Landscape+Urbanism

Category: criticism

  • Second-Rate Urbanism

    Reading through some old articles, I just had to post this quote from Duany – published in the Atlantic – you know the one with the great title ‘The Man Who Reinvented the City’… 🙂  Asked about a May report from the Brookings Institution on The State of Metropolitan America (also check out the interactive map…

  • More on the Urbanism Wars

    GSD as Epicenter The escalation of voices in the (let’s call it debate for lack of a better term) about some of the urbanisms out there – most notably New Urbanism and Landscape Urbanism, has kicked up a notch even in the past few weeks since the initial salvos. There has been a fair amount…

  • Bio-luminescent Trees: WTF?

    Bad idea of the week?  The Inhabitat story “Gold Nanoparticles Could Transform Trees Into Street Lights” mentions new research:  “A group of scientists in Taiwan recently discovered that placing gold nanoparticles within the leaves of trees, causes them to give off a luminous reddish glow. The idea of using trees to replace street lights is an…

  • On Agrarian Urbanism

    An opportunity for point-counterpoint on the topic of Agrarian Urbanism – one that, with the recent explosion of discussion and interest in urban agriculture – is vital to discussing the place of food in the city, and what impact this will have on the form and function of our urban agglomerations.  The topic is poignant…

  • The Suburban Prelude: The City (1939)

    An interesting film, created as part of the 1939 New York World’s Fair, is ‘The City‘, an heavily anti-urban vision of the perils of the the modern city agglomeration.  Using a number of images from both the smoky and polluted industrial Pittsburgh and the crowded, frenetic cosmopolitan New York City of the 1930s, the film…

  • More on Ecological Urbanism

    A recent post regarding Ellen Dunham-Jones talk in Vancouver highlighted the stance of new urbanism not just on landscape urbanism but on ecological urbanism.  Some notes via one of the attendees from – highlights a major disconnect between understanding and rhetoric – particularly that ecological urbanism is focused on some idea of ‘city in nature’ suburbia…

  • Know Thy Annotations…

    I’m really pleased to be able to present a snapshot of the bibliographical evidence related to the existing literature.  While not a complete and total view, this gives hints into some of the theoretical unpinnings of the theory of Landscape Urbanism, which could aid many of the discussions and dispel (or reinforce) some of the…

  • The Landscape Urbanism Wars

    A number of recent posts/discussions outline what is now shaping up as a ‘war’ between the proponents of Landscape Urbanism and those of the New Urbanism. I find it constantly amusing, in this time of blatant political attack ads on television every night (the rift could be DNC v. RNC), to see the polarization that…

  • Island Life

    Greetings from sunny, partly cloudy Friday Harbor, where we are taking some late summer refuge from the urban areas of Portland. Life on the San Juan Islands gives one an opportunity to relax and live a more confined life -because you are literally confined with access either via plane, boat, or car (via ferry)… the…

  • Animurbanism

    I thought this was pretty funny (and ridiculous) when first heard on NPR, then seen in multiple locations. The story centers on the layouts of these planned Sudanese cities, shaped like indigenous animals and even fruit from the region. This has been all over the place lately in media snippets, with a reaction of surprise,…