Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents

Dissimulating the Sustainable City

Andrés Duany, Emily Talen

• Publisher: New Society Publishers
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781550925364
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Sustainability in Architecture

In contemporary Western society, urban development is regarded as an unfortunate blight from which nature provides a much-needed respite. This apparent dichotomy ignores the interdependence between human settlement and the natural world. In fact, one of the most pressing problems facing urban theorists today is determining how to resolve the tension between the built and natural environments, in the process creating truly sustainable cities.

Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents is a collection of essays exploring the debate over urban reform, now polarized around the two competing paradigms of Landscape Urbanism and the New Urbanism. Landscape Urbanism is conceived as a more ecologically based approach, while New Urbanism is more concerned with the built form. Well-known and influential urban theorists such as Andrés Duany and James Howard Kunstler delve into the impact of the tension between the two perspectives on:

• Smart growth
• Neighborhood design
• Sustainable development
• Creating cities that are in balance with nature

While there is significant overlap between Landscape Urbanism and the New Urbanism, the former has assumed prominence amongst most critical theorists, whereas the latter's proponents are more practically oriented. Given that these two sets of ideas are at the forefront of sustainable urban design, the analysis– and potential reconciliation—offered by Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents is long overdue.

Andrés Duany is a leading proponent of the New Urbanism and is a founding principal at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.

Emily Talen is a professor at Arizona State University and the author of four previous books on urban design.

REMINISCENCES

1

Looking Backward:
Notes on a Cultural Episode

ANDRÉS DUANY AND EMILY TALEN

IN THE MIDDLE YEARS OF THE LAST CENTURY, Jose Luis Sert summoned designers and critics to Harvard with the intention of defining a discipline to be called urban design. Records of the annual meetings show reams of tentative disquisition.¹ That no conclusions were drawn, even though the gatherings took place in the presence of the exemplary urbanism of Cambridge, signaled from the outset that empirical evidence was to be held outside the discourse.

Not until 2010, with the semicentennial proceedings commemorating Sert’s quest, did it become clear that his legacy to urban design, at least in the academy, had been a consensus to avoid consensus. This clarification arrived by way of contrast, as a replacement paradigm became visible: the highly focused academic agenda called Landscape Urbanism.

Meanwhile, outside the academy, another consensus had become dominant, this one based specifically on the empirical observation of places like Cambridge. It was called the New Urbanism.²

By the end of the century, the practicing design professions had come to support the principles of the New Urbanism (by its several names) with remarkable unanimity: Americans should drive less and live more compactly because of concerns related to pollution, health, economics, social equity, and energy use.³

The particulars were still in debate, but that basic outline of the human habitat had largely been settled. The instruments to achieve it would be based on the pedestrian shed, an urban pattern in which the basic needs of daily life are within walking distance. These would be integrated to regional and transportation patterns for access to the complete repertoire of special needs. The buildings would not be megastructures, but multiple and compatible and designed sequentially in response to evolving circumstances, under the guidance of the existing administrative protocol of codes — which would be re-written accordingly.⁴ From this model would ensue what was then known to be sustainable for both the human and the natural habitat.⁵

The New Urbanism was close to supplanting the tenacious paradigm of suburban sprawl, which had been the unintended consequence of a century’s search for the “true synthesis” of the social and natural realms. The original proposition, called the Garden City, had dissipated long before — when geographic discipline was made unnecessary by the ubiquity of the automobile. But the New Urbanism, especially through Transect-based codes and LEED-ND (for Neighborhood Development), was poised to become a new standard. Rather than administering protection of nature, the new strategy would be projective, enabling an urbanism that humans needed and desired, and would therefore be loath to abandon. And it was to be market-oriented: those who could choose would not want to inhabit suburban sprawl.

As the Congress for the New Urbanism conceived the campaign, the effort seemed to provide enough intellectual content to support research, stimulate debate, and keep reform-minded designers well occupied: How much compactness should be expected, with development driven also by market expectations? To what extent could natural processes be accommodated without undermining human prerogatives? How could the socioeconomic segregation enabled by the automobile be reversed? Should urban growth be bounded as conceived by Howard, or channeled as proposed by McKaye? How to incorporate food production, energy sourcing, and the inevitable impoverishment into an urbanism adapted to the twenty-first century? These proposals would have to be implemented within then-current bureaucracies, through the friction of an angry and confused public, a venal political system, a development industry programmed for simplistic solutions, and — as it turned out — the opposition of the design academy.

At the turn of the century it became clear that the more intellectually compelling debate was no longer against conventional suburbia, but between the New Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism, two paradigms with differing visions of nature and society. Landscape Urbanism had managed to overcome the reflex that had kept the academy uncommitted for half a century — not by challenging Sert’s discourse, but by unifying the academies against an opponent: explicitly taking on the threat of New Urbanism and proposing to “undermine its certainties, explode its limits, ridicule its preoccupations.”⁶

The New Urbanists did not initially engage the challenge. Ann Spirn’s early critique in The Granite Garden — that there had been “a fundamental lack of understanding of how natural processes shape cities, towns and regions” — was dismissed with the facile retort that Commonwealth Avenue, which appeared on the cover of her book, could not be built following the prescriptions of the text within.⁷

In retrospect, the New Urbanists’ failure to assimilate Spirn’s prescient and reasonable message was a strategic blunder. Years of practice complying with mandatory federal standards had coarsened their ecological sensibility. The natural processes, which were accommodated only as required by law, had not been polemicized. A withering emphasis on socially determined designs for public space opened New Urbanism to the accusation that it was dismissive of nature. New Urbanists, responding to the architectural critiques of Jane Jacobs, William White, Jan Gehl, and Oscar Newman, were both socially and environmentally responsible, yet did not appear to be so.

For years, the emergent challenge had been overshadowed by a distracting debate over architectural style. It seemed that academic architects would not go along with a New Urbanist standard of a contextual architecture cooperating toward spatial definition. The discipline was seen as an intrinsic constraint on their creativity. New Urbanism had underestimated their profound discontent. Not even the spectacular success of modernist buildings within a New Urbanist discipline, of HafenCity in Hamburg (opened in 2015), could assuage the avant-garde architect’s prerogative of unfettered innovation.

In strategic contrast, Landscape Urbanism sought favor within the architectural academy by providing refuge from urban discipline. Nature’s “indeterminacy and flux”⁸ was understood to allow freely designed buildings as freestanding objects within a landscape both buffering and unifying their individualism. A brilliantly argued and lavishly illustrated agenda to restore unconstrained form-making was on offer⁹ — in exchange for the dominant position within Sert’s old Urban Design triad of architecture, urban planning, and landscape architecture, where landscape architecture had been the junior partner.

Rather than an urban fabric based on the spatial definition by buildings, landscape would be the “structuring medium.” “The look and shape of the city” was to be a matter of “open space within which buildings are set.”¹⁰ When Stan Allen stated that “designers can activate space and produce urban effects without the weighty apparatus of traditional space making,”¹¹ it was a radical proposition only against the then-consensus that a disciplined building frontage was the primary component of a successful urban outcome — and its absence a catalyst for failure.

This “critical” position forced Landscape Urbanism to discard all the constituent elements of the dominant paradigm, leading to a deformation professionelle. With an aplomb unique to the academy, there would be an exploration of den...