historically this has not been the case. Territory, communication, and speed are properly infrastructural problems, and architecture as a discipline has developed specific technical means to deal effectively with these variables. Mapping, projection, calculation, notation, and visualization are among architecture’s traditional tools for operating at a very large scale. Architecture is uniquely capable of structuring the city in ways not available to practices such as literature, film, politics, installation arts, or advertising. Complimenting it the author quotes Walter Benjamin, “construction fulfills the role of the unconscious” meaning that the capacity of certain structures to act as scaffold for a complex series of events not anticipated by the architect.


SEVEN PROPOSITIONS –
1.Infrastructure prepares the ground for future building and creates the conditions for future events.
2.Infrastructure work with time and open to change.
3.Infrastructure give direction to future work in the city not by giving rules and conduct but by fixing points of service, access and structure(bottom up approach).
4.Infrastructure accommodates design also with existing conditions while maintaining functional continuity its default condition is regularity.
5.Infrastructure organizes and manages complex systems of flow, movement and exchange.
6.Infrastructure systems work like artificial ecologies managing flows of energy, resources on site directing density and distribution of a habitat.
7.Infrastructure allow detailed design of typical elements or repetitive structures facilitating and architectural approach to urbanism.

Landscape and Principles in: Landscape Ecology

Forman, R., Godron, M., Landscape and Principles in: Landscape Ecology, New York, 1986, John Wiley and Sons. by BART PLUYM

The text in question is actually the introduction of a book on landscape ecology. It can be read as a synthesis and guideline for the rest of the book, focussing mainly on :
the conceptual framework of landscape ecology;
putting forward a number of principles concerning landscape structure, landscape function and landscape change
the description of the state of the art of landscape ecology, by relating it to other disciplines and by putting it in an international perspective.

The first two parts of the chapter are dedicated to delineating the concept of landscape that is used by landscape ecologists. Given the fact that perspectives on landscape are diverse and multiple, a selective reading is given of the meaning of landscape in a few areas. Several aspects of the artist's approach are relevant for the understanding of landscape ecology: the diversity of landscapes that is presented in landscape paintings, the field of view that is generally similar to what the eye can perceive and the fact that the subject of landscape paintings normally include human and non-human elements. Landscape ecology though is only about the land and not about the water. The meaning of landscape in landscape ecology to a certain extend also has an affinity with the way the word is used by historians to indicate relatively extensive land areas where battles took place or where food was grown, settlements were built, .... But the concept of landscape that is used in landscape ecology finds its main source of inspiration in geography and ecology. Geography uses a concept of landscape that essentially focusses on the dynamic relation between natural landforms and human cultural groups. Landscape ecology distances is itself also in this sense from ecology: whereas ecology over the last few decades has focused on the relationships between plants, animals, water, ... within relatively homogeneous spatial units, landscape ecology focusses on the relationship between spatial units.

So what then makes a landscape from an ecological perspective? According to the authors five characteristics can be discerned across ecological landscapes: (1) a cluster of (visibly discernible) ecosystem types, (2) the 'flows' among the ecosystems of a cluster, (3) the geomorphology and climate, (4) a set of disturbance regimes1 and (5) a certain variation in the number of ecosystems within a cluster. These observations form the heart of the ecological landscape concept, an ecological landscape being defined by the authors as “a heterogeneous land area composed of a cluster of interacting ecosystems that is repeated in similar form throughout. Landscapes vary in size down to a few kilometers in diameter.” Three characteristics of the landscape form the focus of landscape ecology: (1) the structure of the landscape or the spatial relations among the distinctive elements, (2) the way the landscape functions or the interactions among the spatial elements and (3) landscape change or the alteration in the structure and function of the ecological mosaic over time. Landscape ecology studies both the principles concerning these characteristics of landscapes, but also the way they can be used in the formulation and solving of problems.

In the third part of the text the authors conceptualise a number of landscape elements, give a very brief summary of the different chapters in the book and formulate seven statements as principles regarding landscapes that together form an emerging theory of landscape ecology. According to this summary a large part of the book is about the fundamental structure of landscapes: all landscapes, despite their extreme diversity, are entirely made up by a number of patches, corridors or strips and a background matrix. The degree of contrast and the level and type of heterogeneity are also key characteristics of the landscape structure. The book also gives a lot of attention to the changing of landscapes according to natural and human influences and to the functioning of landscapes by looking at the flows of energy, materials and species between landscape elements. In the final two chapters some concepts for landscape applications are introduced.

The seven statements or principles are difficult to summarize without entirely copying what is already written. These principles can be interpreted as a “laws” concerning the structure, the functioning and the changing of landscapes. They bring forward – physical – relations between such things as the heterogeneity of a landscape and the abundance of rare interior species, the flows of energy and biomass across boundaries and the heterogeneity of a landscape, ...
The final part of the text is an overview of forefathers, forerunners and contemporary authors of landscape ecology. They are to be found in geography and ecology, but also in other related disciplines. It ends with a short reading of the state of the art from an international perspective.

1That is the intensity and frequency with which certain types of events cause significant change in the normal pattern of the ecological system.

Concluding with Landscapes - J.B. Jackson

JACKSON, J.B. (ed.), ‘Concluding with Landscapes’, in J.B. Jackson (ed.) Discovering the Vernacular Landscape; New Heaven: Yale University Pres, 1984, pp. 145-158

How to define (or redefine) the concept landscape?

The original meaning of the word landscape is the collection, a “sheaf” of lands, presumably interrelated and part of a system. Country or countryside indicates the territory of a community of people all speaking the same dialect, all engaged in the same kind of farming, all subjects of the same local lord, all conscious of having customs and traditions of their own and of possessing certain ancient rights and privileges. It is here, in the usage of the two words landscape and country, that we are confronted with the distinction between the vernacular and the aristocratic or political concepts of space.
In a vernacular landscape are the evidences of political organization of space largely or entirely absent. By political I mean those spaces and structures designed to impose or preserve a unity and order on the land, or keeping with a long-range, large–scale plan. Yet underneath those symbols of permanent political power there lay a vernacular landscape – or rather thousands of mall and impoverished vernacular landscapes, organizing and using spaces in their traditional way and living in communities governed by custom, held together by personal relationships.
At the present state of our studies of the vernacular landscape as a type all that we can say is that its spaces are usually small, irregular in shape, subject to rapid change in use, in ownership, in dimensions; that the houses, even the villages themselves, grow, shrink, change morphology, change location; that there is always a vast amount of “common land” – waste, pasturage, forest, areas where natural resources are exploited in a piecemeal manner; that its roads are little more than paths and lanes, never maintained and rarely permanent clusters of fields, islands in a sea of waste or wilderness changing from generation to generation, leaving no monuments, only abandonment or signs of renewal.
Mobility and change are the key to the vernacular landscape, but of an involuntary, reluctant sort; not the expression of restlessness and search for improvement but an unending patient adjustment to circumstances.

At the same time we cannot overlook what to us is the cultural poverty of such a landscape, its lack of any purposeful continuity. It thinks not of history but of legends and myths.
A landscape without visible signs of political history is a landscape without memory or forethought. Monuments are much more than remind us of origins. They are much more valuable as reminders of long-range, collective purpose, of goals and objectives and principles;

Let us call that early medieval landscape Landscape One. There is another landscape (which we may call Landscape Two), which began to take shape in the Renaissance; and let us identify a Landscape Three, which we can see in certain aspects of contemporary America.
Landscape One, which mixed all kinds of uses and spaces together, Landscape Two insists on spaces which are homogenous and devoted to a single purpose. It makes a distinction between city and country, between forest and field, between public and private, rich and poor, work and play; it prefers the linear frontier between nations rather than the medieval patchwork of intermingled territories. As for the distinction between mobility and immobility, it clearly believes that whatever is temporary or short-lived or movable is not to be encouraged.
But the essential characteristic of Landscape Two is its belief in the sanctity of place. It is place, permanent position both in the social and topographical sense, that gives us our identity. The function of space according to this belief is to make us visible, allow us to put down roots and become member of a working community; it was a temporary symbol of relationships. In Landscape Two land means property and permanence and power.
Remark added to the text: Asian landscapes as Landscape One – medieval? No Renaissance?

I would like to think that in the future the profession of landscape architecture will expand. This would mean knowing a great deal about land, its uses, its values, and the political and economic and cultural forces affecting its distribution. It is finally a matter of defining landscape in a way that includes both the mobility of the vernacular and the political infrastructure of a stable social order. We derive our identity from our relationship with other people, and when we talk about the importance of place, the necessity of belonging to a place, let us be clear that in Landscape Three place means the people in it, not simply the natural environment.
Salvation of Landscape Three depends on our relinquishing this power to alter the flow of time and on our returning to a more natural order. But the new ordering of time should affect not only nature, it should affect ourselves. It promises us a new kind of history, a new, more responsive social order, and ultimately a new landscape.

Beyond the Lake: A gardener´s Logic. Richard Plunz / Iñaki Echeverría by anarafful

The case of the Mexico City Metropolitan Region (MCmr = comprised of 16 delegations of the Federal District and 27 municipalities of the State of Mexico with a population of 16.4 million in an area of 4719 km2) has been challenging the discourse on the future of urbanism and the revalidation of the Megacities (a large agglomeration of population = 10 million or more, a degree of physical extension that encompasses even the area beyond the administrative boundaries, with a complex economy and unifying transport system, with a heavily polarized geography of centrality and marginalization) as a model of social organization with different physical, economic, environmental and cultural structures.

The emergence of the megacity has caused the re-apparition of large scale planning projects as the Lakes Project, which proposes the reconstruction of a water body within the MCmr, the return of a Lake as infrastructural system or element for the re-conceptualization of the relationships between city and its environment, its economic-cultural context, its role in global imaginary, and its future existence.

The ignorance about cohabitation with water (present in the MCmr nowadays) has its origins during the Spanish Colonial era, where water could be understood as a metaphor of revolution, independence and liberty. Today, 500 years ago, the Lake Project tries to be more than a nostalgic preconception of the past, is committed to a vision as well as a series of actions to allow its materializations. The project succeeds in activating discussion about the future of the region but lacks of viability in its realization, which leads in the tradition of utopian planning.

The actual planning and design for the City cannot only account the MCmr but also the Mezquital Valley (a poor arid conurbation about 83000 hectares and 500 000 inhabitants, mostly dedicated to agricultural production), which has become an enormous garden extension of the Capital City. The reconstruction of the Texcoco Lake could help the efficient use of water in this Valley according to the Lakes Project proposal.

Although imaging that five centuries of ecological transformation in this region through the reappearance of a Lake seems a fantasy future, the understanding of the Lakes removal history could help to redirect the evolution of the city.

A planning proposal, of this scale, should go beyond hydraulics and geography, financial or operative viability; it must integrate layers of information within different scales and realms as global city.

Today the 90% of Latin America´s poor population inhabits urban center called “cities”, where the lack of services and culture traditionally has challenged the redefining the notion of the city itself. In this cases the informal sector represents a potential in the small and micro enterprise, which cannot being ignored.

The text pointed out the necessity of looking at the production and consumption of culture in the future city. Cities need a new productive sense, implying creativity to erased the division between living and working, work and leisure activities.

Urban propositions should be understood as ongoing researches evaluating multiple scenarios (scenario technique = these new tool of urbanism was design in order to deal with uncertainty) the design process should allow “shape” to be informed and transformed constantly during the planning processes. All strategies and actions should be flexible in an open ended planning (=a new form of planning foregrounds potential and open ended solutions, where architectural design will have to connect itself to an urban development to become into an interactive and networked process).

Indigenous Landscape Urbanism: Sri Lanka’s reservoir and tank system

Indigenous Landscape Urbanism: Sri Lanka’s reservoir and tank system
Kelly Shannon and Samitha Manawadu

This is quite a long article. I will not make interpretation and critical reading but just put quotations (not in the same order like it was in the original article) from it.

The article will develop an argument that the term ‘landscape urbanism’ has actually been standard practice for several millennia in various parts of the world. The productive (agricultural), reflective (religious) and engineering (flood/drought control) aspects of the tank system [in Sri Lanka] were interdependent and worked hand-in-hand with urbanization. Much of the contemporary discourse on landscape urbanism-and the projects aligned with this emerging field-focus upon the challenges posed by post-industrial urban voids. At the same time, it is arguable that such projects are more landscape architecture-as opposed to landscape urbanism. Often, the urbanism component is lacking.

This paper will develop an argument that landscape urbanism-understood as structuring landscapes to guide their occupation, use and urbanization-is not new, but has been practice for several millennia. There are a number of ancient civilizations in which water resource management significantly structured urbanity.

…civilization based on rice implies a system of sophisticated hydraulic control, which in turn requires strict civic, social and political discipline (Spate and Learmonth 1967, Hanks 1972, Bray 1986).

Productive landscapes of the region were often closely related to sacred landscapes. …the endless search for harmony between earth, heaven and man led to the creation of sacred sites and cities within the landscape. Societies of the sacred city were structured in the image of a hierarchical cosmic order, and the distribution of power and the social structure were reflected in the gradation of social prestige from the centre of periphery.

[The article explored the water management system of some indigenous settlements; see page 7 column2 – page 9 column1]

Sri-Lanka’s physical geography, topography and climate combined to produce an historic need for large-scale irrigation networks. The southwest monsoon, affecting one quadrant of the island delivers 5,000 mm of precipitation each year and defines the country’s ‘Wet Zone’; in contrast, the northern and eastern plains receive rain only from the short, northeast winter monsoon and have a relatively low annual rainfall of less than 1,000 mm- the ‘Dry Zone’.

The country’s first planned settlements date from 1000BC located in the Dry Zone. Therefore, different methods were developed to address specific problems. [Historical explanation of this system during different rulers from pre-modern religion, Buddhist period, colonial, to post-colonial/independence see page 9-15]

Sri Lanka’s water management system… is valuable in the contemporary discourse on landscape urbanism….The marriage of an agricultural/irrigation system (a productive landscape) with a settlement structure (including a sacred/Buddhist landscape) is also evident in other parts of Sri Lanka where dispersed inland settlements …and denser coastal towns colonize prime sites such as beautiful bays and or river mouth.

A fundamental lesson from Sri Lanka…that the primary morphology of the landscape can be manipulated at the infrastructural level of reasoning. In contexts where there remains a will to plan landscape, urbanism can operate at the level of (infra)structural and strategic planning. …landscape urbanism is essentially rooted in a belief in the intelligence and power of place…Elia Zenghelis’ contemporary interpretation of uncovering existing logics of reality and finding the capacity of sites by distinguishing the junk from the potentials. In a landscape urbanism strategy, the site becomes the controlling instrument of the interface between culture and nature; site phenomena are generative devices for new forms and programmes. (ami)