Mohsen Mostafavi 'Landscapes of urbanism'

MOSHEN MOSTAFAVI, 'Landscapes of urbanism', in: Mohsen Mostafavi and Ciro Najle (eds.), Landscape Urbanism A Manual for the Machinic Landscape, London: AA Books, 2003, pp. 5-9.


I found this text quiet difficult. After reading it 3 times I will summerize what I have understood from it. If you think you are more intelligent, you can always try to analize it yourself and add some comments.

So basicily the text compares what urbanism (modern) was and what it is today and in the future (landscape urbanism).

Modenist urbanism is characterized by its division in components of the city: housing, work, leisure,... A masterplan holds these functions togheter but ensures at the same time that they remain distinct and apart.
The multilayered, multifunctional city is too complex to manage. Everything should be ordered, implemented in phases and there is little room for flexibility.

This the author puts in contrast to the elements of landscape urbanism:
- the temporality of landscapes renders them forever incomplete, and this incompletion can be seen as an antidote to the implicit finitude of zoning
- as an answer to what the relation is of urbanism to landscape he suggests that urbanism relies as much on the construction of surfaces and voids as it does on the construction of buildings, which makes the literal use of landscape as a material device a necessity.
- the methods of landscape urbanism are operative, they prioritize the way in which things work and the way in which they are used.
I like how he compares it with agricultural fields, this makes his poit quiet clear:
The agricultural field is ploughed, prepared in anticipation of the crop that will (hopefully) appear at a later date. In this way the appearance of the field is always both incomplete and complete, in as much as at each stage of its development it attains a certain degree of temporal finitude.