Landscape Urbanism and its Discontents: Dissimulating the Sustainable City - Tapa blanda

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Landscape Urbanist theory, from its apparently unconscious preference of the symbolic over the real to its surprisingly outdated conception of man's proper relationship to nature.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.

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 Andres 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. Andres 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.