landscape urbanism
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Rahul Paul | Guest Editor
ontemporary social and environmental conditions pose significant challenges to normative design practices, stemming as they do from an increasing scarcity of resources and consequent shifts in economic, political and material processes. Landscape Urbanism sets out to develop new modes of practice that originate from the understanding that the processes of urbanization – capital accumulation, deregulation, migration, globalization ,environmental protection and such dynamic forces are much more significant for the shaping of urban relationships than are spatial forms of urbanism in and of themselves.1 Landscape Urbanism, coined by Charles Waldheim in the mid 1990’s is one of the most literal manifestations of a continuing critical shift to consider open space and natural systems over built form and infrastructure as ways of organizing and plan-
ning the city . At its most basic level, it may defined as Waldheim states, “Landscape Urbanism describes a disciplinary realignment currently underway in which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism. For many, across a range of disciplines, landscape has become both the lens through which the contemporary city is represented and the medium through which it is constructed.” 2 It suggests a strategic approach to the formation of an urban scheme through the transformations of processes related to landscape. In Kelly Shannon’s article this approach is however challenged to be not a ‘new’ discipline of urbanism, but a traditional concept of urbanism ‘borne of necessity’. Water systems; ecological corridors and patches; bio diversity; the consideration of orientation and aspect; the introduction of urban agriculture; and the multiple uses of urban infrastructure corridors have always been key elements in
landscape
no. 31 | april–june 2011
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