Professor Charles Waldheim presented a lecture titled 'Planning, Ecology, and the Emergence of Landscape' at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design on Monday April 14, 2008.

http://www.gsd.harvard.edu/people/students/resources/
gsd_spring08_lectures.pdf

ABSTRACT

INTRODUCTION

The introduction begins with a brief historical overview of the relative alienation of the design disciplines in the wake of the cultural politics of the 60s and early 70s. This includes a discussion of the parallel alienation and serial separation from schools of design or architecture the disciplines of landscape architecture and urban planning. Citing Harvard, Pennsylvania, and Toronto among others, the introduction suggests that the recent renewal of landscape architecture’s status as a design medium within leading design schools has coincided precisely with the rapprochement between planning programs and schools of architecture and design. Further the introduction argues that that this symmetrical re-engagement, rather than simple coincidence, derives from shifts within the built environment itself and the disciplines that describe it, promising a moment of tangency between the concerns and questions of landscape architecture and planning practice, one in which both disciplines promise to benefit from renewed commitments to subjects of mutually shared historical interest.

PART ONE: HISTORICAL CONSIDERATIONS

The first half of the talk includes a series of short historical cases, each describing the role of landscape in the formation of the region as a subject of city and regional planning practice in the 19th and 20th century. Among these would be a brief overview of recent scholarship on the dominant lineage of regionally informed planning projects as proposed by Geddes, Mumford, and MacKaye, culminating in McHarg. The projects and texts of Ludwig Hilberseimer are presented as an alternative to that tradition, an alternative in which economic readings underpin an ecological approach to industrial decentralization. The first half closes with an overview of the reception of McHargian principles in the 60s and early 70s and the shift of landscape architecture to a medium of regional and urban planning, as well as a summary of the perceived failures of the McHargian project to address the challenges of the contemporary metropolis.

PART TWO: CURRENT COMMITMENTS

The second half of the talk surveys the recent re-emergence of landscape design as a medium of urban design, and the impact of that shift on the disciplinary commitments and professional precedents of urban planning. Among these, the talk will describe the renewed interest in landscape as a medium of design agency and the role of landscape as a cultural form. Equally, the talk will identify the role of ecology in that renewal of landscape design, and rehearse the various claims that have been made on behalf of landscape ecology as an agent of contemporary urban development. The main body of the talk closes with a survey of several recent projects from around the world that propose landscape and ecological process as drivers of design process, and employ planning practices that are necessarily informed by ecological subjects, the sites they implicate, and the constituencies they concentrate.

CONCLUSION

The conclusion offers a provisional sketch of potential models for contemporary planning practice moving forward as informed by contemporary understandings of landscape and ecology as media of urban design. The conclusion cites a small number of contemporary scholars working at the intersection of planning and landscape design, referencing their various positions as they inform contemporary conceptions of planning practice and pedagogy.