Past, Present, Future: The Landscape as Design Collaborator

In common literature the relationship between urban planning and landscape architecture has retrospectively often been described as an antagonistic one. The impression can be gained that only recent projects re-discover the importance of existing natural features as guiding design themes, and that earlier generations ignored them in favor of grand urban schemes. Architectural hardware against green software. Tabula rasa against incremental change. Starting from this hypothetical premise of two contradicting philosophies, the authors decided to dwell deeper into the historic context and to investigate how existing landscape systems have had a major impact on masterplan principles, informing a built reality that could otherwise have taken a different form and turn.

Nature and Cities: The Ecological Imperative in Urban Design and Planning A new compilation of essays and work from a number of leading landscape architects, architects, and planners is slated for publication in June 2016. Nina-Marie Lister contributes a chapter on resilience. Nature and Cities will be published by the Lincoln Institute of Land Policy, in association with the University of Texas at Austin School of Architecture, and George F. Thompson Publishing.

This paper examines the potential of a holistic approach for urban and regional strategies in order to understand the way this might contribute more effectively to current global challenges. Part of a wider research strategy investigating the extent to which low carbon and spatial quality can be delivered at a regional level, it demonstrates benefits of adopting a range of processes to deliver integrated and sustainable urban development. The case studies examined include the Landscape Observatory (Spain), the Room for the River (the Netherlands) and HS2/HS2LV (UK). The Landscape Observatory has raised public awareness of the value of landscape to the extent to which there is now a public law protecting landscape in Catalonia. An investigation of projects dealing with climate adaptation in the Netherlands demonstrates the potential and significance of introducing low carbon and the quality of space in urban and regional infrastructure projects. An examination of the HS2 high-speed rail project in the UK illustrates how it might be possible to impact on the perception and development of a singular engineering project in order to convey a wider sustainable vision and the impact that this might have on future landscape in towns, cities and rural areas. The significance of development of procurement processes, policies and legislations as part of the administration phase of urban and regional landscape schemes are also considered necessary for future landscape strategies. Initial outcomes indicate that successful delivery requires the development of a landscape vision and the understanding of low carbon and spatial quality concepts through design in order to be better expressed in the infrastructure and create added value to our cities and regions.

Today, cities are redefining their relationships with the natural world, spurring a new dynamic between the built environment, man-made landscapes, and nature. Nature is no longer seen as the antithesis of the city and civilized life, or as something simply to support urban dwellers’ social life, but also as a means of fighting challenges such as climate change, urban health and well-being within the city. This approach to landscape and nature in cities has evolved as a response to the human–nature crisis and the need to limit urban development in open areas of ecological importance. In terms of planning, this approach called for the preparation of pre-development surveys, including a comprehensive land survey that relates to climate, geology, hydrology, flora and fauna as means to better planing the built environment. In addition, and in parallel, to the discussion on the conservation of land resources outside urban space, there was also recognition of the need to address the natural systems in cities (Scheer, 2011). This recognition led to investigation of flora and fauna in the city and examination of the city’s ecosystems, which in turn led to new design strategies viewing landscape as a key component in creating new hybrid ecosystems (Mossop, 2006). At the beginning of the twenty-first century this ecological emphasis in cities is associated with two prominent concepts: landscape urbanism (Waldheim, 2006) which emerged from architecture and planning, combining design with ecological approaches, and urban ecology (Mostafavi and Doherty, 2016; Steiner, 2011) whose roots are in ecological positivist studies. Viewing landscape and nature as a means/tool that can ‘solve’ some of the major challenges of contemporary urbanization also contributed to their presence in our daily life. Recycling, greening and rehabilitating nature in the city have not been merely theoretical-utopian ideas but rather translated into practice through policy documents, designated campaigns, and legal initiatives. This condition contributed to the centrality of landscape in our daily city life and also, as suggested by W.J.T. Mitchell (2002), contributed to the use of landscape as a verb. As he further argues, landscape is not just an object to be seen, or text to be read, but a process by which social and subjective identities are formed; as such, landscape is not merely signifying power relations; it is an instrument of cultural power, perhaps even an agent of power that is independent of human intentions (Ibid., p. 1).

Sustainability

Given that evolving urban systems require ever more sophisticated and creative solutions to deal with uncertainty, designing for resilience in contemporary landscape architecture represents a cross-disciplinary endeavor. While there is a breadth of research on landscape resilience within the academy, the findings of this research are seldom making their way into physical practice. There are existent gaps between the objective, scientific method of scientists and the more intuitive qualitative language of designers and practitioners. The purpose of this paper is to help bridge these gaps and ultimately support an endemic process for more resilient landscape design creation. This paper proposes a framework that integrates analytic research (i.e., modeling and examination) and design creation (i.e., place-making) using processes that incorporate feedback to help adaptively achieve resilient design solutions. Concepts of Geodesign and Planning Support Systems (PSSs) are adapted as part ...

2023

While the world has changed a lot over the last 75 years, IFLA continues to serve as a platform for professional collaboration, knowledge sharing, and advocacy, advancing the profession of landscape architecture. Our role in shaping sustainable and resilient environments is still contested and landscape architects across the globe keep fighting the same battles. Pressures of globalisation and urbanisation, threats to sustainability and food security, hazards derived from climate change and sea level rise, the burdens of modern living on our own health and well-being and social justice, and more recently, the pressures resulting from the COVID-19 global pandemic. These issues require us to focus on establishing a joint vision for protecting and nurturing our natural and built environments.

Proceedings of the 2016 European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS) Confernce. Organized by HSR Hochschule für Technik Rapperswil hepia, haute école du paysage, d'ingénierie et d'architecture de Genéve; Paul Bauer, Maria Collender, Michael Jakob, Lea Ketterer Bonnelame, Peter Petschek, Dominik Siegrist, Christian Tschumi (Eds.)

Journal of Urban Design, 2012

Despite the flourishing of the urban design field over the last quarter of a century, many of the issues and problems haunting urban environments have not been resolved. Forces such as globalization, immigration, the explosion of digital technologies, and the rise of a service economy centred on consumption have important spatial and design implications, while how we design our cities may have repercussions on a variety of concerns ranging from climate change to the epidemic of obesity. The paper traces some of the spatial implications of socioeconomic shifts during the last decades, and explores the role and responsibility of urban design in addressing the outlined challenges.

1997

No one who has observed the development of American cities in recent decades can ignore several long-term trends. The population density continues to decline, suburbia (and beyond it exurbia) continues to grow, reliance on the automobile increases, and commerce follows and fosters these trends, as malls, office towers, and corporations move into the hinterland. Americans seem intent on abandoning the European form of the city, even if there are some rear-guard actions such as gentrification that seek to reclaim old neighborhoods.

IFLA Journal #2 [Adaptive Capacity of Cities], Europe International Federation of Landscape Architects, 2013

This article will contribute to the discussions on the developing process of cities` construction in relation to the territory. We will argue that urban spaces should be (re)design on a regional scale by prioritising landscape as the ruling force in the analysis and planning of contemporary cities. The rules and limits of a landscape together with the forces of nature and its heritage values will be considered when striving for the long-term goal of developing a new urban landscape, socially- cohesive and ecologically-balanced.