Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory by Charles Waldheim (review)

Landscape Urbanism is one of many buzzwords in our field that sound great and are highly fashionable, but elude easy definition. Nevertheless, Charles Waldheim’s text Landscape as Urbanism attempts to clarify our thinking by first redefining the term “landscape” and, second, exposing new interdisciplinary relations between urban planning, architecture, and landscape architecture. His attempt at clarification is what makes this text, which is the first monograph on the topic, so valuable.

Waldheim approaches the development of a general theory of landscape urbanism through a critical review of landscape architecture and planning practices rather than through an abstract exploration of theoretical positions. As such, each chapter of Landscape as Urbanism defines a particular aspect of the term through the lens of specific projects, beginning with chapter one, which proposes that landscape is urbanism. Waldheim provides large scale projects like the Paris Parc de la Villette, New York’s Fresh Kills Landfill, and Toronto’s waterfront as evidence for landscape becoming “a medium through which to articulate a layered, nonhierarchical, flexible, and strategic urbanism” (17). The second chapter further develops this concept of landscape as autonomous self-organization—referring to nature as an ecological system whose open-endedness and flexibility informs urban design. The third chapter creates a link to modernist planning and ecology, but with an explicit disconnect from Ian McHarg’s well-known form of environmental planning. Though McHarg’s approach depended on a strong governmental role in planning, Waldheim makes the point that the current laissez-faire capitalism produced a donor class that is replacing government as the driving force behind urban landscape projects. “Ironically, in spite of decades devoted to ecological planning, much of landscape’s newfound relevance for contemporary urbanism comes through a particular conflation of design culture, the donor class, and a broad-based populist environmentalism” (53). For Waldheim, the aesthetic component appreciated by the postmodern donor is less the landscape object itself, but more the diagram on ecological principles—illustrating the open-ended process. Chapter four develops the link between post-Fordist economies and logistic landscapes, and chapter five connects the origin of landscape to the urban crisis of industrial decline. Here Waldheim develops a rather interesting link between the emerging landscapes of “formerly urban” Detroit and the appearance of landscape as a topic in Italian Renaissance paintings depicting the “formerly urban” ancient Roman ruins (94). While other scholars understand the picturesque interpretation of antique ruins in landscape painting and landscape gardens as an enlightened reference to the link between nature and history, Waldheim comprehends landscape “in the context of decreasing urban density and shrinkage” (104). This enables him to reject common cultural semiotics of landscape as an outdated and unnecessary baggage. Urban order and structural change (chapter six) are core elements of “contemporary readings of landscape as urbanism” as evident in American modernist urban planning from Frank Lloyd Wright to Ludwig Hilberseimer. In chapter seven, Agrarian Urbanism and the Aerial Subject, Waldheim adds the aspect of agriculture and productive landscape because the “agrarian impulse in midcentury planning equally portends the ascendance of an aerial subject as the appropriate inhabitant of a democratically decentralized North American urbanism” (134).

Chapter eight strengthens the impression that Waldheim observes a transformation of landscape from a three dimensional spatial experience to a two dimensional plan view: “In landscape urbanism, the idea of landscape has shifted from scenic and pictorial imagery to that of a highly managed surface best viewed and arranged from above.” (140). From this viewpoint, landscape architecture is no longer about an emotional response to a given location creating a “place,” but a rational reorganization of data toward a given set of goals. To support this argument, in chapter nine Waldheim goes back to the beginning of landscape architecture, claiming that the Bois de Bologne in Paris and Central Park in New York City were foremost urban planning projects rather than picturesque designs. Those projects marked the beginning of professional landscape architecture. American professional education...