Grounding Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism
Published May 15, 2015 · K. Kullmann
Journal of Urban Design
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Abstract
Grounding landscape urbanism and new urbanism Karl Kullmann 2015. Journal of Urban Design 20 (3): 311–313 Landscape urbanism developed in response to the dispersed, organic and edgeless nature of contemporary urbanism. 21 st century cities appeared to more closely resemble emergent ecological processes than the traditional expression of a city as an assemblage of rigid building blocks. The white space that separated and serviced buildings in conventional figure/ground plans is inversed to create green systems that structure—rather than react—to the built city. With this approach, landscape urbanism challenges the template for compactness propagated by new urbanism, which had in turn claimed city design in the 1980s from the retreat of modernism and the policy-focus of urban planning. Each doctrine has presented valid critiques of the other. For instance, Andres Duany rightly protests that mediocre examples of landscape urbanism risk reintroducing the green buffer around modernist architecture, which will kill off the street-life that several generations of urbanists fought so hard to regain. Moreover, when viewed within the constellation of competing city design disciplines, it is likely that landscape urbanism is being used as a vehicle for architectural ambitions to leapfrog urban design and reclaim city planning. In addition, landscape urbanism is susceptible to misappropriation, as designers seeking to keep abreast of the avant-garde have freely retrospectively rebranded their projects as landscape urbanist.