Landscape+Urbanism

Category: representation

  • Works of Landscape Urbanism?

    A long-standing question that seems to have arisen in recent days due to discussions on Ecological Urbanism, coupled with a reconnection to the Landscape Urbanism bibliography.  I’ve also recently rescued my book collection from storage – so have an opportunity to look specifically at some of the pertinent literature to glean what we could consider…

  • 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…

  • The Wilderness Downtown

    I have in the past alluded to the ‘Soundtrack of Spaces‘ linking music to our physical environment.  I know most people have amused themselves with this video experiment, but I finally found myself engaging with the Arcade Fire’s interactive video ‘The Wilderness Downtown‘ – perhaps a literal interpretation of the space/music connection.  The narrative film,…

  • Landscape+Urbanism: Large Print Edition

    Apologies for the random post:  Through some unknown glitch, the formatting of some recent posts has been defaulting to both large print and strange spacing.  I have not been doing anything different, but it is making me suspect that the AARP has hacked into my code and removed the default font size giving me a Goldilocks dilemma…

  • Reading List: Small Spaces

    A new release that arrived from Princeton Architectural Press ‘Small Scale’ advertises ‘Creative Solutions for Better City Living’ which is a lofty goal.  It immediately made me think of niche DIY magazines like Ready-Made  for people with pent up creativity just bursting with ideas if they only had some direction or money.  When I read the preliminary…

  • Mapping Racial Diversity

    Serendipitously continuing on the topic of mapping, some interesting ones (spotted on Seattle’s Publicola) offers many color-coded maps of racial diversity from major US cities. The work is from a familiar name, Eric Fischer (an earlier post showing some of his work is here), and he has developed another comprehensive set of urban maps highlighting…

  • Reading List: The Exposed City – Mapping the Urban Invisibles

    If you love maps, not as just as visual artifacts but as part of design and planning methodology, Nadia Amoroso’s recently published ‘The Exposed City: Mapping the Urban Invisibles‘ (Routledge, 2010) will validate, comfort, and quite possibly amaze you. That’s the effect it had on me – after quickly devouring this visually rich resource –…

  • Disaster Imagery

    The Gulf oil spill – documented by Photographer Edward Burtynsky, best known for his fabulous work ‘Manufactured Landscapes‘… capturing the essence of the breadth of disaster and human-wrought destruction. (via Treehugger, more images on the exhibit at the Metivier Gallery). :: image via Treehugger

  • 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,…

  • Goodbye, Landscape Urbanism BS Generator

    Sad news… I got an email that the Landscape Urbanism Bullshit Generator (and the entire ruderal site for that matter) is no longer . One of my first posts mentioned what I think is a great, tongue-in-cheek reference for the overly wordy, obfuscatorily verbose – particularly in terms of the word bank of the early…