| Landscape Urbanism has emerged as a movement among North American architects and urban planners since the early 1980s, enjoying the support of a few prominent designers, resulting in critical enquiry among the design disciplines, and a number of noteworthy urban parks. Termed and defined by Charles Waldheim with contributions by two key practitioners, James Corner and Mohsen Mostafavi among others the movement offers a counter to modernist ideologies of building, by organizing space as an adaptable system, while replacing architectural form with landscape as the primary organizing element of the built environment. Its roots are traceable to modernist writers such as historian Lewis Mumford, who spoke of the city as an organic, ecological form, and ecologist Carl Troll whose term and ideas of Landscape Ecology (1939) were also highly influential. Landscape Urbanism seeks the combination of the distinct fields of landscape architecture, ecology, architecture and urban planning, to create a new form of urbanism to more effectively address planning related predicaments of the late 20th century without proposing to end the processes that led to rapidly deindustrializing cities. This essentially forms a reversal of architecture led teams where landscape architecture was relegated to a mere aesthetic role encouraging a more complex choreography of disciplines, with professions abandoning historic limitations and crossing disciplines. The issue of adaptability is central to its precepts and represented by designing the landscape as a continual process of evolvement rather than one defined by a static plan. Although Landscape Urbanism has potential to be positioned on the forefront of urban development theory and practice, it is not widely accepted as a movement, nor is it fully understood. This study seeks to articulate the intellectual boundaries of Landscape Urbanism, its relevance as a movement and success as a practice. Primarily two concepts are explored, the first being where the realities of economy, culture and government conflict or coalesce in practice through study of the three North American based case studies, secondly whether Landscape Urbanism as a practice has the potential to contribute effectively to the amelioration of the current deindustrialzed landscape. |
