1.

Landscape Urbanism
✓ According to Charles Waldheim, chair of the landscape architecture department at Harvard University:
Landscape urbanism is a theory of urban planning which promotes the general idea that landscape, rather than
architecture, is more capable of organizing the city and enhancing the urban experience.
✓ On the other hand, James Corner, the head of Field Operations and chair of the landscape architecture
department at the University of Pennsylvania, suggests that:
Landscape urbanism is an approach to urbanism where buildings and landscapes are synergistic and must be
considered, planned, and designed together.
✓ To be more specific, it seeks to reintroduce critical connections with natural and hidden systems and
proposes the use of such systems as a flexible approach to the current concerns and problems of the urban
condition.

HISTORY
✓ Landscape urbanism originated in the late-1980s, when landscape architects and urbanists such as Peter
Connolly, Richard Weller and Charles Waldheim began to explore the perceived boundaries and limits of
complex urban projects.
✓ Landscape urbanism was born as a reaction to architecture and urban design's inability to offer coherent and
convincing solutions to contemporary urban conditions.
✓ In essence, the theory suggests that landscape should supplant architecture from its traditional role as
the foundation for urban form.
✓ This may be achieved through managing infrastructure, water, biodiversity and human activity, and
examining the ecological and environmental implications of the urban development.
✓ By the late-2000s, the term had come to be used in reference to high-profile projects of urban renewal,
often with commercial investment, such as London's Olympic Park.

CONCEPTS OF LANDSCAPE URBANISM from James Corner

▪ Process over time: Ecological awareness with regard to the built environment.
▪ Horizontality: Horizontal alignment in landscapes, as opposed to vertical structuring.
▪ Working methods/techniques: Techniques should be adapted to the relevant environment.
▪ Imaginary: The failure of 20th century planning is a result of 'the absolute impoverishment of the
imagination to extend new relationships and sets of possibilities.'

EXAMPLES

High Line in New York Millennium Park in Chicago

Olympic Park in London Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle Parc de la Villette in Paris

2. Everyday Urbanism
✓ It is a concept that encourages the close investigation and empathetic understanding of the specifics of daily
life as the basis for urban theory and design.
✓ Margaret Crawford and her co-editors, John Chase and John Kaliski, introduced this term in 1999.
✓ Challenging the formalism of architecture and the abstraction of planning, Everyday Urbanism is grounded
in the specific activities, issues and opportunities that can be found in any urban locale. This could be trips
to supermarkets, the commute to work, journeys that included wide boulevards and mini-malls, luxurious
stores and street vendors, manicured lawns and dilapidated public parks.
✓ It views cities as a conversation between and among its residents. This leads to a dynamic urban form that
evolves not from outside pressures, but from activities that occur within a neighborhood.

CONCEPTS according to Margaret Crawford

✓ Refamiliarization: It domesticates urban space, making it more familiar.
✓ Adaptive urbanism: explores ways to improve what already exists in incremental ways
✓ Dialogism & visual heteroglossia: urban planning as a process of perpetual engagement and reiteration

EXAMPLES

La Brea Avenue, Los Angeles. Visual heteroglossia is Frank Gehry’s building for Chiat Day in Venice, California, takes a
omnipresent in the Los Angeles landscape. Everywhere you similar approach, playing with the same concept in a more
look there are startling juxtapositions of scale, of images, formalized way.
of building types, and of style.

3PM: Parking garden at fresh pond mall in

daytime use;
8PM: After dark, the movie theater
becomes the dominant element in the
parking lot.
Design by Tobias Armborst
Street-side Garage Sale, Hollywood Mother’s Day on La Brea Avenue, Baldwin Heights, LA