There are some small signs of movement, especially in the stirrings of fungibility on the part of planning and landscape. Although I run a program in urban design, I have a fundamental disbelief in any unitary discourse of the city and try to offer access to many. Originally conceived as a way of recuperating physical design from a planning profession that had fallen in thrall to the social sciences, urban design is often taught simply as big building and fixates excessively on historic patterns. But urbanism’s most desperate needs devolve on the new morphologies of sustainability and equity that an exponentially urbanizing world so urgently needs. The urban population increases at the rate of a million people a week and, to me at least, that means that we need to create numerous new cities on an urgent basis, cities that are able to provide for themselves and provide rich lives to diverse populations.
The emergence of “landscape urbanism” as a position, if not a discipline, is a hopeful sign. Not simply does the conceit represent the rejection of a hard boundary between the practices of landscape architecture and urban design and planning; it stands, in theory, for a more holistic view of the environment and the indispensability of an integrated perspective in thinking about projects that exceed the architectural scale. And it suggests a strategy of inclusion, rather than an endless consideration of what the disciplines are not. Still, from the perspective of education, it feels a little like rearranging the deck chairs while preserving distinctions that have outlived their usefulness. As environmentalism becomes more and more the central authority for all design, why retain any boundaries at all?
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