Landscape urbanism

[1] In 1996 Tom Turner wrote that The city of the future will be an infinite series of landscapes: psychological and physical, urban and rural, flowing apart and together.

[2]In the late 1990s, concepts of 'landscape urbanism' were often used by landscape architects in the United States in the reorganization of declining post-industrial cities, such as Detroit.

Their texts cite and synthesize the ideas of influential modernist methods, programs and manifestoes that appeared in the early twentieth century, rediscover the methodologies of seminal landscape architects and planners Frederick L. Olmsted and Ian McHarg, ad build on the work of contemporary architects of the time such as OMA-Rem Koolhaas and Bernard Tschumi.

The Charles Waldheim, Anu Mathur, Alan Berger, Chris Reed, among others, were students at the University of Pennsylvania during this formative period for Landscape Urbanism.

[3] After the Chicago conference, European design schools and North American design institutions formed academic programs and began to formalize a field of Landscape Urbanism studies, including the University of Toronto, Harvard Graduate School of Design, Oslo School of Architecture Urbanism and landscape, Massachusetts Institute of Technology Landscape+Urbanism at MIT, Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium Landscape Urbanism – KU Leuven, the University of Illinois at Chicago and London's Architectural Association.The development of an operative response to the broad and often vague concepts surrounding landscape urbanism was largely developed at the Architectural Association in London.

These have been decried as expensive schemes with a commercial and aesthetic purpose that satisfy a local ambition to invest in ecology or sustainability without posing a more globally applicable approach.

[11] However, critics question the extent to which Landscape Urbanism has effectively championed the principles of equity, or if its projects have contributed more to the displacement of people in low-income and marginalized groups.

As an evolving urban ecology, Charles Morris Anderson has described this connection as the “thinness.” It is the simultaneous perception and implicit understanding of the past, present, and future.

Emo Urbanist projects include the built work of Charles Anderson at the Olympic Sculpture Park[17][18][19] in Seattle, WA; The Anchorage Museum Common[20] in Anchorage, AK; the yet to be constructed Project Phoenix[21] in Haiti and Hellinikon's Metropolitan Park[22] in Athens, Greece.

His conclusions are: ... there are ideas with the Landscape Urbanism discourse which have great merit, among which I would include the breaking down of professional distinctions, the integration of ecological thinking, the foregrounding of infrastructure, the interest in the positive use of waste materials and the emphasis upon functionality rather than mere appearance.

... Larding the case for Landscape Urbanism with Deleuzian and Derridean references was a mistake, since it was done principally to impress an academic elite, and it has even left large sections of its intended audience bemused'.