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Do Landscape Architects make the
Best Urban Designers?
Landscape Typologies as an Engine
for Urban Transformations
Matthew Urbanski
Principal, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc.,
Landscape Architects
Lecturer, Harvard Unversity Graduate School of Design
Strictly speaking, Landscape cannot be a “model” for
urban design because it is not reducible to a specific
condition. In other words, it is not through the wellintentioned
infusion of undifferentiated green spaces,
or even improved ecological approaches that will allow
landscape methodology to inform urbanism. Instead, it
will be a question of whether the firms or individuals involved
in coordinating the design have sufficient fluency
in the complex application of urban/landscape typologies
to have faith in the landscape’s ability to resolve difficult
urban adjacencies and whether they possess the
landscape imagination to understand how this full range
of landscape typologies can be brought to bear on the
problems of the contemporary city.
The examples of Brooklyn Bridge Park and the Lower
Don Lands, discussed below, demonstrate how a landscape
methodology based in an understanding of landscape
typologies can be used to successfully challenge
the status quo of an architecturally-based urban design
and how the leadership role of the landscape architect
in both of these projects has resulted in real benefits to
the understanding of landscape as a model for urban
design. This is not to say that landscape architects are
the only individuals who might have this level of fluency
with the various scales systems of the city, or even that
all landscape architects possess an imagination that is
capable of making the leap from landscape design to
urban design. Nevertheless, landscape architects might
be in the best position to educate related design professionals
and policy makers into a more complex understanding
of landscape typologies to that will allow them
to imagine a heterogeneous urban landscape that makes
use of existing conditions but also lays the groundwork
for transformations.
force in the design of cities has, however, a much longer
history in the United States, most notably in the work
of Charles Eliot in the creation of the Metropolitan Park
System in Boston (1893). Faced with pressing social,
sanitation, and ecological concerns, Eliot designed and
advocated for a system of open spaces that were structured
first around large-scale landscape features and the
role of landscape systems in the achievement of civic objectives
like flood control, but then also telescoped down
to regional open space attractions, like the beaches, and
down further to the level of the neighborhood with a constellation
of small playgrounds. Eliot’s approach of using
landscape systems to structure urban systems was continued
with the work of Ian McHarg and other pioneers of
an ecologically- founded approach to the design of the
landscape in the late 1960’s and 1970’s.
Although Charles Eliot, Frederick Law Olmsted, and the
Olmsted Brothers addressed social and ecological issues
through the design of entire systems of public landscapes,
in the later 20th Century it has been rare that the
landscape has framed the basis for decision-making on
an urban scale. More typically, “open spaces” are designated
within a pattern of development that is designed
around architectural forms, traffic patterns, and circulation.
In existing cities, parks are more often created by
the fact that space is available than by any recognition
of a site’s potential function in a larger system of parks
or ecological systems. Although there has been tremendous
enthusiasm for codifying the rules of “open space”
design over the last several decades, there has not been
nearly as much emphasis on understanding the interrelationship
between various scales of landscape typologies.
For instance, proponents of the American school of “New
Urbanists,” use the notion of contextualism as a means
of encouraging a model-based approach to the design
of these “green spaces” that strongly favors stylistic tra-
Fig. 1
Reshaping, Restoring, Reviving, and Realigning the
City
The tenets of this particular approach to city-building,
have their immediate roots in a conference that was organized
in a 1997 by Charles Waldheim in Chicago, and
the subsequent publication of The Landscape Urbanism
Reader. The idea that landscape can be a generative