From Practice to Theory

In a world increasingly conscious of the environment,

landscape urbanism has become an autonomous discipline,
developing its own mode of practice and ideology

Francesco Repishti
Francesco Repishti is Associate Professor of History of Architecture at the Department of
Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano. His research is mainly directed towards
Modernist and current architecture with regard to the contemporary landscape.more

First published in Lotus International (http://www.editorialelotus.it/web/index.php) cite

n recent decades, and in particular since the 1997 Graham Foundation

conference in Chicago and key faculty changes at Harvard Graduate School of
Design, the term landscape urbanism has been widely debated, and its theoretical
and programmatic foundations analysed.1 The theory of landscape urbanism,
which is based on a critique of the discipline of urban design and the traditional
models of urbanism and city planning, is presented as an alternative to the New
Urbanism2 movement, and puts forward a model of experimentation that is a

hybrid of landscape design and urban planning. To this, speculation has recently
been added on the possible environmental dimension of such an approach or
rather an attempt to bring about a transformation of urban disciplines according to
an ecological tenor, in response to adjustments in the contemporary sensibility.3

The simplicity of the theoretical framework, the attempt to propose a cultural and
disciplinary syncretism in the name of a lost naturalness and the adaptability of
the term landscape together created favourable conditions for an enthusiastic
reception and immediate success with the critics, so that in the last decade
landscape urbanism has become an autonomous discipline for which there are now
projects, university courses and extensive academic output.

Landscape urbanism thus takes the form of an ideology as well as a practice.4 In

practical terms it lays down that the city can be conceived and designed as if it
5
were a landscape, overcoming the antithesis of greenery/concrete (from the
planning, social and cultural points of view) and suggesting the concept of an
6
urban landscape in movement capable of promoting positive development.
Although the landscape has historically always played a role in the construction of
the form of the city, landscape urbanism as James Corner suggests goes
beyond the design of places like parks, public spaces and gardens, and presents
itself as a practice that can be related to more than one urban scale.

However, for some years now we have become accustomed to encountering calls, at
different scales, for a new approach to planning in relation to the activity of several
contemporary landscape architects: for example, in territorial planning, in projects
for the reclamation of large disused and residual urban areas or infrastructures,
and in the design of public spaces and parks. The structural conditions that have,
over the years, led to urbanistic action oriented towards the landscape were
revealed when the traditional urban model appeared inadequate if applied to post-

industrial situations, and when we realised that the places we live in are more
suburban than urban, more open than closed, more characterised by works of
infrastructure than by works of architecture.

The growing use of the landscape as an agent of urban regeneration cannot, in

fact, be separated from a rise in the number of difficult places presented by and in
post-industrial cities. While the responses of architects to design challenges, such as
the enormous craters found in mining and industrial landscapes, wavered between
strategies, ideal representations, territorial schemes and images, landscape
architects (like Kienast, Walker, Girot, Geuze, Dietrich, Field Operations and
Latz) indicated how it was possible to actually transform such territories, on what
time scales, and using which techniques. It has seemed logical to entrust the task of
tracing in time the new hybrid landscapes of the city to their culture and their
7
expertise. This represents a genuine discovery for the European milieu, as well as
the realisation that landscape urbanism has been a widespread practice in the
United States, as had been documented by authors including Christian Zapatka
8
and Peter Walker.

The fact is that, at least since the 1983 competition for the Parc de la Villette in
Paris, the interventions of Peter Walker and George Hargreaves or those of Peter
Latz and Michel Desvigne with Christine Dalnoky, questions of contemporary
landscaping have appeared as an original response accompanied by the
surmounting of an idea of landscape as absence of architecture, by the theorisations
of the French school and by many expressions of land art. Inventions of great
originality and a variety of experiences have for some time suggested three new
factors: the new ecological paradigm as a guide for all actions, the encroachment of
art on the landscaping discipline in parallel with a new idea of active and
participant public space, and the proof of the inability of architecture and
planning to tackle and resolve certain urban places entrusted to landscaping as an
agent of urban regeneration.

So the landscaping approach, especially in the last few decades, has been the
premise for a profound reappraisal of the planning disciplines which has allowed
the overcoming of a number of contradictions, and has proved instrumental in the
solution of unsettled urban episodes, especially in the creation of public places and
interstitial spaces between individual buildings, between centre and periphery, and
between town and country.9

What has been happening for some time, in both Europe and the US, is an
increase in the importance of the action of landscaping: as a solution to the gap
between one building and another or between blocks, in an effort to establish
connections between scattered works of architecture, and in an attempt to find a
medium that would substitute for any perceived loss of sociality. It is a
discontinuity which, inserted into daily scenarios, is able to revive lost
relationships with the character of places in a process of mending degraded or postindustrial urban environments, in the presence of phenomena of congestion and
dispersion alike.

Called upon opportunistically to fill or somehow create a place by finding a possible

coherence between architecture and the contemporary city, especially in urban cases
around or on the margins of infrastructure or large-scale buildings, the
intervention of landscaping (even before landscape urbanism) has therefore
succeeded in completing, in finding a remedy, in therapeutically mending and
aesthetically recomposing the problematic situations created by building practices
declared no longer manageable, to the point of overturning a traditional
relationship and, at times, paradoxically transforming the architecture near these
new situations into urban voids.

Thus the important ideological and programmatic premises put forward by James
Corner, Mohsen Mostafavi, Alex Wall, Stan Allen and Charles Waldheim seem to
have taken on the character of a theoretical formulation of practices already in use
for some time a formal transition and construction of rules with a view to
legitimising a discipline made up of a range of different areas of expertise. The
complexity and problematic nature of combining lessons from diverse disciplinary

theories and from the pluralism of practices and experiences might, however, run
the risk of undergoing a drastic reduction, a simplification and a normalisation
that pave the way for a levelling out of experimentation.10

But it is not important to argue for the superiority of practice over theory, nor to
establish who was the first to coin, with such clarity and immediacy, the
terminology of the movement; the task of this essay is to demonstrate the breadth
of these experiences which have, in any case, developed independently of the more
recent theorisation as well as of the pressures of a traditional and, at times,
reactionary disciplinary structure. So we will try in the first place to trace, in the
practices of the last half century, a diorama of the experiences (including theoretical
ones) to which landscape urbanism has recourse today, investigating some of the
innovations that have emerged thanks to contemporary landscaping: the new
concept of public space, the encroachment of art, landscaping as an agent of urban
regeneration, and the ecological paradigm.

A Team 10 meeting in the garden of Aldo van Eyck.

(http://www.archined.nl/uploads/pics/team10-tuin_01.jpg)

Public space: Situationist practices and

experience architecture
It is possible to discern a first point of rupture, with respect to the ideas of the city
held by the Modern Movement and functionalism, in the reversal of approach
promoted by a realist and situational attitude. This was the conclusion of a long
journey from the rejection of CIAM city planning, which passed first through Aldo
van Eycks proposal that a project should be adapted to a precise urban situation
instead of working with a set of mathematical data, thereafter by way of other
members of Team 10,11 and finally the practices of the Situationist International
and the phenomenologists.

In his turn van Eyck had under his belt a literary and artistic preparation that
favoured a different way of looking at the built environment, noting within it
objects and situations that before passed unobserved so as to redefine parts of the
city and its boundaries on the basis of the perception of the people who live in it.
The four functions of the Athens Charter were replaced by existentialist and
phenomenological notions like the house, the street, the district and the city, as
12
superimposed and distinct levels of human association. Everything was aimed
at overturning the spatial order of the city defined by authorities in an antagonistic
reversal of the hierarchy of public and private space between a space democratically
understood as place of participation and an oligarchic one where decisions were
taken. Without abandoning an imposed planning, architects and city planners
began to collaborate and learn from the peculiarities and irregularities of leftover
spaces, holes and tears in the urban fabric, working with the gaps instead of
putting them aside.13

In parallel, the writings of Guy Debord and the Situationists, like Constants
Description of the Yellow Zone in the Internationale Situationniste, identified as
a principal feature of their operation the search for a social relationship between
people, favoured by a succession of situations arranged at random, of exquisite
corpses able to generate a meaning in action.14

Approaches similar to this idea, of spaces that set themselves the goal of creating or
fostering sociality, can be found again in the projects for parks and public spaces
realised by landscape architects in recent years even those less well-known than
West 8, Peter Latz, Vito Acconci or Ian Hamilton Finlay: both in the adoption of
various techniques for the production of localities, going beyond mere
aestheticising, and in producing an active public space as the outcome, one that
stimulates participatory uses as an alternative to static contemplation. Such
activation and engagement, as applied to public space, is exemplified by the current
phenomenon of urban farming.

So the legacy taken up and enunciated by so-called landscape urbanism, but not by
it alone, appears to be that of an interest in the lived dimension of urban space as a
place of real sociability a place to spend time in and not just to be traversed; no
longer solely an aesthetic element.

To this can be added the awareness of having to respond to new environmental,

social, touristic and cultural demands. And also, a response necessary for a second
aspect of innovation as well: the progressive change of attitude provoked, now that
the Bilbao effect has faded, by the contemporary experience of tourism. Mass and
low-cost tourism has raised levels of expectation with regard to practices of
entertainment and enticement. These practices are now oriented less towards
individual works of architecture as to the urban aspect to the liveability of cities
recognised as product and sum of a decorous mix of public spaces, both pedestrian
zones and parkland, and landscape. We might also add that this has been
accompanied by the production of strands of weak architecture with two seemingly
contradictory characteristics: on the one hand, buildings upon which a strong
iconic impact is imposed and, on the other, buildings that are supposed to reassure,
reduced to a few archetypes and a sort of ahistorical abstraction.

Tourism in this genre focuses on the search for a lost urban liveability and this
explains why, today, many projects purport to nod in the direction of architecture
that prioritises experience,15 thereby reinforcing the link between what happened in
the 1950s and 60s and new practices. The imagination and the capability of the
entertainment industry seem, in fact, to have leapfrogged the bounds of theme
parks to place themselves at the service of a tourism industry and discourse,

seeking to create seductive urban experiences through the production of localities.

In the past, the task of so-called experience architecture was precisely to create
fantastic places/events that mix up landscape, high-tech, nature and media, and
use diverse stories and histories to distinguish one event from another. Content and
communication have, in the past, given rise to places of public information such as
trade fairs, expos, theme parks, Olympic parks and carnivals, as well as brand
environments or brand attractions; these processes have even been applied to rest
stops on motorways and express routes.

In addition to artistic interventions that constitute elements of rupture and

discontinuity, and whose true objective is a strengthening of the imagination,
projects such as these have often made use of spatial devices derived from the
contribution, suppression or preservation of pre-existing elements: from elements of
the territory able to offer purchase for the gaze, for stories and for social practices.
Sometimes the content of the narration of these alternative realities has coincided
with the environmental and ecological improvement of a place, with an ideal
search for its roots, or it has been enriched by elements reflecting the region and the
values that it represents.

And in pursuit of these goals a desire has emerged to challenge architecture on a

larger scale, so that we observe the notion of planning being used to upgrade
individual spaces, pieces of cities or entire regions that rely on an aestheticisation of
the urban experience, rather than its regulation, as their sole instrument and
organising principle. Some of these planning projects appropriate the strategies of
urban marketing, through which an attempt is made to communicate content by
the staging of spectacular and emotional actions, presented with educational and
narrative and therefore cultural characteristics and aims.16 In addition,
adopting as they do the same mechanisms as were used in the early expos, these
new projects are today considered symbolic of the civil progress of the nations that
host them and, looked at close-up, of the cities that propose them. And, like theme
parks, they have an impact when they succeed in accessibly combining the specific
features of the place which grounds the element of narration with an
environmental and media programme.

If in the past the work of the landscape architect was required only at the end,
today he or she is brought in right from the inception of a project and, as in the
designs of the most famous theme parks, traditional architects and planners have
often stepped aside for landscape architects who in turn have given their
intervention the strong connotation of a natural (although counterfeit) vision,
which is the current positive vision of progress in the Western world, paradoxically
considered primitive and shunned up until a few decades ago.

The encroachment of art and the crossing of

disciplinary boundaries
One of the paradigms of the theoretical framework of landscape urbanism is its
critique of the rigid separation of disciplines, to which it opposes an
interdisciplinary approach to the city and to architecture, one sought in urban
planning and tackled in the debate over the landscape; this is a debate which has
looked, in recent years, for a rapprochement with other ways of thinking instead of
composing a pre-established picture.

The 1997 Chicago conference proposed eliminating traditional disciplinary

codifications and distinctions between architecture, landscape architecture and city
planning in favour of an infrastructural and systemic conception of the built
environment. For example, James Corner suggested that such an interdisciplinary
approach should bring together the sciences of urban and territorial planning,
ecology, geography, anthropology and sociology, cartography, aesthetics,
philosophy and economics, to the point where the sciences of space would lose their
centrality.

If we look at what has been realised, among the crossing of boundaries between
fields, it is the artistic ingredient that appears most significant in recent years to
the point of having thrown disciplinary schematics into disarray: announced by
the avant-gardes, suggested by three masters of landscaping Isamu Noguchi,
Luis Barragn and Roberto Burle Marx and conceptualised and elaborated in
the works of land and earth art. Mixtures and experiences that have broken down

the fixity of contrast and ushered in different perspectives and logics in the
relationship between art of the landscape and city, rich in consequences for the
whole contemporary art of landscaping.17

Only after these experiences in the United States did the professional activity of
landscape (urban) gardeners develop, achieving a leap in scale in parallel to the
artistic movements that have served as a continual source of inspiration and
models: models that, transferred to public spaces, have become patterns, textures,
objects and compositions. Minimalism, land art, abstractionism, pop art and
organicism have been blended into a coherent artistic groundswell in which colour,
material and form are arranged to reveal and transfigure the nature and form of
places. Peter Walkers public spaces marked out the road onto which were then
grafted the pop experiments and artistic inventions of Martha Schwartz, the
deconstructivism on a territorial scale of George Hargreaves, and the historicist
citations of Kathryn Gustafson. For Schwartz, reference to the methods of avantgarde bricolage is evident, especially in her attempt to take objects of everyday use
out of their habitual contexts and use them in radically different ways. Even the
European originality of Adriaan Geuze found its cultural references, at Tilburg for
18
example, by reviving expressions of avant-garde painting. More recently, Mary
Miss has outlined a different role for artistic insertions into Irvines Great Park,
conceived on the basis of a programme of public space that offers concrete
experiences in relation to themes of environmental and social sustainability.

(images/repishti/mary miss.jpg)
Mary Miss, Greenwood Pond, Double Site

Process not plan

Naturally linked to the experience of landscape art, the project of landscape

urbanism formulates a process and not a plan, develops an open configuration and
not abstract volumes, and is concerned with urban surfaces and not forms.19 So the
task assigned to the plan of ordering the city through a radically horizontal
urbanism appears obsolete; in truth it had already been fragmented to some extent
over the last 30 years by practices of piecemeal transformation applied by urbanscale projects to the benefit of an ecological way of thinking about the city, and at
the expense of the typically inherited urban logic represented by plans,
programmes, grids, urban design, etc.

At the beginning of the 1980s, and above all spearheaded by the experience of
plans for the regeneration of Barcelona, the notion of the urban project was
formulated. Today this notion covers a vast, rich and varied range of experiences
one in which the urban project is seen as an intermediate area of city planning
outlined as a set of mutable and many-sided approaches, in which forays into the
fields of infrastructure and the landscape have represented a necessary condition of
feasibility. Incursions that have been decisive moments of suspension of
consolidated practices disciplinary and design practices, technical and regulatory
ones, those of decision-making and control and that have ushered in, at the
concrete level of transformation, new theoretical approaches and working methods.
Manuel de Sol-Morales defined the urban project as a project to give form to a
physical, architectural and engineering process that has to combine land,
construction and infrastructure;20 his younger brother Ignasi de Sol-Morales
coined the term terrain vague to define privileged areas of intervention areas that
invite development because of their indeterminacy and sense of incompleteness.
How can we forget that in 1984 the completion of the Moll de la Fusta in
Barcelona set in motion, with the first section of the Rnda Litoral, an intervention
that went on to win back for the city approximately six kilometres of seafront and
beaches, offering liveable and participant public spaces that amount to one of the
largest public-facing urban projects in Europe, comparable only with certain
experiences in New York? The strategy of recuperation, implemented by
transforming interstitial squares and spaces, has interacted with the project of
completing and expanding major road systems, rendering the themes of
infrastructure compatible with the needs of housing and landscape. The Barcelona
example was, in fact, a planning intervention capable of transforming the urban
landscape without limiting itself to the imposition of rules about the various

elements of which it was to be composed over time; it went beyond the idea, in such
a fragmented situation, of attempting to resolve the problem with unifying
gestures, or by means of grand, so-called iconic works of urban architecture.

(images/repishti/Manuel de Solaa Morales.jpg)

Manuel De Sol Morales, Moll de la Fusta, Barcelona

Models of urban settlement organised around the creation of a park are also part of
the tradition of city planning. They have functioned chiefly for circumscribed areas
like small garden cities, university campuses, model villages and science or
technology parks, but in recent years have helped to create a series of enclaves
visibly incapable of relating to one another or to other nearby contexts. This
phenomenon frequently resurfaces today when the notion of planning applied to the
creation of housing in disused industrial areas reveals an inability to overcome
these limitations and produce localities. The works of the many landscape
architects cited in this essay (and featured in the issue of Lotus international from
which it is adapted)21 have been proposed as agents of urban regeneration in
difficult places and in zones of the city constructed according to a numerical and
dimensional logic without any attention to ideas of habitability and the quality of
the urban environment. Often these difficult places are in areas fragmented or cut
off by the transport infrastructures that habitually delimit the city, like medieval
walls, or by structures used for logistical purposes and the interchange of goods.
They are spaces occupied by elements located at different levels or suspended above
the ground that cannot be dealt with by calculations of useful surfaces, nor by a
horizontal planning that limits itself to generating new alignments which are only
on paper and not visual.

Ecosophy
Finally we come to the most recent theorisation of an ecological dimension (or
drift) in relation to this approach, as if the question could be resolved in a different
use of the terms landscape or urbanism as adjectives. Mohsen Mostafavi,
editor with Gareth Doherty of the volume Ecological Urbanism (2009), points out
that a change of outlook and an idea of progress that necessarily no longer places a
certain ideal of humanity at the centre can be traced back to the ethical and
political notion of ecosophy, as taken up by Flix Guattari in The Three
22
Ecologies. Added to this, in the last few years a far-reaching campaign aimed at
awakening public opinion and exposing a quantity of unexpected facts (and
mobilising awareness of them) has, in fact, brought the environmental question to
the forefront.

While analysis of the premise of ecological urbanism raised to the level of a

theoretical framework is not at all banal, it would not be correct to place the results
of these diverse ways of thinking on the same plane if for no other reason than to
do so would risk a degrading of the reasoning put forward in this essay. On other
occasions, however, people have reflected on how the influence of greenolatry has
gone beyond the notion of metaphor. It has abandoned mere words to place itself
more at the centre of the architectural debate, resulting in profound changes in
architectural production in a deviation with regard to what had gone before.

If seen in the context of the exhaustive litany of well-intentioned actions suggested

by the inhabitants of the worlds wealthiest nations, the call for more sustainable
practices appears, in most cases, to be a sort of ethical camouflage a strategic
manoeuvre that stems in equal parts from the burden of accumulated guilt and the
allure of radical chic. The promise of resolution appears in the idea of a green
aestheticisation aimed at bringing about the return of a figurative unity of the
territory yet all too soon destined to be revealed as a superstructure or, at most,
to present itself as ground rather than figure. Purportedly sustainable
interventions are designed to conceal and make amends for nature, with a
superficial biomorphism assigned the elementary task of covering up the mineral
reality of constructions in order to render them familiar and homelike.

In another way, if all this corresponds as Mostafavi has pointed out23 to a

realisation of the impending need for a series of operative attentions to the
sustainability of the intervention in relation to the context (for instance, actions
aimed at preventing various types of pollution: noise, air, dust, etc., to the drainage
and recovery of water, to operations of planned maintenance, to the growth of
plants over time), then the ecological approach is reduced to the plane of technical
coordination and the correct application of working procedures. In addition to the
architectural digressions that would inevitably ensue, such a scenario would entail
the development of a kind of bio-planning governed by advanced environmental
standards and techniques, and founded on scientific knowledge.

A different scenario would be the outgrowing or transcending of the urban and

architectural culture expressed by the Modern Movement, of the typological, formal
and morphological culture that has been at the root of the training of entire
generations. Such displacement, brought about perhaps by a consolidation of
ecological orthodoxy, would lead to the environmental question being assumed as a
condition cutting across all other factors; under these conditions the city would be
likened to a permeable, natural or agricultural territory, one in which all action
would be guided by this new ethic. Up to now, an important point in favour of this
vision has been the premise that the ecological paradigm is no longer the expression
of one part of the world or of an elite. Free from the trap of self-referentiality, it
presents itself as universal and as the product of a way of thinking common to all
rather than of intellectualism. But Guattari himself had already argued, in 1989,24
that this aspiration could be fulfilled only under the conditions of a genuine
political, social and cultural revolution, one capable of reshaping the objectives of
the production of material and immaterial goods.

More essays and projects