Infrastructure and the Future
get out of our car and move back into the old city. And that’s great if you’re in our class, if you can afford to do that as a lifestyle choice, but the overwhelming majority of Americans don’t live in cities for economic reasons. I’m going to respond to “eco” questions that came up in the first panel, and questions about the economic underpinnings of our disciplinary arrangements in the second panel. In many contexts, Bloomberg’s New York and David Miller’s Toronto—the two biggest cities in their two North American countries—are the best experiments we have in landscape urbanism. Particularly as contexts in which landscape architects are perceived to have a mix of disciplinary expertise, these cities are dealing with environmental and structural issues across a range of scales that allow them to be uniquely suited to addressing urban form today. Most recently, I and many of my colleagues have been arguing that this occurs in many jurisdictions as the combination of private philanthropy, private real estate development, and landscape urbanism led work. Tim Love I have an example on the board up there. Charles Waldheim This is Adrian Geuze’s West 8. It’s an example where the traditional planning mechanism, and the discipline planning in particular, were perceived to be primarily responsible for protecting communities from change as opposed to managing that change. In that context, the government officials, the development community, and private philanthropy chose to use design through the celebrity landscape architect to go around planning. That condition is one that I see increasingly in Western Europe and in Asia. Landscape urbanism, for better or for worse, is attempting to describe and to theorize that condition. Tim Love Master plans led by landscape architects are inherently better from a public relations standpoint than master plans led by architects, because the focus of the planning is the open space network first, which is good for communities and not the buildings. The buildings fade into the background. Architect-led mas-
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