[p2p-research] Fwd: [P2P-URBANISM WA] video on New Urbanism, and the possibility of joining a new group

Tue Sep 21 08:02:11 CEST 2010

*Landscape Urbanism: Sprawl in a pretty green dress?*

*The latest in a series of academic challenges to the New Urbanism turns out
to be weak in all the areas that matter most, argues author Michael Mehaffy.
*

Some years ago, Harvard architecture professor Alex Krieger made one of the
most memorable and withering critiques of the New Urbanism: in too many
cases it was, he said, “sprawl in drag.”  What he meant was that the
underlying patterns of sprawl were still dominating, and no mere
repositioning of colorful traditional buildings on streetscapes would be
enough to change that.  While the Charter of the New Urbanism was much more
thoroughgoing than Krieger suggested – see the link below - the criticism
was all too valid for a number of projects.

Since then, many New Urbanists – whether thus self-identified, or merely
following the same set of Charter principles – have tried to do more to
combat sprawl and its profligate waste of resources.  And indeed, they’ve
had notable successes building new urban districts in formerly declining
inner cities, HOPE VI mixed-income housing projects, and new LEED-ND
projects with good transit, district energy and other resource-conserving
features (a new certification they helped to develop).  While the magnitude
of success is a subject of debate, there’s clear evidence that these efforts
are beginning to make a measurable difference on factors like carbon
emissions.

But the New Urbanism surely has its remaining flaws. More to the point,
perhaps, no good attempted deed goes unpunished among competitive designers
nowadays.  Thus a long series of competitors has arisen to the New Urbanism,
each with their own attempted critiques – and each usually with some
variation of the moniker “X” Urbanism: Everyday Urbanism, Real Urbanism, Now
Urbanism, and so on.  The one thing they have in common is the backhanded
respect they pay to their competitor, suggesting that it’s “the team to
beat.”

Most recently, Krieger himself has become associated with a new alternative
that could better meet the design standards of the avant-garde: “Landscape
urbanism.”   What is it?  Krieger’s associate Charles Waldheim, one of the
originators of the concept, made clear its competitive nature: “Landscape
Urbanism was specifically meant to provide an intellectual and practical
alternative to the hegemony of the New Urbanism.” (Links are included below
for all quotes.)

More specifically, Landscape Urbanism, according to Waldheim, rejects the
New Urbanist idea that urban design can reform the auto-dominated patterns
of the Twentieth Century, and their negative social and ecological
consequences.  It seeks to provide an alternative to the “prevailing
discourse” that sees “a kind of 19th Century image of the of the city, that
said if we could put the toothpaste back in the tube of automobility, we
could all get out of our cars, and live the right way, the kind of moral and
just way, we could somehow reproduce some social justice and some
environmental health that we feel as though we've lost.”

But this is a delusion, say the Landscape Urbanists, and we should just
accept the sprawling automobile patterns, and use them as the basis for
imaginative new designs. As leading LU theorist James Corner puts it:
“Horizontality and sprawl in places like Los Angeles, Atlanta, Houston, San
Jose, and the suburban fringes of most American cities is the new urban
reality. As many theories of urbanism attempt to ignore this fact or
retrofit it to new urbanism, landscape urbanism accepts it and tries to
understand it.”

How does this new understanding manifest itself?  Horner says they emphasize
“surface, not form” because “formlessness characterizes nature.” The LU
schemes are often characterized by long fingers of lush green spaces forming
fanciful abstract shapes.  The designers are very clear that these shapes
are not the product of such factors as walkability or transit or mixed use –
the usual aspirations of New Urbanism – or of any other urban precedent.  In
fact they are soaring new fantasies, based on the most fanciful and
arbitrary of generative forces.  Here is Waldheim describing a scheme by
Corner:

What I want to draw your eyes to are these lozenge shaped, weird football
shaped public open and park spaces. Corner's proposition here would be that
the shape of the public realm, the shape of the parks and the plazas and the
open spaces, would not be derived by urban precedent from models of the 19th
century, would not be derived by walking radii of transit oriented
development or other principles. It would be derived from a mapping of the
plumes of the toxicity subsurface onsite.

Plumes of toxicity?  Weird football shapes? Non-designers might be forgiven
for wondering why designers would employ such arbitrary, even perhaps
deranged forces, at the apparent expense of requirements for walkability,
social interaction, access to transit, dynamics of public space – perhaps
even social justice and equity.  After all, there is no reason to suppose,
say, that a frail or poor or elderly person can navigate such a vast
no-man’s land of space to access transit or other important daily needs.

But the Landscape Urbanists accept horizontality (Corner), accept
auto-dominated patterns (Waldheim) – accept sprawl.  Hence the vast
stretches of empty green space, obeying no laws of organization save the
designer’s fantasies.  Here is Alan Berger, in an essay from his book *
Drosscape*, republished in Waldheim’s book *The Landscape Urbanism Reader*:

The phrase “urban sprawl” and the rhetoric of pro- and anti-urban sprawl
advocates all but obsolesce under the realization that there is no growth
without waste. “Waste landscape” is an indicator of healthy urban growth.

There is more than a faint echo here of Le Corbusier, in his highly
influential 1935 book *The Radiant City*:

The cities will be part of the country; I shall live 30 miles from my office
in one direction, under a pine tree; my secretary will live 30 miles away
from it too, in the other direction, under another pine tree. We shall both
have our own car. We shall use up tires, wear out road surfaces and gears,
consume oil and gasoline. All of which will necessitate a great deal of work
… enough for all.

The Landscape Urbanists, like many free-market defenders of sprawl, seem to
think that sprawl is the result of inexorable forces, and did not arise as a
result of comprehensible historical choices – choices that can be understood
structurally and thereby, to some extent, changed.  Indeed, both groups
share a remarkable consistency in their laissez-faire attitudes to what is,
and what cannot be changed through concerted public action – and the folly
to even try.

Yet the historical record is clear, in the writings of Le Corbusier and
others: sprawl was the result of designers’ visions of their future, working
with industrialists (or, less charitably, as apologists and marketers for
industrialists).  As the urban scholar Jane Jacobs famously noted, they did
not try to understand the underlying patterns of the city, or of
nature:  Corner
makes that clear with the astonishing (to any biologist) claim that
“formlessness characterizes nature.”

Indeed, the Landscape Urbanists’ shallow “understanding” of the forces that
generated sprawl seem more aimed at constructing a “grand narrative” that
declares that nothing is to be done, except to create art.  History,
precedent, typology – all of these are irrelevant now, and the only relevant
force is their own imagination: “avant-gardist architectural practice, an
interest in autonomy authorship.”

This is a kind of artistic “magical thinking”: we will draw a beautiful deer
on the wall of the cave, and tomorrow we will surely have a wonderful
dinner.  We will make our cities into magical art, and tomorrow they will be
wonderful to live in.  As they say, good luck with that.

Jane Jacobs also famously warned that the city must not be treated as a work
of art.  But a century of avant-garde designers has done exactly that – with
devastating consequences for cities.  By doing so, they’ve confused visual
order with a deeper, intrinsic kind of order (or in Corner’s case, become
oblivious to it.).  That’s the order that people create around them every
day when they form social spaces, create small acts of ordering, solve small
human problems.

>From those small acts of ordering, larger urban patterns have emerged and
evolved, forming clusters of re-usable information.  Those are the patterns
of the traditional city: not mere stylistic contrivances, but evolutionary
adaptations to the transcendent needs of human beings. For New Urbanists,
these patterns may be re-used usefully today, under the right adaptive
conditions.  They should not be eschewed simply because they have been used
in the past.

Indeed, this evolutionary problem-solving principle transcends human
culture: a porpoise does not reject a dorsal fin pattern merely because the
shark used it 300 million years earlier.   And it bears on whether sharks,
or dolphins – or humans – can actually survive.

There is surely a place in our built environment – a privileged place, even
-- for imagination, fantasy, and soaring works of art.  But it must surely
be integrated into the everyday evolving fabric of human life, and moreover
it must accommodate and respect that fabric, in a way that is beneficial for
quality of life – and in a way that serves to avert looming disaster.  No
less than any doctor, entrusted with the well-being of their patient, this
bust surely be the essential professional responsibility of any
architect-urbanist.

The New Urbanism is a long way from perfect – stipulated – but it is taking
seriously the need to advance and learn, and to incorporate more of the
bottom-up approaches championed by Jacobs, Alexander and others.  Moreover,
it is taking seriously the comprehensible structural causes of waste and
unsustainability, and the steps designers – working in concert with others –
can in fact take to learn from and reverse their own and others’ mistakes.

Most importantly, the New Urbanists refuse to let the complexity of urbanism
be reduced to a mere question of artistic style and novelty of imagination.

New Urbanists assert, especially, that the work of architect-urbanists must
be informed by nature, and evolution, and history; and that this engagement
must serve our well-being and perhaps even our survival, at least as a
viable civilization.  To believe otherwise seems dangerously close to the
magical thinking of a dying culture.  Let us hope such a dying culture is
only a trendy but quickly passing one within the schools, and not a more
global one.

*Michael Mehaffy is an author, urban practitioner, and executive director of
the Sustasis Foundation in Portland, **Oregon**.*

This article draws on the following references, with links included:

The Charter of the New Urbanism. http://www.cnu.org/Charter.  It’s
astonishing how many people make spurious arguments about the New Urbanism
without being aware of what this constitutional document actually says.  Bring
on the debate, by all means – but be informed, please.

Charles Waldheim, lecture to UNC College of Arts and Architecture, Feb. 17,
2010. Available at http://www.vimeo.com/12992244

James Corner, “Terra Fluxus.”  Essay quoted in Wikipedia, available at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landscape_urbanism

Alan Berger, “Drosscape: Wasting land in urban America.” Princeton
Architectural Press, 2006.
http://books.google.com/books?id=qo-4ZSBSbr8C&dq=Alan+Berger+Drosscape&printsec=frontcover&source=bn&hl=en&ei=v_iUTLyOFY-osAO_m_m_Cg&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=4&ved=0CCQQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q&f=false

Le Corbusier, La *Ville Radieuse*, 1935. English translation by Pamela
Knight, published by Orion Press, 1967, as *Radiant City: Elements of a
Doctrine of Urbanism to be Used as the Basis of Our Machine-Age Civilization
*.  Shockingly, given its pervasive global influence on 20thcentury urbanism
in theory and practice, this book is out of print.  It needs to be
re-printed, studied and debated.

Council for European Urbanism, Working Draft, “The Responsibility of the
Architect-Urbanist: A Hippocratic Oath for the Built Environment,”
http://www.tectics.com/CEU-Draft-HippOath.html

See for example the Journal of Urbanism,
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals/titles/17549175.asp  THIS NEEDS EXPANDING

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 3:54 PM, Nikos Salingaros <salingar at gmail.com>wrote:

> Dear friends,
>
> A great video from my friend Andrés Duany, who explains how academia
> is sabotaging all our work with New Urbanism by spreading vicious lies
> in order to continue to dominate the schools. Unfortunately, I hear
> these lies originating from self-styled "Landscape Urbanism" (a
> harmless-sounding term adopted by architectural assassins) innocently
> repeated even by some of my friends who have heard them from the
> media. In this atmosphere of propaganda it will be impossible to move
> forward with p2p-urbanism.
>
>
> http://ecom.mediasite.com/mediasite/Viewer/?peid=470632346283426e8b0dfa1b184afd7b1d
>
> By the way, Stefano Serafini is opening up the group
> <amicigrupposalingaros at yahoogroups.com> to non-italians. Most of the
> messages are in italian, but you are welcome to join and communicate
> in Spanish, French, Portuguese, or English. Many of the existing
> members will understand these languages. The discussion is about our
> architectural, planning, and political activities in Italy and the
> rest of the world.
>
> Cheers,
> Nikos
>
> --
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-- 
Michael Mehaffy
333 S. State Street, Suite V-440
Lake Oswego, OR 97034
(503) 756-1595
www.tectics.com

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