AA 02 2011 01 17 Landscape Paraphrased Into Urbanity

ARCHITECTURAL ASSOCIATION SCHOOL OF ARCHITECTURE GRADUATE SCHOOL PROGRAMMES

COVERSHEET FOR SUBMISSION 2010-2011

PROGRAMME:

MA [Landscape Urbanism]

TERM:

Autumn

STUDENT NAME(S): KELVEKAR, Shantesh

SUBMISSION TITLE

Landscape paraphrased into urbanity the rethinking of a system

WORD COUNT

3,936 words

COURSE TUTOR

SMITH, Tom

COURSE TITLE

Machining Landscape

SUBMISSION DATE: 17th January 2011

DECLARATION: “I certify that this piece of work is entirely my/our own and that any quotation or paraphrase from the published or unpublished work of others is duly acknowledged.”

Signature of Student(s):

Date:

Landscape paraphrased into urbanity -the rethinking of a system

Abstract There is not an exact formula when it comes to the percept of an urbane. There cannot be a judgemental call between determining good and bad conditions; nothing is white or black. But they are all shades of grey, for they have to blend with each other to perform efficiently.

Understanding ecological dynamics is about being sensitive towards nature, and the more we start being thoughtful in understanding the processes, the more considerate would be the end result.

Green Infrastructure, in today’s world has become a fancy terminology. The term would actually be understood if we detach ourselves from it, inspect it with a highly rational approach, analyse it and then blend with our emotional quotient to add sensitivity in our approach. This then would give distinct character to each territory with respect to the pertaining natural forces within to shape and curate a culture to evolve in the region.

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Introduction As cities are evolving and growing exponentially; urbanists are finding an increased pressure on the infrastructure development strategies. And this is not mere due to overwhelming growth observed in an urban setup, but also mainly because of the interdependency in the network the systems are creating, and these systems operate in conjunction to perform better. As stated in Infracity, unlike the recent past that proposed a territory of metropolitan areas and infrastructural corridors of connections, the image that presently is evolved is of a multi-scalar interventions and is made up of territorial platforms of production, urban territories of interchanges and strips of infrastructural connection1. In the scenario today, the dependency in a network, between productions of crops, commodities to different types of industries to commerce is clearly evident. And juggling between these various systems the ecological equilibrium is disturbed.

Another impact one can clearly observe is that as the cities are growing in terms of their physical expanse or footprints and hence there is a steep rise in the demand for resources like electricity, water, food, fuel etc. As the city is expanding, the green fringe outside the city is being depleted, and in the urge to manufacture these resources in higher volumes we tend to destroy the vegetation even more. This remunerative vision is causing adverse effects on the environment.

There is a fine balance, when it comes to settlement and nature, which if disturbed can cause severe damage to the ecology. In the present scenario of rapid urbanisation, we have to be very sensitive towards the ecology. The balance needs to be maintained for a better living. This paper attempts to deal with, and provide an insight on the landscape infrastructural systems required, and highlight the importance of ecological services.

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History If we look back into any civilisation, be it Indus Valley, Mesopotamian, Egyptian or Mayan or any ancient civilisation, nature has been worshiped by the people of that era. There was a sensitivity reflected in their rituals and customs towards nature.

And, when it came to respecting nature, they not only respected the vegetation and wildlife of the region, but they also respected the resources like earth (soil), rivers, sea, wind; and never disturbed the balance that existed in nature. The rule was to use resources only as much as required.

Fast forward to the 18th century, the dawn of an industrial era brought some drastic changes to the working of the natural systems. Primarily there was a major migration of people from rural to the new upcoming and promising urban. These ‘urban’ were the upcoming industrial towns, and for many, these new cities changed their professions from farmers to industrial workers.

Further industrial revolution also industrialised agricultural production. As scientists discovered that nitrogen can encourage fast growth of plants and crops, they were constantly trying to do research in this field. Vaclav Smil in his book stating on discovery of ammonia synthesis and commercial production of nitrogen fertilisers reveals the way nitrogen fertiliser revolutionised the traditional methodologies of agriculture. He states, “how, over the course of the nineteenth century, scientists gradually came to understand the importance of nitrogen fertilizers, leading up to the “brilliant discovery” of ammonia synthesis by Fritz Haber in 1908.2” Ammonia synthesis, as a process turned to be economical method of manufacturing nitrogen fertilizer in large quantities and eventually supply it to farmlands for higher yielding.

This meant that although high number of people had shifted from being farmers to industrial workers, the supply of food would not be impacted. But, none even remotely anticipated its catastrophic side. The adequate production of food made possible an exponential population growth in the last two centuries, which created a demand for more goods and more commodities, and started consuming all the resources and hence a major disturbance in the ecological system was created.

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Figure 1: World fertiliser consumption 1960-2001 (Source: World Resources Institute Earthtrend Database)

The other side of industrial revolution demanded an increase need of resources and physical infrastructure, and these all were not evenly distributed, but rather were concentrated in the urban zones. The industrial age, majorly mutating the cultures in America and Europe, was affecting the lifestyle and the living conditions of the people in an adverse way. It led to the growth of the cities in these regions within a short frame of time and the scenarios soon started to take a horrific turn. There were failure of water services, sewers and drains which led to epidemics and severe hygienic issues. As Matthew Gandy by his research on the urban developments and changes incurred in Paris during 19th century, puts light on the dismaying conditions prevailing in the city3. The entire city was drowned in the filth, due to the lack of the drainage systems and narrow labyrinthine roads made it even worse to take the waste out. The scenario was such that the ground floors were literally covered in dirt, leading to severe unhygienic conditions. Spread of diseases like cholera and diphtheria and other water borne diseases was inevitable, and this led to many deaths. Haussmann however managed to redesign the city and rebuild it to perform better in terms of the networks of infrastructure. This was certainly the scenario almost everywhere, be it Detroit or London or any major city of that period.

A conscious effort started almost as an alarm during this period to relook at the urban interventions happened. Most of these cities were built to cater to the immediate requirements and had a very myopic vision in terms of its future interventions. The intent of expanding the city in future was by expanding its physical boundaries and this led to a condition of an urban sprawl. But sprawl had adverse KELVEKAR, Shantesh

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impacts; as the sprawl spread and expanded the city boundaries, it created dead hollow zones within and these had adverse impacts on social, economic and environmental conditions.

Reinterpretation As the market in Asia started showing an economic boom post 1980s, there was an urgent need for urbanisation in Asia, especially China and India. China at the beginning of this decade proposed to build 400 new cities by the year 2020. This meant a humungous growth in the urban population. The migration from rural to urban which is happening in China is the thickest migration ever happened in the entire human history. In 2007 it was officially declared that more than 50% of the world’s population has moved to urban.

In the urge to grow faster, the failed urban intervention, the modernist methodologies were being reinterpreted and used. This clearly highlighted the growth of urban infrastructure in terms of its physical growth, and ecology was considered very superficially. The green patches developed were in the leftover voids between the built forms. This made the green infrastructure more local and did not provide enough scope to participate and contribute to a larger infrastructural system.

Highlighting on networking programmes, Wilfred Hackenbroich states: “The main idea is to create a physical urban environment that will be capable of triggering and accommodating specific, diverse and changing programmes and activities. We have to find a balance between conditions that we can foresee and plan and conditions that are unpredictable and for which we can only provide a framework. The project and the programme should be as open as possible and as planned as needed.3�

Like Wilfred Hackenbroich, present day researchers agree on a functional network of infrastructure, and its performance in coordination would lead to a better yielding in terms of not only the revenue generation but also for a better social and ecological conditions. James Corner, another urbanist too states in his essay Terra Fluxus that Landscape as a basic building element of urban rather than architecture (or built forms) would perform better simply for the fact that landscape has the quality to

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adapt itself to the changing conditions and it has the ability to bind both the built and the open spaces together and function as one4.

A Promising Discipline In the early 1990s there was a concern among the urbanists about the way our cities were being designed. The approach was getting stereotypical and the outcome predictable. Researchers and urban theorists were having a totally new outlook on the perception of the city. They tend to understand the subtleties of a city not through just the physicality that made a city, but by understanding the social dynamics and the role the territory played in shaping it. The percept was of understanding the city by understanding various forces acting on it. Landscape Urbanism as a theory was evolving during that time, and Charles Waldheim, the person who quoted the term “Landscape Urbanism” stated: “Landscape Urbanism describes a disciplinary realignment currently underway in which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism. …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 constructred.5”

The emphasis is clearly shifting on understanding the methodology in which ‘landscape’ as an integral part of infrastructure would perform. It is a fact that urban intervention through a lens of landscape, like landscape itself, would make it more adaptable to scenarios unpredicted. Since more than the built the landscape, being unified with nature and local ecology infuses the built within it. Hence landscape as infrastructure would play a more sensitive role in evolving an urban. As Felix Guattari states: “…nature cannot be separated from culture; in order to comprehend the interactions between ecosystems, the mechanosphere and the social and individual Universes 6

of reference, we must learn to think ‘transversally’. ”

Guattari emphasises on the role of ‘landscape’ and its expanse in an urban domain to operate in multi-disciplinary model. And landscape as a Green entity plays a very important role in connecting and keeping together these infrastructures.

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Landscape [as green] Infrastructure Landscape infrastructure in the recent past has been considered as an important asset in urbanity, and its intent is perceived beyond just a ‘green’ element in the city.

Landscape is conceived as an element which plays a role beyond just romanticising spaces, landscape here releases itself from this clichĂŠ. And to understand landscape in totality, in this context, we have to speculate its potentials past its immediate rejoinder. Landscape has the ability to alter and enhance the potentials of other systems of urbanism like the water system, sewers, road networks etc. It can maintain the ecological balance not only by introducing varied species of vegetation, but also by a phased strategy of cultivation; where it adapts to the prevailing context and evolves in time.

The multifunctional nature of landscape infrastructure assets, underpinned by ecosystem services, and would mean that they can deliver a diverse range of benefits which are mutually reinforced and can be enhanced by the connectivity of these assets7. While dealing with landscape infrastructure various aspects are needed to be considered, like the climate change adaptation, production of crops, water management, dealing with wastes (biodegradable and non-biodegradable), importance of system to local ecology, economic values and its impact on health and social conditions. The setup related to these aspects accounts in the development of the overall infrastructure.

Implication In the context of China, in the urge of rapid urbanisation, the ecological factors are being neglected and only emphasis is given to the built environment and the utilitarian spaces that generate revenue. In the book Infracity, the author states that there needs an interconnection of various nodes and there needs an accessibility to various functional attractors. This guarantees the efficient system of an urban centrality, where the territorial vision is a multiple concentration of activities (business, commerce, educational, hospitals, recreational etc.) should all evolve into an integrated system of reticular centralities fed by efficient network connection8. In such a scenario, the open spaces become more viable to undergo transformation and encourage better performance systems integrated with the green infrastructure.

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The more traditional ways in which we speak about landscape and cities, the way they have been conditioned throughout the nineteenth century, cities are seen to be busy with the technology of high density buildings, transportation infrastructure, and revenue producing development. The undesirable effects of this include congestion, pollution, and various forms of social stress; whereas landscape, in the form of parks, greenways, street trees, esplanades and gardens. It is generally seen to provide both salve and respite from the deleterious effects of urbanization9. One of the most common examples, referred to in this context, by James Corner is the Manhattan’s Central Park. Central Park, although is a physical detachment from the urban grid of Manhattan, performs beyond just the solo realm of ‘landscape’. Corner says that landscape here drives the process of city formation.

Figure 2: Plan: Central Park in the dense constructed urban grid, New York (Source: unknown)

The landscape of Central Park integrates a reservoir that retains the storm water within and contributes to the local hydrological system. This also acts as a landscape element and becomes a space for social interaction and activities. The entire park in its course of more than a century and a half has adapted with the cities changing infrastructure and evolved a culture. Till date it acts as a major green reservoir to the city and is of a great environmental support to New York. However, Charles Waldheim in an interview with Jeff stein states that landscape and parks were perceived to be an exception to the city. The pastoral, picturesque landscape tradition in America is characterized by the park as a place apart from the city, both KELVEKAR, Shantesh

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morally and physically. Whereas landscape urbanism argues quite the contrary, that the city is itself a place of natural flows and human beings are embedded in those flows. Landscape urbanism is much more interested in the synthesis between models of the natural world and the shape of the city, as opposed to a contrast between the city and the natural world10.

Figure 3: The Promenades of Paris (Source; unknown)

A primitive example of integrating landscape infrastructure with the other working systems of the city is Haussmann’s Paris. Baron Haussmann was among the first visionaries to formulate a metropolitan scale response to this function and to recognize the opportunity it provided to "modernise" Paris11. The rebuilding of Paris between 1850 and 1870 was an important period in urban history. The boulevards which Haussmann designed integrated various systems of infrastructure within; the boulevard beyond a landscape element catered to take the sewer out from the city and solved the problem of unhygienic condition within. The trees lined up acted as a relief between the wide streets and the residential buildings; also it generated a new typology and encouraged new social and commerce space. A typology where shops and retail outlets were on the ground floor and the top floor included the residences.

This contributed towards a better local economy. Although Haussmann’s model was criticised initially, critiques when revaluated Paris after the failure of some of the modern industrial towns, they found out that it actually changed the entire urban typology and yet adapted itself with the social setup for the betterment. Haussmann’s Paris remains a fundamental structure of even today’s modern day Paris.

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Initial strategies As Dean Fararr says with reference to the industrially affected social and ecological condition of the last decade of the nineteenth century: “We are becoming a land of great cities. Villages are stationary or receding; cities are enormously increasing. And if it be true that the great cities tend more and more to become the graves of the physique of our race, can we wonder at it when we see the houses so foul, so squalid, so ill-drained, so vitiated by neglect and dirt?13”

It is important to understand the context of that period, to which Ebenezer Howard responded by being sensitive to the ecology and attempted to understand the aftereffects of industrialised cities within England. He was conscious of the major migration happening from countryside to the city and was trying to deal with the scenario very delicately by addressing various issues.

Figure 4: Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City (Source: Garden Cities of Tomorrow)

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Howard’s proposal for the creation of a new typology by merging the recovered features of urban interventions with the geographies of countryside gave scope for the concept of Town-Centre and encouraged sub-urban condition12. His “City of Tomorrow” was reflected into a project, The Garden City of Letchworth in 1903 by architects Barry Parker and Raymond Unwin. Louis de Soissons designed Welwyn Garden City in the mid-1920’s, which was yet another interpretation of Ebenezer Howard’s planning strategy, but was designed with more sensitivity towards the motor age and consciously dealt the issues of health, safety and well-being.

Figure 5: Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City concept used to design Letchworth (Source: Professor Simon Atkinson's Urban Design Theory Seminar Web Page, University of Texas)

The major drawback of this planning strategy was that each city was designed for a certain volume of people and if the city had to expand in future, it had to repeat a similar module around it, but had no provision to inherit within the existing setup.

This led to the failure of the model for the fact that duplicating the entire set of infrastructure, including the services and connectivity was a highly expensive affair.

Moreover it did not serve beyond its conceived vision, which although with less

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sensitivity towards ecology and society, the industrial towns of that period did. Also, these industrial towns were much easier and faster to construct.

Towards a better ecology In I965, Secretary of the Interior Stewart Udall appointed Ian McHarg to a task force of American Institute of Architects on the Potomac River basin. McHarg decided to use his research carried out and the output of his studio courses in the University of Pennsylvania. The Potomac River basin study in the late 1960s and early 1970s was an influential project with reference to the ecological concerns. It was the first project to combine the physiographic region and the river basin as the primary organising context for ecological planning and design. It considered the existing conditions and anticipated future scenarios. It also considered varied landscape scales, from micro to macro level, and diverse physiographic regions within the river basin; the summarised patterns of topography, geology, soils, hydrology, vegetation, current land use and potential uses deemed suitable for the territory14.

McHarg along with his students did an intense analysis of the site before designing and concluded his research by terming it “An Ecological Inventory�. He stated that a prerequisite for an intelligent intervention and proposing adaptable solutions one needs to understand the local conditions thoroughly. He further states that, if one now knows historical geology, climate and physiography, then the water regimen becomes comprehensible; the pattern of rivers and aquifers, their physical properties and relative abundance, oscillation between flood and drought. Knowing the foregoing and the prior history of plant evolution, we can now comprehend the nature and pattern of soils. By identifying physiographic, climatic zones and soils, we can perceive order and predictability in the distribution of constituent plant communities.

Animals are fundamentally plant related so that given the preceding information, with the addition of the stage of succession of the plant communities and their age, it is possible, both to understand and to predict the species, abundance or scarcity of wild animal populations.15 The attempt he is trying to make is to derive an analogy between the flora and the fauna, and its presence with the local ecological system. He says, once we understand this subtle balance of the existing landscape, the approach would then

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Figure 6: Overlays of factors to reveal spatial patterns of “intrinsic suitabilities� for diverse land uses, Potomac River Basin Study of 1965-66 (Source: Design with Nature)

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be more sensitive towards the environment and nature, and the design would then be highly sensitive towards nature and would be an adaptable solution with respect to the evolving context.

Mohan Rao, a landscape architect from India while designing the landscape for the world heritage site at Hampi, India; which was once the capital of Vijaynagar Empire, understood the local geological and hydrological systems thoroughly before intervening. The hydrological system evolved during the reign of this dynasty was a highly sophisticated model for irrigation, and it catered the farmers of this otherwise arid and rocky region the water from Tungabhadra River adequately. However, these aqueducts and canals were ruined over a period of time and were dilapidated. Rao understood the local geological and topographic conditions and derived a phased landscape solution which merged and responded with nature.

In the present day scenario, we need to be very sensitive towards the pertaining contexts. One has to detach him/herself from the shallow lucrativeness of the rapid urbanisation and consider the local conditions to derive an adaptable solution. This does not mean yielding lesser revenue through these territories. But definitely would mean considering the environment before destroying it, considering the bigger picture. The ecosystem services we provide are like an investment for yielding a better lifestyle which is highly adaptable and is in favour of everyone.

Conclusion There is a conscious stride among urbanists and strategists towards ecology these days. But the people actually working with nature are a handful and the rate of urbanisation is tremendous. The concern is that by the time we understand our stake in urbanity, it probably would be too late to rectify. Our approach needs to be matured enough and malleable enough to cater in different ecological and geological conditions, and also has to consider other factors of social and economic domain.

Urbanism is a never ending phenomena, and adaptable methodologies area really important to be implemented. While new cities are always being formed, we also need to cleanse the existing cities from within. Sociologist Galen Cranz makes a point that those having interest in the character of urban life should seize on parks as a primary element in constructing the urban, and that parks are a perfect miniature KELVEKAR, Shantesh

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world that provides norms for the larger world to live up to16. But cities are not about just providing parks from within argues landscape Architect Adrian Geuze, in context of Dutch landscape. He states: “…there is absolutely no need for parks anymore, because all the nineteenthcentury problems have been solved and a new type of city has been created. The 17 park and greenery have become worn-out clichés. ”

As Julia Czerniak says, Geuze appears to be arguing less for the erasure of the landscape than for the reconsideration of an exhausted typology18. Although Geuze and Cranz seem to have contradicting ideologies, in either cases both are considerate with the appearance, presence and performance of open spaces within the setup of a contemporary nature and culture.

Several projects internationally have been recognised in the recent past, which have reused the enormously scaled degraded zones (like barren industrial lands or dumping zones) as an urban intervention, with landscape being primary medium through which strategies are being intervened. A few to name are Adrian Geuze and Field Opertation’s Fresh Kills at Staten Islands, NYm and Rem Koolhaas and OMA’s Park Downsview, Toronto. These projects have a phased tactic to approach towards the existing scenarios, tackle with the degraded zones and rejuvenate the local environment. Although these developments are projected to impact urban lifestyle and culture, at its basic core it deals with the landscape and ecology to mutate other conditions over a period of time.

When it comes to urbanity, an urban can never be designed, but rather it evolves in time. In the urge to grow faster, if there remains a narcistic approach among urbanists, then it probably would make a remarkable intervention in terms of physical infrastructure but it really would be implying on site rather than understanding the locale dynamics to derive a solution; in fact there is no solution per se to the evolving urban since the change is inevitable. It would be more sensitive to establish ourselves into the existing realm and provide generative points from where the systems start to operate in conjunction. A sense of interdependency develops within the various systems of ecology, sociology and economy and help better fruition culture and lifestyle. This interdependency appears promising from the domain of ecology, as clearly seen nature rules over all the built forms.

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Bibliography: 1 – Clementi, Alberto. Di Venosa, Matteo. Infracity. Barcelona, Spain: LISt Laboratorio Internazionale Editoriale Sas, 2003 2 –Smil, Vaclav. Enriching the Earth. Fritz Haber, Carl Bosch, and the Transformation of World Food Production Food Production. Cambridge, Massachusetts, London, England: The MIT Press, 2001 3 –Sonnabend, Regina. Serve City. Bauhaus, Germany: The Bauhaus Dessau Foundation, 2003 4 –Waldheim, Charles, The Landscape Urbanism Reader. (Corner, James. Terra Fluxus) Princeton, USA: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006 5 –Waldheim, Charles, The Landscape Urbanism Reader. Princeton, USA: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006 6 – Guattari, Felix. The Three Ecologies. London: The Athlone Press, 2000 7 –Landscape InstituteGreen infrastructure: connected and multifunctional landscapes.Landscape Institute, London, England: Badrock Design, April 2009 8 – Clementi, Alberto. Di Venosa, Matteo. Infracity. Barcelona, Spain: LISt Laboratorio Internazionale Editoriale Sas, 2003 9 –Waldheim, Charles. The Landscape Urbanism Reader. (Corner, James. Terra Fluxus) Princeton, USA: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006 10 –Waldheim, Charles in an interview with Stein, Jeff. GROUNDSWELL The rise of landscape urbanism. Boston, USA 11 –Jordan, David. Transforming Paris: The Life and Labors of Baron Haussmann, New York, USA: The Free Press, 1995 12 –Howard, Ebenezer. Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902), USA: MIT Press, 1965 (new edition) 13 –(Fararr, Dean.: Author’s Introduction) Howard, Ebenezer. Garden Cities of Tomorrow (1902), Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 1965 (new edition) 14 –Ed. Conan, Michel. Environmentalism in Landscape Architecture, Washington, USA: Dumbarton Oaks Research Library and Collection, 2001 15 –McHarg, Ian. An ecological method for landscape architecture,1969 16 –Cranz, Galen. The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America, Cambridge, USA: MIT Press, 1982 17 –Arriola, Andreu. Modrrn Park Design. (Geuze, Adrian. Moving beyond Darwin) Michigan, USA: Thoth, 1993 18 –Czerniak, Julia. Hargreaves, George. Large Parks. Princeton, USA: Princeton Architectural Press, 2007

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