Francesco Repishti

Francesco Repishti is Associate Professor of History of Architecture at the Department of

Architecture and Urban Studies, Politecnico di Milano. His research is mainly directed towards

Modernist and current architecture with regard to the contemporary landscape.

First published in Lotus International (http://www.editorialelotus.it/web/index.php)

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In recent decades, and in particular since the 1997 Graham Foundation

conference in Chicago and key faculty changes at Harvard Graduate School of

Design, the term ‘landscape urbanism’ has been widely debated, and its theoretical

and programmatic foundations analysed. The theory of landscape urbanism,

which is based on a critique of the discipline of urban design and the traditional

models of urbanism and city planning, is presented as an alternative to the ‘New

Urbanism’ movement, and puts forward a model of experimentation that is a

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From Practice to Theory

In a world increasingly conscious of the environment,

landscape urbanism has become an autonomous discipline,

developing its own mode of practice and ideology

hybrid of landscape design and urban planning. To this, speculation has recently

been added on the possible environmental dimension of such an approach – or

rather an attempt to bring about a transformation of urban disciplines according to

an ecological tenor, in response to adjustments in the contemporary sensibility.

The simplicity of the theoretical framework, the attempt to propose a cultural and

disciplinary syncretism in the name of a lost naturalness and the adaptability of

the term landscape together created favourable conditions for an enthusiastic

reception and immediate success with the critics, so that – in the last decade –

landscape urbanism has become an autonomous discipline for which there are now

projects, university courses and extensive academic output.

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Landscape urbanism thus takes the form of an ideology as well as a practice. In

practical terms it lays down that the city can be conceived and designed as if it

were a landscape, overcoming the antithesis of greenery/concrete (from the

planning, social and cultural points of view) and suggesting the concept of an

urban landscape ‘in movement’ capable of promoting positive development.

Although the landscape has historically always played a role in the construction of

the form of the city, landscape urbanism – as James Corner suggests – goes

beyond the design of places like parks, public spaces and gardens, and presents

itself as a practice that can be related to more than one urban scale.

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However, for some years now we have become accustomed to encountering calls, at

different scales, for a new approach to planning in relation to the activity of several

contemporary landscape architects: for example, in territorial planning, in projects

for the reclamation of large disused and residual urban areas or infrastructures,

and in the design of public spaces and parks. The structural conditions that have,

over the years, led to urbanistic action oriented towards the landscape were

revealed when the ‘traditional’ urban model appeared inadequate if applied to post-

industrial situations, and when we realised that the places we live in are more

suburban than urban, more open than closed, more characterised by works of

infrastructure than by works of architecture.

The growing use of the landscape as an agent of urban regeneration cannot, in

fact, be separated from a rise in the number of difficult places presented by and in

post-industrial cities. While the responses of architects to design challenges, such as

the enormous craters found in mining and industrial landscapes, wavered between

strategies, ideal representations, territorial schemes and images, landscape

architects (like Kienast, Walker, Girot, Geuze, Dietrich, Field Operations and

Latz) indicated how it was possible to actually transform such territories, on what

time scales, and using which techniques. It has seemed logical to entrust the task of

tracing in time the new hybrid landscapes of the city to their culture and their

expertise. This represents a genuine discovery for the European milieu, as well as

the realisation that landscape urbanism has been a widespread practice in the

United States, as had been documented by authors including Christian Zapatka

and Peter Walker.

The fact is that, at least since the 1983 competition for the Parc de la Villette in

Paris, the interventions of Peter Walker and George Hargreaves or those of Peter

Latz and Michel Desvigne with Christine Dalnoky, questions of contemporary

landscaping have appeared as an original response accompanied by the

surmounting of an idea of landscape as absence of architecture, by the theorisations

of the French school and by many expressions of land art. Inventions of great

originality and a variety of experiences have for some time suggested three new

factors: the new ecological paradigm as a guide for all actions, the encroachment of

art on the landscaping discipline in parallel with a new idea of ‘active’ and

‘participant’ public space, and the proof of the inability of architecture and

planning to tackle and resolve certain urban places entrusted to landscaping as an

agent of urban regeneration.

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So the landscaping approach, especially in the last few decades, has been the

premise for a profound reappraisal of the planning disciplines which has allowed

the overcoming of a number of contradictions, and has proved instrumental in the

solution of unsettled urban episodes, especially in the creation of public places and

interstitial spaces between individual buildings, between centre and periphery, and

between town and country.

What has been happening for some time, in both Europe and the US, is an

increase in the importance of the action of landscaping: as a solution to the gap

between one building and another or between blocks, in an effort to establish

connections between scattered works of architecture, and in an attempt to find a

medium that would substitute for any perceived loss of sociality. It is a

discontinuity which, inserted into daily scenarios, is able to revive lost

relationships with the character of places in a process of mending degraded or post-

industrial urban environments, in the presence of phenomena of congestion and

dispersion alike.

Called upon opportunistically to fill or somehow create a place by finding a possible

coherence between architecture and the contemporary city, especially in urban cases

around or on the margins of infrastructure or large-scale buildings, the

intervention of landscaping (even before landscape urbanism) has therefore

succeeded in completing, in finding a remedy, in therapeutically mending and

aesthetically recomposing the problematic situations created by building practices

declared no longer manageable, to the point of overturning a traditional

relationship and, at times, paradoxically transforming the architecture near these

new situations into urban voids.

Thus the important ideological and programmatic premises put forward by James

Corner, Mohsen Mostafavi, Alex Wall, Stan Allen and Charles Waldheim seem to

have taken on the character of a theoretical formulation of practices already in use

for some time – a formal transition and construction of rules with a view to

legitimising a discipline made up of a range of different areas of expertise. The

complexity and problematic nature of combining lessons from diverse disciplinary

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theories and from the pluralism of practices and experiences might, however, run

the risk of undergoing a drastic reduction, a simplification and a ‘normalisation’

that pave the way for a levelling out of experimentation.

But it is not important to argue for the superiority of practice over theory, nor to

establish who was the first to coin, with such clarity and immediacy, the

terminology of the movement; the task of this essay is to demonstrate the breadth

of these experiences which have, in any case, developed independently of the more

recent theorisation as well as of the pressures of a traditional and, at times,

reactionary disciplinary structure. So we will try in the first place to trace, in the

practices of the last half century, a diorama of the experiences (including theoretical

ones) to which landscape urbanism has recourse today, investigating some of the

innovations that have emerged thanks to contemporary landscaping: the new

concept of public space, the encroachment of art, landscaping as an agent of urban

regeneration, and the ecological paradigm.

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(http://www.archined.nl/uploads/pics/team10-tuin_01.jpg)

A Team 10 meeting in the garden of Aldo van Eyck.

Public space: Situationist practices and‘experience architecture’

It is possible to discern a first point of rupture, with respect to the ideas of the city

held by the Modern Movement and functionalism, in the reversal of approach

promoted by a realist and situational attitude. This was the conclusion of a long

journey from the rejection of CIAM city planning, which passed first through Aldo

van Eyck’s proposal that a project should be adapted to a precise urban situation

instead of working with a set of mathematical data, thereafter by way of other

members of Team 10, and finally the practices of the Situationist International

and the phenomenologists.

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In his turn van Eyck had under his belt a literary and artistic preparation that

favoured a different way of looking at the built environment, noting within it

objects and situations that before passed unobserved so as to redefine parts of the

city and its boundaries on the basis of the perception of the people who live in it.

The four functions of the Athens Charter were replaced by existentialist and

phenomenological notions like the house, the street, the district and the city, as

superimposed and distinct levels of ‘human association’. Everything was aimed

at overturning the spatial order of the city defined by authorities in an antagonistic

reversal of the hierarchy of public and private space between a space democratically

understood as place of participation and an oligarchic one where decisions were

taken. Without abandoning an imposed planning, architects and city planners

began to collaborate and learn from the peculiarities and irregularities of leftover

spaces, holes and tears in the urban fabric, working with the gaps instead of

putting them aside.

In parallel, the writings of Guy Debord and the Situationists, like Constant’s

‘Description of the Yellow Zone’ in the Internationale Situationniste, identified as

a principal feature of their operation the search for a social relationship between

people, favoured by a succession of situations arranged at random, of ‘exquisite

corpses’ able to generate a meaning in action.

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Approaches similar to this idea, of spaces that set themselves the goal of creating or

fostering sociality, can be found again in the projects for parks and public spaces

realised by landscape architects in recent years – even those less well-known than

West 8, Peter Latz, Vito Acconci or Ian Hamilton Finlay: both in the adoption of

various techniques for the production of localities, going beyond mere

aestheticising, and in producing an ‘active’ public space as the outcome, one that

stimulates participatory uses as an alternative to static contemplation. Such

activation and engagement, as applied to public space, is exemplified by the current

phenomenon of urban farming.

So the legacy taken up and enunciated by so-called landscape urbanism, but not by

it alone, appears to be that of an interest in the lived dimension of urban space as a

place of real sociability – a place to spend time in and not just to be traversed; no

longer solely an aesthetic element.

To this can be added the awareness of having to respond to new environmental,

social, touristic and cultural demands. And also, a response necessary for a second

aspect of innovation as well: the progressive change of attitude provoked, now that

the ‘Bilbao effect’ has faded, by the contemporary experience of tourism. Mass and

low-cost tourism has raised levels of expectation with regard to practices of

entertainment and enticement. These practices are now oriented less towards

individual works of architecture as to the urban aspect – to the ‘liveability’ of cities

– recognised as product and sum of a decorous mix of public spaces, both pedestrian

zones and parkland, and landscape. We might also add that this has been

accompanied by the production of strands of weak architecture with two seemingly

contradictory characteristics: on the one hand, buildings upon which a strong

iconic impact is imposed and, on the other, buildings that are supposed to reassure,

reduced to a few archetypes and a sort of ahistorical abstraction.

Tourism in this genre focuses on the search for a lost ‘urban liveability’ and this

explains why, today, many projects purport to nod in the direction of architecture

that prioritises experience, thereby reinforcing the link between what happened in

the 1950s and ’60s and new practices. The imagination and the capability of the

entertainment industry seem, in fact, to have leapfrogged the bounds of theme

parks to place themselves at the service of a tourism industry and discourse,

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seeking to create seductive urban experiences through the production of localities.

In the past, the task of so-called ‘experience architecture’ was precisely to create

fantastic places/events that mix up landscape, high-tech, nature and media, and

use diverse stories and histories to distinguish one event from another. Content and

communication have, in the past, given rise to places of public information such as

trade fairs, ‘expos’, theme parks, Olympic parks and carnivals, as well as ‘brand

environments’ or ‘brand attractions’; these processes have even been applied to rest

stops on motorways and express routes.

In addition to artistic interventions that constitute elements of rupture and

discontinuity, and whose true objective is a strengthening of the imagination,

projects such as these have often made use of spatial devices derived from the

contribution, suppression or preservation of pre-existing elements: from elements of

the territory able to offer purchase for the gaze, for stories and for social practices.

Sometimes the content of the narration of these alternative realities has coincided

with the environmental and ecological improvement of a place, with an ideal

search for its roots, or it has been enriched by elements reflecting the region and the

values that it represents.

And in pursuit of these goals a desire has emerged to challenge architecture on a

larger scale, so that we observe the notion of planning being used to upgrade

individual spaces, pieces of cities or entire regions that rely on an aestheticisation of

the urban experience, rather than its regulation, as their sole instrument and

organising principle. Some of these planning projects appropriate the strategies of

urban marketing, through which an attempt is made to communicate content by

the staging of spectacular and emotional actions, presented with educational and

narrative – and therefore cultural – characteristics and aims. In addition,

adopting as they do the same mechanisms as were used in the early expos, these

new projects are today considered symbolic of the civil progress of the nations that

host them and, looked at close-up, of the cities that propose them. And, like theme

parks, they have an impact when they succeed in accessibly combining the specific

features of the place – which grounds the element of narration – with an

environmental and media programme.

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If in the past the work of the landscape architect was required only at the end,

today he or she is brought in right from the inception of a project and, as in the

designs of the most famous theme parks, traditional architects and planners have

often stepped aside for landscape architects who in turn have given their

intervention the strong connotation of a natural (although counterfeit) vision,

which is the current positive vision of progress in the Western world, paradoxically

considered primitive and shunned up until a few decades ago.

The encroachment of art and the crossing ofdisciplinary boundaries

One of the paradigms of the theoretical framework of landscape urbanism is its

critique of the rigid separation of disciplines, to which it opposes an

interdisciplinary approach to the city and to architecture, one sought in urban

planning and tackled in the debate over the landscape; this is a debate which has

looked, in recent years, for a rapprochement with other ways of thinking instead of

composing a pre-established picture.

The 1997 Chicago conference proposed eliminating traditional disciplinary

codifications and distinctions between architecture, landscape architecture and city

planning in favour of an infrastructural and systemic conception of the built

environment. For example, James Corner suggested that such an interdisciplinary

approach should bring together the sciences of urban and territorial planning,

ecology, geography, anthropology and sociology, cartography, aesthetics,

philosophy and economics, to the point where the sciences of space would lose their

centrality.

If we look at what has been realised, among the crossing of boundaries between

fields, it is the artistic ingredient that appears most significant in recent years to

the point of having thrown disciplinary schematics into disarray: announced by

the avant-gardes, suggested by three masters of landscaping – Isamu Noguchi,

Luis Barragán and Roberto Burle Marx – and conceptualised and elaborated in

the works of land and earth art. Mixtures and experiences that have broken down

the fixity of contrast and ushered in different perspectives and logics in the

relationship between art of the landscape and city, rich in consequences for the

whole contemporary art of landscaping.17

Only after these experiences in the United States did the professional activity of

landscape (urban) gardeners develop, achieving a leap in scale in parallel to the

artistic movements that have served as a continual source of inspiration and

models: models that, transferred to public spaces, have become patterns, textures,

objects and compositions. Minimalism, land art, abstractionism, pop art and

organicism have been blended into a coherent artistic groundswell in which colour,

material and form are arranged to reveal and transfigure the nature and form of

places. Peter Walker’s public spaces marked out the road onto which were then

grafted the pop experiments and artistic inventions of Martha Schwartz, the

deconstructivism on a territorial scale of George Hargreaves, and the historicist

citations of Kathryn Gustafson. For Schwartz, reference to the methods of avant-

garde bricolage is evident, especially in her attempt to take objects of everyday use

out of their habitual contexts and use them in radically different ways. Even the

European originality of Adriaan Geuze found its cultural references, at Tilburg for

example, by reviving expressions of avant-garde painting. More recently, Mary

Miss has outlined a different role for artistic insertions into Irvine’s Great Park,

conceived on the basis of a programme of public space that offers concrete

experiences in relation to themes of environmental and social sustainability.

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(images/repishti/mary miss.jpg)

Mary Miss, Greenwood Pond, Double Site

Process not plan

Naturally linked to the experience of landscape art, the project of landscape

urbanism formulates a process and not a plan, develops an open configuration and

not abstract volumes, and is concerned with urban surfaces and not forms. So the

task assigned to the plan of ordering the city through a radically horizontal

urbanism appears obsolete; in truth it had already been fragmented to some extent

over the last 30 years by practices of piecemeal transformation applied by urban-

scale projects to the benefit of an ecological way of thinking about the city, and at

the expense of the typically inherited urban logic represented by plans,

programmes, grids, urban design, etc.

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At the beginning of the 1980s, and above all spearheaded by the experience of

plans for the regeneration of Barcelona, the notion of the ‘urban project’ was

formulated. Today this notion covers a vast, rich and varied range of experiences –

one in which the urban project is seen as an intermediate area of city planning

outlined as a set of mutable and many-sided approaches, in which forays into the

fields of infrastructure and the landscape have represented a necessary condition of

feasibility. Incursions that have been decisive moments of suspension of

consolidated practices – disciplinary and design practices, technical and regulatory

ones, those of decision-making and control – and that have ushered in, at the

concrete level of transformation, new theoretical approaches and working methods.

Manuel de Solà-Morales defined the urban project as ‘a project to give form to a

physical, architectural and engineering process that has to combine land,

construction and infrastructure’; his younger brother Ignasi de Solà-Morales

coined the term terrain vague to define privileged areas of intervention – areas that

invite development because of their indeterminacy and sense of incompleteness.

How can we forget that in 1984 the completion of the Moll de la Fusta in

Barcelona set in motion, with the first section of the Rónda Litoral, an intervention

that went on to win back for the city approximately six kilometres of seafront and

beaches, offering liveable and participant public spaces that amount to one of the

largest public-facing urban projects in Europe, comparable only with certain

experiences in New York? The strategy of recuperation, implemented by

transforming interstitial squares and spaces, has interacted with the project of

completing and expanding major road systems, rendering the themes of

infrastructure compatible with the needs of housing and landscape. The Barcelona

example was, in fact, a planning intervention capable of transforming the urban

landscape without limiting itself to the imposition of rules about the various

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elements of which it was to be composed over time; it went beyond the idea, in such

a fragmented situation, of attempting to resolve the problem with unifying

gestures, or by means of grand, so-called iconic works of ‘urban architecture’.

(images/repishti/Manuel de Solaa Morales.jpg)

Manuel De Solà Morales, ‘Moll de la Fusta,’ Barcelona

Models of urban settlement organised around the creation of a park are also part of

the tradition of city planning. They have functioned chiefly for circumscribed areas

like small garden cities, university campuses, model villages and science or

technology parks, but in recent years have helped to create a series of enclaves

visibly incapable of relating to one another or to other nearby contexts. This

phenomenon frequently resurfaces today when the notion of planning applied to the

creation of housing in disused industrial areas reveals an inability to overcome

these limitations and produce ‘localities’. The works of the many landscape

architects cited in this essay (and featured in the issue of Lotus international from

which it is adapted) have been proposed as agents of urban regeneration in

difficult places and in zones of the city constructed according to a numerical and

dimensional logic without any attention to ideas of habitability and the quality of

the urban environment. Often these difficult places are in areas fragmented or cut

off by the transport infrastructures that habitually delimit the city, like medieval

walls, or by structures used for logistical purposes and the interchange of goods.

They are spaces occupied by elements located at different levels or suspended above

the ground that cannot be dealt with by calculations of useful surfaces, nor by a

horizontal planning that limits itself to generating new alignments which are only

on paper and not visual.

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Ecosophy

Finally we come to the most recent theorisation of an ecological dimension (or

drift) in relation to this approach, as if the question could be resolved in a different

use of the terms ‘landscape’ or ‘urbanism’ – as adjectives. Mohsen Mostafavi,

editor with Gareth Doherty of the volume Ecological Urbanism (2009), points out

that a change of outlook and an idea of progress that necessarily no longer places a

certain ideal of humanity at the centre can be traced back to the ethical and

political notion of ecosophy, as taken up by Félix Guattari in The Three

Ecologies. Added to this, in the last few years a far-reaching campaign aimed at

awakening public opinion and exposing a quantity of unexpected facts (and

mobilising awareness of them) has, in fact, brought the environmental question to

the forefront.

While analysis of the premise of ecological urbanism raised to the level of a

theoretical framework is not at all banal, it would not be correct to place the results

of these diverse ways of thinking on the same plane – if for no other reason than to

do so would risk a degrading of the reasoning put forward in this essay. On other

occasions, however, people have reflected on how the influence of ‘greenolatry’ has

gone beyond the notion of metaphor. It has abandoned mere words to place itself

more at the centre of the architectural debate, resulting in profound changes in

architectural production in a deviation with regard to what had gone before.

If seen in the context of the exhaustive litany of well-intentioned actions suggested

by the inhabitants of the world’s wealthiest nations, the call for more sustainable

practices appears, in most cases, to be a sort of ethical camouflage – a strategic

manoeuvre that stems in equal parts from the burden of accumulated guilt and the

allure of radical chic. The promise of resolution appears in the idea of a ‘green’

aestheticisation aimed at bringing about the return of a figurative unity of the

territory – yet all too soon destined to be revealed as a superstructure or, at most,

to present itself as ground rather than figure. Purportedly sustainable

interventions are designed to conceal and make amends for nature, with a

superficial biomorphism assigned the elementary task of covering up the mineral

reality of constructions in order to render them familiar and homelike.

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More essays and projects

In another way, if all this corresponds – as Mostafavi has pointed out – to a

realisation of the impending need for a series of operative attentions to the

sustainability of the intervention in relation to the context (for instance, actions

aimed at preventing various types of pollution: noise, air, dust, etc., to the drainage

and recovery of water, to operations of planned maintenance, to the growth of

plants over time), then the ecological approach is reduced to the plane of technical

coordination and the correct application of working procedures. In addition to the

architectural digressions that would inevitably ensue, such a scenario would entail

the development of a kind of bio-planning governed by advanced environmental

standards and techniques, and founded on scientific knowledge.

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A different scenario would be the outgrowing or transcending of the urban and

architectural culture expressed by the Modern Movement, of the typological, formal

and morphological culture that has been at the root of the training of entire

generations. Such displacement, brought about perhaps by a consolidation of

ecological orthodoxy, would lead to the environmental question being assumed as a

condition cutting across all other factors; under these conditions the city would be

likened to a permeable, natural or agricultural territory, one in which all action

would be guided by this new ethic. Up to now, an important point in favour of this

vision has been the premise that the ecological paradigm is no longer the expression

of one part of the world or of an elite. Free from the trap of self-referentiality, it

presents itself as universal and as the product of a way of thinking common to all

rather than of intellectualism. But Guattari himself had already argued, in 1989,

that this aspiration could be fulfilled only under the conditions of a genuine

political, social and cultural revolution, one capable of reshaping the objectives of

the production of material and immaterial goods.

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