VIEWPOINT - CUDC Quarterly 3:3/4 - Winter 2004

Shrinking Smart
the Promise of Landscape Urbanism
Ruth Durack
Director, Urban Design Center of Northeast Ohio

There are two certainties – besides death and taxes – that define the challenge of the 21st century: population growth and continuing decline of the environment. Every two weeks, the world adds the population of a city the size of Los Angeles, along with its demands on food, water and energy supplies, and its contributions to global warming, decreasing air and water quality and the generation of garbage. So it’s not a great stretch to realize that our continued survival depends on finding satisfactory ways to house all these people in settlements that consume fewer resources and have less destructive effects on the environment.

This, of course, is old news and the design disciplines have already responded with unusual determination and creativity. Although implementation is definitely lagging, there have been dramatic shifts in design thinking and practice, as evidenced by the focus on green building (now almost a mainstream concept), by new approaches to restoring landscapes and by the standard inclusion of terms like "sustainable development", "smart growth" and "transit oriented design" in the goals and objectives of neighborhood and city-wide plans. Particularly telling is a new emphasis on environmental responsibility in the curricula and studio exercises of design schools across the country. But despite these important advances, the measures of environmental degradation continue to rise at such alarming rates that one can’t help wondering whether we’re just putting band aids on a sabre wound so deep that emergency surgery is needed just to stop the bleeding.

Fortunately, there’s a new "-ism" that may provide the kind of radical treatment that’s necessary: landscape urbanism. Actually, it’s not so new. There’s already a significant body of work that explores the concept, most of it produced for design competitions, like Victoria Marshall and Steven Tupu’s proposal for New York’s East River (1998), Jim Corner and Stan Allen’s proposal for Downsview Park, Toronto (2000), and their winning proposal of the following year for the Freshkills Landfill on Staten Island . (Stan Allen, by the way, was one of the designers the UDC brought to Cleveland for the Canal Basin charrette in 2001.) The first article I have been able to find on the subject is by Ignacio Bunster-Ossa (another Canal Basin charretter) in Urban Land, July 2001, and there are already at least three graduate programs in Landscape Urbanism –two in the U.S., at the University of Illinois Chicago and Notre Dame, and one at the prestigious Architectural Association in London.

But if you’re looking for a straightforward definition of landscape urbanism, I’m not sure you’ll find it in the handbooks of the academy. The course description published by the AA, for example, talks about "...tak(ing) on the task of engineering the new operative capacities emerging in the discipline through the exploration of five aspects: multiscalarity, cross-scalarity, prephysicality, performativity and intensive coexistence." Try spellcheck on that one! But in spite of the academic tendency to obfuscate and confuse, the concept is elegantly simple. It’s a call to turn the traditional practice of urban design inside out, starting with open spaces and natural systems to structure urban form, instead of buildings and infrastructure systems.

The difficult word here, of course, is "starting". Urban design is usually about intervening in environments where people already live, not working from a clean slate, and it’s no wonder that the lionized examples of this approach so far have been for sites like Downsview Park (a vacated air base) and Freshkills (a 2,200 acre landfill). Nevertheless, the idea of landscape urbanism reorders the values and priorities of urban design, emphasizing the primacy of the void over built form, and celebrating indeterminacy and change over the static certainty of architecture. Its most powerful contribution, however, may be that it recalls nature’s restorative cycles and tries to put them back to work in the city. This will be essential to containing the impact of expoding urban growth in much of the world, but it also points to a particularly promising new direction for shrinking cities like Cleveland.

In "Decamping Detroit" – published in Jason Young, et. al. (eds.): Stalking Detroit, Actar Editorial [Ann Arbor], 2001, pp. 104-122) – Charles Waldheim (who heads the program in landscape urbanism at UIC) and his colleague Marli Santos-Munne propose a four stage process for reconstituting decaying areas of the incredible shrinking city of Detroit. First, "dislocation", or the disconnection of services; then "erasure", which involves demolition of buildings and infrastructure and the aerial seeding of a native landscape ecology; then a period of "absorption", during which woods, marshes and streams are reconstituted; and finally "infiltration", when the area is re-colonized with compact mixed-use villages. As Grahame Shane writes about the strategy: "This reversal of normal processes opens the way for a new hybrid urbanism, with dense clusters of activity and the reconstitution of the natural ecology, starting a more ecologically balanced, inner-city urban form in the void." (Grahame Shane: "The Emergence of ‘Landscape Urbanism’, Harvard Design Magazine, Fall 2003/Winter 2004, p. 5).

This "void" is the great advantage of shrinking cities. Instead of bemoaning the fact that Cleveland has only half the population it had 50 years ago, we should recognize it as a rare opportunity to reconstitute an environment that has been fatally damaged by 300 years of careless development. We certainly have the land to create a more ecologically balanced pattern of settlement. The trouble is, it’s scattered in small parcels and not in the right places. Cleveland is pursuing an aggressive policy of replacing dilapidated housing –at the rate of 1,500 units a year. Rather than scattering these new units around, wherever there are vacant sites or abandoned buildings, they should be clustered by design around a new pattern of connected open spaces that reconstitute the natural systems of our damaged geography. With a deliberate program of strategic land swapping, we could, for example, uncover the many miles of culverted streams that flow into the Cuyahoga River, improving air and water quality, enhancing wildlife habitat, and establishing a city-wide system of pedestrian paths and bike routes.

Part of our role at the CUDC and Kent State is to get the word out and help people envision what great places are in the offing with this genuinely new urbanism. We’re making plans to do more through new academic and outreach programs. What’s needed now is the political will to take advantage of the extra space while we can.