First, an update on this fall’s virtual SF Open Studios! I’ll be participating in the Rose Event on Saturday, September 26th from 10am-2pm PDT, one of four live events together featuring 250+ artists. Anyone anywhere can join for free–click here to join/register as a guest (you’ll get email reminders if you register ahead of time). Drop by for some conversation and virtual visits to places that have inspired me.
In the meantime, please check out my new promo video! (You can find it here if nothing happens when you click on the image below.)
In my last few posts I went into two possible benefits of bringing pieces of native ecosystems into cities, softening a little the “island civilization” model of a complete separation between urban “islands” and surrounding nature. The first is strengthening urban “ecological sense of place,” and the second is countering (symbolically at least) the oppositional relationship between city and nature that has led to such disastrous consequences for the latter—if not ultimately for both.
Here and in the next few posts I’ll move toward describing what an approach that’s similar to “island civilization” in spirit but more nuanced in form might look like. To illustrate the danger of going too far in the opposite direction, but also because parts of deserve consideration, I’ll start by introducing a model from the design world called Landscape Urbanism which proposes essentially the polar opposite of “island civilization.” (Fellow designers might find this discussion a bit dated, since it’s mostly based on recollections from grad school two decades ago filled in by some more recent reading. Please feel free to correct or add anything you’d like to in the comments section of this post on the website—one of my reasons for this blog is to encourage these conversations!)
Honxing Community, Dalian, China, 2009, by Sasaki. A number of Landscape Urbanist tropes are visible here; even in cases where they’re more convincing than this, they need to be weighed against the costs of urban expansion. The arrangement of the buildings is inspired by ecological forms of the valley site, though in the ultimate example of aesthetics over ecological function, that ecology has been built over. The green roofs and interstitial ground plantings, even if they looked anything like the original vegetation, would obviously be no replacement for it. (Andrés Duany, “An Album of Images,” in Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents. Original image source: Sasaki & Associates, Intersection & Convergence.)
Landscape Urbanism, originating in the 1990’s, advocates for upgrading rather than halting or reversing the current trend of spatially blending nature and city (i.e. sprawl), as a way of both acknowledging and reinforcing the fact that our activities can’t be separated from natural processes, physically or conceptually. Being dishonest about this reality of inseparability, it claims, is actually detrimental to environmental health. Putting nature and civilization on opposing sides creates either outright hostility toward the environment or objectification and idolization of small parts of it that we consider “pure.” The latter results in neglect of other parts that are less intact or pleasing despite their still having ecological value. (And idolization itself can have its own harmful effects, as in “loving to death” our national parks.) In theory, spatially mixing the two extremes leads to a heightened, inescapable awareness of how we and our environment depend on each other for a healthy existence.
So rather than restoring ecological—and human—health through urban densification, Landscape Urbanism proposes that environmental patterns and processes act as the structuring element for a generally horizontal, dispersed “urban” landscape such that either everything or nothing is urban depending on how you look at it. In projects and proposals following this model, urban infrastructure is everywhere, but so is “nature”—from stream and wildlife corridors down to greenery on seemingly every built surface, with a focus on native species and “ecologies.” (The pluralizing makes me roll my eyes; in fact it’s a tame example of Landscape Urbanists’ often ridiculously impenetrable writing style—check out the now-famous Landscape Urbanism Bullshit Generator—which along with fancy graphics has been accused of compensating for lazy science. )
Plan of Charleston, SC. On the left, the compact, high-density city as it is, analogous to “island civilization” (in this case, nearly a literal island). On the right, a re-thinking of the city along Landscape Urbanist lines, with natural elements (waterways in this case) rather than streets as structuring elements. The latter is one-quarter as dense, with the other three-quarters forced to go somewhere else—say, to a nearby undisturbed wetland. Charleston wouldn’t be Charleston in the right-hand version, and those strips of coastal habitat would also be better off preserved in that other wetland than mixed with streets and buildings. On the other hand—no, it wouldn’t be Charleston, but it could be some other community that you know and find inspiring. Its environmental deficiencies are real, but it would go to far to say it has no value from a human, experiential standpoint. In designing new cities, it isn’t necessarily either-or. (Duany, “An Album of Images,” in Discontents. Original image source: Duany Plater-Zyberk.)
There are plenty of issues with this “blending” approach, stemming from what’s essentially an erasing of boundaries between humans and nature in the spatial sense but also between the needs of both. It seems to assume that merging the extremes of city and nature into various forms of garden (with native plantings in configurations that are difficult and expensive to maintain, and often too small or superficial to have much ecological function) will keep everyone and everything happy at the same time. This downplays the social and cultural benefits of dense, walkable, human-scaled urban fabric on one hand and the environmental benefits of extensive, unbroken natural habitat on the other. And those downplayed benefits are in fact mutual—dense cities mean less habitat fragmentation, as well as lower carbon emissions that are good for everyone and everything.
I also have problems with the more symbolic justification for erasing boundaries. As my earlier “Realities of Nature” series of posts concludes, our current condition of inseparability from the natural world (whether or not you believe it’s always been our condition) need not be a self-fulfilling prophecy—in fact that inseparability can be the very justification we need for choosing physical separation. And treating parts of the natural world as precious objects isn’t qualitatively much different than, say, preserving archaeological artifacts; we just need to make decisions about what’s feasible and worthwhile using the resources we have.
But I do think certain elements of Landscape Urbanism’s landscape-based approach can have a positive influence on more architecture-focused planning—such as The New Urbanism, considered LU’s competitor, which advocates for traditional dense cities organized around spaces framed by buildings and tends to see natural elements as less relevant in shaping design. (The sometimes-heated debate—see Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents, eds. Andrés Duany and Emily Talen—between the two movements seems to have fizzled early this decade, apparently because it came to be seen as largely theoretical and beside the point given that neither model is mutually exclusive and different contexts call for different approaches.) I don’t think there’s much of an argument that using locally-distinctive natural elements to shape the character of a city and to make nature a larger part of people’s day-to-day experience isn’t a worthy goal—even when those elements are primarily aesthetic, or “visual biophilia” as Duany calls it in Discontents. As I’ve said before, even if it’s hard to quantify, I’d say it’s undeniable that such visuals have an important effect on the urban experience. Biophilia is a real thing, and by definition it’s largely or entirely visual.
The Highline in New York City—one of the best-known examples of Landscape Urbanist-inspired design. It’s limited in scope, more purely landscape architecture than urban design, like the majority of such projects that have gotten built, but it’s shaped urban character through a decidedly landscape-based move. There have been the unsurprising issues with maintenance and installation—vegetation has been planted rather than “colonizing” on its own as planned—but the project illustrates how an urban space conceived as much as an ecological showcase as a recreational space can be successful (not to mention profitable from a real-estate perspective). (High Line, New York by Mike Peel licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.)
But bringing natural elements into urban areas—creating “biophilic cites” as Timothy Beatley calls it in his book of that title—needn’t and shouldn’t mean that city and nature lose their individual identities. Landscape Urbanism aims to correct what it considers the fundamental problem with “island civilization”- like approaches to design—a paradoxical devaluing of the environment as the result of over-valuing it as an exotic “other” that we try to preserve but then forget about. But taking the opposite approach ultimately leads to the same problem of devaluation: nature can’t be valued as nature if it’s become indistinguishable from everything else. (You might say that in so strongly giving identity to cities, it gives up its own.) And whether we view nature as “everywhere” or “elsewhere,” we lose sight of the fact that its continued survival relies on our restraint. The solution is treating nature as something in-between, or as multiple things at once. More thoughts on this to come!
Darren