Landscape urbanism

Landscape urbanism is a theory of urban planning arguing that the best way to organize cities is through the design of the city's landscape, rather than the design of its buildings. The phrase 'landscape urbanism' first appeared in the mid 1990s. Since this time, the phrase 'landscape urbanism' has taken on many different uses, but is most often cited as a postmodernist or post-postmodernist response to the "failings" of New Urbanism and the shift away from the comprehensive visions, and demands, for modern architecture and urban planning.

The phrase 'landscape urbanism' first appeared in the work of Peter Connolly, a Masters of Urban Design student from RMIT Melbourne. In 1994, Connolly used the phrase in the title for his Masters of Urban Design proposal at RMIT Melbourne. Here, he suggested that 'a language of "landscape urbanism" barely exists and needs articulating', and that 'existing urbanisms ... are limited in the exploration of the landscape'. He also used the term 'landscape as urbanism' in his 1994 essay, '101 Ideas About Big Parks'. 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. They will be mapped and planned for special purposes, with the results recorded in geographical information systems (GIS), which have the power to construct and retrieve innumerable plans, images and other records. Christopher Alexander was right: a city is not a tree. It is a landscape.

From the late 1990s, the phrase 'landscape urbanism' was used by landscape architects in the United States to refer to the re-organisation of declining post-industrial cities, such as Detroit. From the 2000s, it was used in Europe by architects to mean a highly flexible way of integrating large-scale infrastructure, housing and open space. By the late 2000s, the phrase became associated with highly commercialised, multi-phase urban parks, such as Olympic park design.

The first major event to do with 'landscape urbanism' was the Landscape Urbanism conference sponsored by the Graham Foundation in Chicago in April 1997. Speakers included Charles Waldheim, Mohsen Mostafavi, James Corner of James Corner/Field Operations, Alex Wall, and Adriaan Geuze of the firm West 8, among others. The formative period of Landscape Urbanism can be traced back to RMIT University and University of Pennsylvania in the late 1980s, at a time when Peter Connolly, Richard Weller, James Corner, Mohsen Mostafavi, and others were exploring the artificial boundaries of Landscape Architecture, Urban Design and Architecture, searching for better ways to deal with complex urban projects. However, their texts cite and synthesize the ideas of influential modernist methods, programmes and manifestoes that appeared in the early twentieth century. Charles Waldheim, Anu Mathur, Alan Berger, Chris Reed, amongst others, were students at the University of Pennsylvania during this formative period for Landscape Urbanism. 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 [5], Massachusetts Institute of Technology [6], Catholic University in Leuven, Belgium [7], the University of Illinois at Chicago and London's Architectural Association.

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