Mapping landscape urbanism

Abstract

A map is a context. This project is about contextualization. This process has helped me understand where landscape architecture currently sits as a discipline and offers hints as to where it might go in the future. The function of this mapping is as much about re-shaping an understanding of landscape architecture as it is about understanding landscape urbanism.

Like architecture and city planning, landscape architecture is a discipline in constant flux, redefining its role with and relationship to parallel fields of thought and within broader disciplinary contexts. Over the last few decades it has become apparent that landscape architecture has emerged as a discipline strongly capable of reshaping urban space. Ideas regarding landscapes as active, dynamic, operational systems have paralleled the discipline’s growing relevance within an urban context.

In this time landscape urbanism has emerged as a reaction to landscape architecture’s role within our changing world. For landscape urbanism to contribute anything of value to the future of urbanism, or to the design disciplines, it needs to be contextualized within the larger framework of which it is part, without this context landscape urbanism has no relevance. Where it has come from must be critically assessed as a way to understand its intentions and potential future.

Landscape urbanism may expand architecture’s boundaries to include elements of landscape thinking, but it does not expand the boundaries of landscape design. Its attempt to generate a new approach for urbanism is innovative as architecture, in its effort to expand the discipline’s understanding of site, but as a design discipline, or a strategic approach to thinking, landscape urbanism is not innovative.