Corner discusses landscape architecture and urbanism and questions whether the two notions are indeed two separate notions. Corner’s text considers the notion of combining the landscape with the cityscape, creating a more holistic view.
“Landscape themes of organization, dynamic interaction, ecology and technique point to a looser, emergent urbanism, more akin to the real complexity of cities and offering an alternative to the rigid mechanisms of centralist planning.”
“It seems that certain elements within each of the design professions – architecture, landscape architecture, urban design and planning are moving towards a shared form of practice, for which the term landscape holds central significance as described through the formulation of landscape urbanism.”
“Cities can be seen to be busy with the technology of high-density building, transportation infrastructure, and revenue producing development, the undesirable effects of which include congestion, pollution and various forms of social stress whereas landscape, in the form of parks, greenways, street trees, esplanades, and gardens, is general seen to provide both salve and respite from the deleterious effects of urbanization.”
Landscape is strongly attached to “Nature” – Corner brings the example of a city-wide channel designed by engineers in Los Angeles to aid the discharge of water in the event of a flood. Essentially this protects against a violent, threatening nature, which the engineers attempt to gain control over. A community group that took a different view suggested converting the channel into a green corridor – a habitat to protect nature with woodlands, birdsong and fishermen. Corner comments that this is both about bringing landscape into the “cityscape” (the built environment of buildings, paved surfaces and infrastructures) and also about bringing the cityscape into the landscape.
An argument is mentioned that landscape architecture has been marginalized in the past and restricted to superficial aesthetic improvements and that alone it cannot cope with major issues such as waste management and pollution. Similarly, cityscape grossly undermines nature when expanding into it. Corner suggests that the exclusion of urban form and process from any ecological analysis is a major problem.
Corner proposes four provisional themes to cope with this lack of integration:
1) Processes over time (recognition)
Capital accumulation, deregulation, globalization, environmental protection and so on are much more significant for the shaping of urban relationships than are the spatial forms of urbanism by themselves.
We must recognize that “the modernist notion that new physical structures would yield new patterns of socialization has exhausted has failed to contain the dynamic multiplicity of urban processes within a fixed, rigid, spatial frame that neither derived from nor redirected any of the processes moving through it.
This means we should shift attention away from the object qualities of space to the systems that condition the distribution and density of urban form.” Corner suggests mapping as a means to doing this – aiming to understand the way that things work in space and time.
2) The horizontal surface (representation)
Corner emphasizes the strategic importance of understanding the terrain and how operations occur rather than the form of the design. Mapping is proposed once again as a means to developing an understanding and in addition to this, it is important to anticipate future change – a process over time.
3) The operation or working method (implementation)
“How does one conceptualize urban geographies that function across a range of scales and implicate a host of players?”
How do we implement these changes? Many concepts have emerged in the past but failed to develop as they could not be implemented. For Corner, developing a new mode of operations is most important of the four themes.
4) The imaginary (stimulation of creativity)
Corner suggests there is a lack of imagination in developing proposals for change since a lot of the focus is on capital accumulation.
Corner concludes that the failure of earlier urban design and regionally scaled enterprises was the oversimplification, the reduction of the phenomenal richness of physical life.
Corner, J. (2006) Waldheim, Charles. The Landscape Urbanism Reader. Princeton. pp. 21-33
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