In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

Global economic restructuring has sparked urban crisis and long-term economic decline in many industrial and manufacturing centers since the 1950s, but today Ecological Urbanism is an important urban design theory, providing communities with tools to renew local economies by restoring ecologically and urbanistically compromised landscapes. This chapter explores how an understanding of urban dynamics grounded in the framework of Ecological Urbanism can be used to address the negative effects of the physical and social transformations brought about by globalization and chronicles how a major midwestern city is creating a world-class park and exceptional ecological corridor to secure its future. Former industrial centers in America’s heartland have keenly felt the negative effect of globalization, characterized by expanding flows of ideas, capital, goods, and people throughout the world. These cities have also experienced globalism’s tendency to separate economy and materiality, erasing the specificity of place. The result has been a rapid departure from an urban form focused around localized mills, breweries, or factories and toward one based on far-reaching transnational global production networks (Clark 1997). For the city of Milwaukee, this has meant a pattern of disinvestment and significant economic decline. Over 40 years (1960-2000), the city lost approximately 20% of its population, from a high of 741,324 to a low of 596,974 (“Population of the 20 Largest U.S. Cities, 1900-2005” 2011; “Top 50 Cities in the U.S. by Population and Rank” 2011). In 1970, the 10 largest employers in the city of Milwaukee were based in manufacturing and brewing; by 2004, the 10 largest employers included healthcare, grocery , banking, utility, printing, retail, and insurance, with none of the former leaders. The city’s descent was chronicled by the local paper, which noted, “Milwaukee falls to the bottom of nearly every index of social distress” (Boyle 2008). Decline linked to globalism’s increasingly dynamic , invisible, and far-reaching relationships has left former industrial cities struggling to find ways to rebound in the face of physical and social disruption . How can these cities benefit from the forces of change, and what strategies can they employ to harness the potential of globalism’s universality, while simultaneously capturing the value of the single and the local? How will they be able to create design agency in the context of distress? A Context for Ecological Urbanism Ecological Urbanism incorporates contemporary thinking about city development and combines it with landscape ecology considerations to integrate functional goals for human use, ideology, and aesthetic style, as well as ecological processes and demands . This contextual framework, when applied to the restoration of a riparian landscape within a former industrial center, creates the conditions to consider new forms of space-making guided by dynamic ecological processes (habitat restoration, biological diversity, etc.) and restrained forms of traditional spatial definition guided by known relationships (low-impact trails, green building, etc). Chapter Nine Ecological Urbanism in the Postindustrial City Christine Sc ott Thom son 104 Christine Scott Thomson The inclusive nature of this ideology, a logical companion to theories of globalization, acknowledges the broad economic structure that binds the entire world together and focuses on knowable limits, requiring a rigorous framework for value identification , goal setting, and measured performance. Today, urban space-making in the context of globalization is dominated by two important areas of urban design theory that, by themselves, are inadequate to address the spatial transformation brought about by new patterns of finance linked to increasingly rapid transportation, communication , and organizational technology. The first area of urban design theory, New Urbanism, focuses on recapturing the spatial definition typical in nineteenth-century cities and advocates for design response that seeks a coherent, pedestrian-scale constructed environment using built form (Duany 2000; Solomon 2003). This thinking views globalism pessimistically and rallies for design that resists the tendency of global capital to disperse homes, stores, and community institutions across the landscape . New Urbanism uses design to channel the forces of global capital toward compact communities that rely on traditional urban form and resist sprawl. The second area of urban design theory, Landscape Urbanism, focuses on new forms of urban space-making and advocates for a design response that utilizes alternative elements, such as landscape, to create a coherent urban condition (Sassen 2006; Waldheim 2006). This theory is generally optimistic about globalism and its potential as a generative force. Landscape Urbanism concedes that constructing new meaningful urban form through traditional built means may be impossible , given the strength of speculative capital and the popularity of...

Share