Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents: Dissimulating the Sustainable City

by Andrés Duany, Emily Talen

Overview

Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism - negotiating the relationship between cities and the natural world

In contemporary Western society, urban development is regarded as an unfortunate blight from which nature provides a much-needed respite. This apparent dichotomy ignores the interdependence between human settlement and the natural world. In fact, one of the most pressing problems facing urban theorists today is determining how to resolve the tension between the built and natural environments, in the process creating truly sustainable cities.

Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents is a collection of essays exploring the debate over urban reform, now polarized around the two competing paradigms of Landscape Urbanism and the New Urbanism. Landscape Urbanism is conceived as a more ecologically based approach, while New Urbanism is more concerned with the built form. Well-known and influential urban theorists such as Andrés Duany and James Howard Kunstler delve into the impact of the tension between the two perspectives on:

• Smart growth
• Neighborhood design
• Sustainable development
• Creating cities that are in balance with nature

While there is significant overlap between Landscape Urbanism and the New Urbanism, the former has assumed prominence amongst most critical theorists, whereas the latter's proponents are more practically oriented. Given that these two sets of ideas are at the forefront of sustainable urban design, the analysis– and potential reconciliation—offered by Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents is long overdue.

Andrés Duany is a leading proponent of the New Urbanism and is a founding principal at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company.

Emily Talen is a professor at Arizona State University and the author of four previous books on urban design.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781550925364
Publisher:	New Society Publishers
Publication date:	03/01/2013
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	336
File size:	10 MB

About the Author

Andrés Duany is a founding principal at Duany Plater-Zyberk & Company (DPZ), a firm widely recognized as a leader of the New Urbanism. Andrés has completed designs for nearly 300 new towns, regional plans, and community revitalization projects, and has delivered hundreds of lectures and seminars, addressing architects, planning groups, university students, and the general public. He is a founder of the Congress for the New Urbanism, which has been characterized by The New York Times as "the most important collective architectural movement in the United States in the past fifty years," and is the author of The New Civic Art and Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream. He earned a Master's degree in architecture from the Yale School of Architecture, has been awarded several honorary doctorates and many awards for his scholarship in architecture and urban design.

Emily Talen is a Professor in the School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and at Arizona State University. She is also co-editor of the Journal of Urbanism and the author of four previous books and many journal articles on urban design and the New Urbanism. She is the Director of the Phoenix Urban Research Laboratory at ASU,sits on more than a dozen editorial and advisory boards, and has received many honors and awards for her work, including being voted one of Planetizen's "Top 100 Urban Thinkers".

Andrés Duany is a New Urbanist, a recipient of the Driehaus Prize, and principal at Duany Plater-Zyberk&Co. He is the author of three previous bookson urbanism.
Emily Talen is a professor at Arizona State University and the author of four previous books on urbanism.

Table of Contents

Preface
1. Reminiscences
Looking Backward: Notes on a Cultural Episode Andrés Duany and Emily Talen
Transcript of a Debate ca. 2011 Sandy Sorlien and Bruce Donnelly, Editors
An Album of Images 1950-2010 [includes color section] Andrés Duany
2. Landscape and the City Michael Dennis and Alistair McIntosh
3. Landscape Urbanism, New Urbanism and the Environmental Paradox of Cities Doug Kelbaugh
4. The Metropolis versus the City Neal I. Payton
5. The Social Apathy of Landscape Urbanism Emily Talen
6. A General Theory of Ecological Urbanism Andrés Duany
7. The Zombies of Gund Hall Go Forth and Eat America's Brains James Howard Kunstler
8. Landscape Urbanism: Supplement or Substitute? Paul Murrain
9. Why Dogs Should Not Eat Dogs Daniel Solomon
10. Absorbing Landscape Urbanism Bruce Donnelly
11. Art Vitiating Life Michael Mehaffy
12. Marginality and the Prospect for Urbanism in the Post-Ecological City Michael Rios
13. Adaptive Urbanism Kristina Hill and Larissa Larsen
14. Talk of Urbanism Jason Brody
15. Articulating Landscape Urbanism Jusuck Koh
16. Landscape Ecology and Its Urbanism Perry Pei-Ju Yang
17. Urbanism — New, Landscape, or Otherwise: The Case for Complementarity Nan Ellin
18. A Critique of the High Line: Landscape Urbanism and the Global South Leon Morenas

Index
About The Editors/Contributors

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

Herein one can find the most articulate and insightful debate on Urbanism to surface in decades. The issues raised should be at the heart of any serious dialog about the human prospect.
—Peter Calthorpe, author, Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change

Landscape Urbanism propaganda famously vaunts its own doctrinal incompleteness, indeterminateness, openness, while paradoxically broadcasting a possible maturation. In this unique compendium formidable antagonists pay the LU gobbledygook more attention than it is capable to sustain and scrupulously expose the extent to which LU is but old modernist wine presented in new greenwashed bottles.
—Leon Krier, Louis Kahn Visiting Professor, Yale University

This important collection of essays lays bare the comprehensive wrongheadedness at the foundation of Landscape Urbanist theory, from its apparently unconscious preference of the symbolic over the real to its surprisingly outdated conception of man's proper relationship to nature. We've known for decades that the best way to protect the landscape is to stay the heck away from it, collecting ourselves in dense, walkable cities. Any alternative to this time-tested model is still carbon-belching sprawl, however well it drains.
—Jeff Speck, author, Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time

Editorial Reviews

Herein one can find the most articulate and insightful debate on Urbanism to surface in decades. The issues raised should be at the heart of any serious dialog about the human prospect.
---Peter Calthorpoe, author of Urbanism in the Age of Climate Change

Landscape urbanism propaganda famously vaunts its own doctrinal incompleteness, indeterminateness, openness, while paradoxically broadcasting a possible maturation. In this unique compendium formidable antagonists pay the Landscape urbanism gobbledygook more attention than it is capable to sustain and scrupulously expose the extent to which LU is but old modernist wine presented in new greenwashed bottles.
---Leon Krier, Louis Kahn Visiting Professor, Yale University SOA2013

This important collection of essays lays bare the comprehensive wrongheadedness at the foundation of Landscape Urbanist theory, from its apparently unconscious preference of the symbolic over the real to its surprisingly outdated conception of man's proper relationship to nature. We've known for decades that the best way to protect the landscape is to stay the heck away from it, collecting ourselves in dense, walkable cities. Any alternative to this time-tested model is still carbon-belching sprawl, however well it drains.
---Jeff Speck, author of Walkable City: How Downtown Can Save America, One Step at a Time.

From the Publisher