“Urbanism and the Landscape Architect
Mark Hough. May 30, 2013
Landscape architects are not given nearly enough recognition for being urbanists.
This is not because we don’t get enough work in cities but, rather, it is the types of projects we get or, more importantly, don’t get. We have always been the go-to designers for parks, waterfronts and streetscapes, but have had a tougher time finding seats at the table alongside (or instead of) planners and architects when broader planning decisions are being made. Because of this, we are usually forced to respond to change orchestrated by others rather than direct it ourselves. Exceptions to this certainly exist, but aside from landscape architects working as planners in public offices, there aren’t many.
I’m not whining. I’m just trying to establish a benchmark in relation to the more optimistic direction I see things headed. Urban design is changing, and it is changing fast. Due in large part to environmental and climatological crises that are translating directly into quality of life issues, cities are focused on their urban landscapes as perhaps never before. This is not groundbreaking news, and I’m not the first person to bring it up, but it is still a worthy discussion.
Urban landscape is a tricky term that is often misunderstood and incorrectly used by people who don’t really know what to do with it. Architects, for instance, whose preference for a top-down, figure-ground approach to urban design that lets buildings alone dictate urban form, relegates the landscape to a series of insertions fitting within the pattern of buildings. Planners, whose sensibilities are typically more in line with landscape architects, don’t really get it either. Their habit of treating landscape as generic green shapes on land use maps or as elements to standardize within form-based codes isn’t much better.”


![The Atlantic Cities:
Is It Time to Move Past Urban Studies and Toward Urbanization Science?
Eric Jaffe. March 19, 2013
William Solecki compares the current study of cities to natural history in the 19th century. Back then most natural scientists were content to explore and document the extent of biological and behavioral differences in the world. Only recently has science moved from cataloguing life to understanding the genetic code that forms its very basis.
It’s time for urban studies to evolve the same way, says Solecki, a geographer at Hunter College who’s also director of the C.U.N.Y. Institute for Sustainable Cities. Scholars from any number of disciplines — economics and history to ecology and psychology — have explored and documented various aspects of city life through their own unique lenses. What’s needed now, Solecki contends, is a new science of urbanization that looks beyond the surface of cities to the fundamental laws that form their very basis too.
“What we need is a comprehensive, integrated, system-level analysis of the city-building process,” says Solecki.
Solecki recently made the case for a new science of urbanization in an issue of Environmentmagazine [PDF], alongside environmental scholar Karen Seto of Yale and geography colleague Peter Marcotullio of Hunter. The current fragmentary nature of urban studies, they write, has led to a disconnected “smorgasbord of information” about cities. In response, they suggest moving away from the study of cities as “places” and toward the study of urbanization as a “process.”
“Urban studies illustrates the diversity of cities, the conditions under which cities are built,” says Solecki. “But that really, in large part, hasn’t focused on the process through which there’s this ongoing development or change of cities. … I think one of the things we can start to ask is how do we look at cities as not only objects, but also to look at them in a slightly more sophisticated way.”
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