LANDSCAPE & ECOLOGICAL URBANISM
INTRODUCTION
Landscape Urbanism emerged near the end of the 20th century in response to dramatic changes in American cities, in which open space in urban areas was re-conceived as an alternative to architecture as a medium for “articulating a layered, non-hierarchical, flexible, and strategic urbanism.”1 This approach viewed metropolitan areas as living arenas of change over time, and rejected the marginalization of landscape architects as mere purveyors of bourgeois decoration that was marginal to spatial formation. Landscape Urbanism argues that the transformation of contemporary urban territory is far too complex to allow for isolated disciplinary specialization and that landscape is a critical part of the urban environment, rather than a polar opposite to architecture in a binary system. Landscape Urbanism is championed by theorists and designers James Corner and Charles Waldheim. In their writing, they argue that infrastructural systems and public landscapes could be used as ordering mechanisms in the urban field. The acceptance of landscape as urban fabric can be used to create spaces that are adaptable to (and that anticipate) open-endedness, indeterminacy, negotiations and changing urban conditions. Corner believes that the actual processes of urbanization are far more significant to the shaping of cities than the spatial forms of urbanism themselves, emphasizing the importance of design and accommodation to process rather than fixed form.2 Similarly, Ecological Urbanism considers the urban condition with a world-view that is fluid in scale and disciplinary focus. Design provides the synthetic key to connect ecological principles with urbanization processes in an integrated way. In many ways, Ecological Urbanism is an evolution and critique of landscape urbanism, arguing for a more holistic approach to the design and management of city regions. To some extent, we can say that Ecological Urbanism is a worldwide revolution of theory and practice of city, of changes of current urban planning, and method and mode of urban management, and even of a new lifestyle. Originally, the core concept of Ecological Urbanism is to treat a city as an urban
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Theories and Methods of Urban Design
1. Charles Waldheim, Landscape as Urbansim: A General Theory (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016). 2. James Corner, “Terra Fluxus,” in The Landscape Urbanism Reader (New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006).