Duany vs Harvard GSD
Without a doubt, architect Andres Duany is a pivotal figure in creating a less car-dependent, more walking-oriented American landscape—the kind of human-scale, personally navigable, tight developments that seem to have sturdy green roots and point, generally, toward a more urban lifestyle. Certainly, densely-settled cities have what Duany and his cohorts have been advocating for 30 years. But now as these cities begin to re-engage with nature, to create their own, healthy and life-affirming environments, surprisingly (at least to me) Duany is not cheering, he’s jeering. He seems to equate the new “dogma of environmentalism” (my quotes) with the recent changes at the Harvard GSD, where the old Urban Planning and Design department is giving way to Landscape Urbanism. And so I must ask this, is he just looking for a fight, or is there a constructive dialogue to be had here? —sss
Last April, upon attending a remarkable conference at the Harvard GSD, I predicted that it would be taken over in a coup. I recognized a classic Latin American-style operation. It was clear that the venerable Urban Design program would be eliminated or replaced by Landscape Urbanism. Today, it is possible to confirm that the coup was completed in September—and that it was a strategic masterpiece.
To summarize: The first step was the hiring of Charles Waldheim, who, after long and patient preparation, had circled in from the academic hinterland acquiring “famous victories” at Illinois and Toronto. The second step was the “general strike” of the huge Ecological Urbanism Conference—the one that I attended last April. With some thirty speakers, it was both a remarkable show of force, and simultaneously the casting call for the next faculty.
The conference began with a shock: Rem Koolhaas’ keynote address destabilized the then-current GSD regime. It was most unexpected to see the grand, aging revolutionary, distancing himself from all starchitect work (including his own) and aligning anew with his origins in the “humble, local and climatically responsive” work of his 60s teacher, Jane Drew (I made a note at the time “Jane Drew is the New Leonidov!”). To my fevered imagination, it was quite a frisson to witness a real show trial.
Then another shock: Midway though the conference there was suddenly a very unusual performance for a university president. Drew Faust transcended the expected insipid greeting, baring quite some fang when stating forcibly that the GSD was going to change to the ecological line—and to get used to it. Dean Mohsen Mostafavi followed with an interpretation of what was meant by that change: an unalterable commitment to the ecological basis but also, soothingly, assurances that the GSD would not neglect the high-design filter.
The third step was the publication of a red brick-like summa of the proceedings, Ecological Urbanism—the first official guide of the new regime. In size and weight and format it is clearly a replacement to Rem’s silver SMLXL testament.
Then last month, by interview, Charles Waldheim disclosed that the once”small” Landscape Architecture Department he now heads would within a year hire ten new faculty. He also announced (in both the interview and in the summa) the official name change for the party, from the revolutionary, unique, branded, “Landscape Urbanism” to the reassuring, generalized, mature—conservative even—“Ecological Urbanism”. A by-the-book protocol, just as the glamorous but scary “Red Brigades” transmute into comforting “socialists” once they take power.
Then this week [October 18] it was announced that Rahul Mehrotra (a denizen of India) was hired as a full professor with tenure to head the Urban Design Program. Alex Krieger, the levelheaded head of that program is presumably out. It is not difficult to conclude given Rahul’s specialization, that the Urban Design Program will morph entirely toward third world initiatives—all offshore—thereby leaving the field clear for Landscape/Ecological Urbanism to be the GSD’s only urban program operating in North America and Europe.
Done! This coup was brilliantly conceived and comprehensively executed. Machado and Silvetti, plantados in gentlemanly formal principles, will probably retire soon in frustration. The agile Koolhaas will be the one Old Party survivor, as he has already provided the intellectual underpinnings for Urban Design’s third world focus (with his Lagos work) while supplying infrastructural meta-visions (North Sea Power Rings et al) such that will allow Ecological Urbanism to seem downright pragmatic.
So… there will not be much of whatever remained of the urbane, urban design sensibility. Landscape/Ecological Urbanism will rule without dissension.
The CNU should now stand to salute Charles Waldheim and his companions. As Churchill said of Rommel in 1941: “We have against us a very daring and skillful opponent and, may I say across the havoc of war, a great general.”
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BACK TO TOP
So this story is: New Dean takes over, hires new department heads. There’s nothing sneaky happening at all.
Details: There is no “Department of Urban Design” at the GSD, there’s a Department of Urban Planning and Design. Krieger was the interim head, he took over only when the search for a full head went slowly.
It’s highly unlikely that the Department will shift to “third world initiatives,” since Mehrotra will be the only faculty member with an overseas specialization.
Furthermore, Machado was already retiring - he gave a valedictory speech in the Spring of 2009.
Also, Koolhaas comes to the GSD once a year to give a keynote lecture, so it’s hard to see how be could belong to a ‘party’ at the school.
Comment by N. — November 3, 2010, @ 2:09 pm
I have no information relating to the specifics of this story. However, I found Duany’s analogies very amusing and insightful. No doubt that Harvard is Harvard because they have been more successful than any other academic institution in playing the institutional game which is: Self-preservation at all costs.
I’m a little surprised, though, that someone who from a distance seems so smart and insightful would be surprised. Bitter,maybe. Angry, perhaps. But surprised, no.
Comment by Charles Boxenbaum — November 3, 2010, @ 3:26 pm
” A by-the-book protocol, just as the glamorous but scary “Red Brigades” transmute into comforting “socialists” once they take power. ” ? ?
Is’nt Harvard already mostly populated with ” comforting ” socialists ? ———-
Comment by M. — November 3, 2010, @ 4:15 pm
Duany isn’t the only critic of landscape urbanism looking at Harvard: Michael Mehaffy recently wrote on our website that “…the Landscape Urbanists’ shallow “understanding” of the forces that generated sprawl seem more aimed at constructing a “grand narrative” that declares that nothing is to be done, except to create art. History, precedent, typology – all of these are irrelevant now, and the only relevant force is their own imagination: “avant-gardist architectural practice, an interest in autonomy authorship.”
The whole critique is worth reading, and gives context to Duany’s concerns; http://www.planetizen.com/node/46262
Comment by Tim Halbur — November 3, 2010, @ 4:32 pm
How is Charles Waldheim “from the academic hinterland” if his experience stems from time at Illinois and Toronto? Who feeds these places after all? Arrogance.
Comment by Dieter Janssen — November 5, 2010, @ 9:49 am
Duany criticizes anything that is not under his control, and he no doubt sees the emergence of “ecological urbanism” as a threat to his New Urbanist empire. Duany has been at odds with the GSD for years because those who taught or were trained at the school were often critical of the “new” urbanism. There was a memorable exchange between Duany and the “levelheaded” Alex Krieger on the merits of new urbanism back in 1997 or ‘98. Perhaps the GSD should just acquiesce and heap some praise upon Duany and New Urbanism and transmute his coup position from jealous outsider to participant observer.
Comment by Thomas — November 5, 2010, @ 2:13 pm
I am GLAD to be out of the school on time with some REAL UD understanding. Landscape Urbanism and all “that” always existed but as supplementary choices which students could pursue upon interest and enrich their design approach. Unfortunately until my last studio…one of the Charles followers ended up being my instructor and asked me to forget the highways that existed on the site and design new innovative landscape systems!!..also ridiculously at one point suggested turning the highway away from the design site to where he had no idea!! the project ended up being FAR from any remote reality and absolutely unresolved and not a masters level studio work…None of the guest reviewers agreed to the stand that the studio acquired…the instructor ended up being the defender at every point!! but yes I made some fantastic good looking dwgs- the only positive learning from the studio.
We will very soon know the reality of the new Ecological Urbanism dogma when the school will no more have the same ranking position and Urban Design-Planing students will dread ending up here in future…I have already started discouraging my juniors and suggested them to re-think their interest in the Urban Design program at GSD.
Good luck UPD @ GSD im glad to be a part of the history before it turns into a wannabe AA!
Comment by a — November 7, 2010, @ 11:25 am
So Catty! You’d think grown men and women would be searching for a commonality in their design approaches in order to solve our very real problems, rather than sniping at who has the currently dominant brand or slogan.
Regarding the quotation from Churchill: Alan Moorehead, perhaps one of the finest war correspondents of WW2, had this to say about Rommel: “Rommel was an abler general than any on the British side, and for this one reason-because the German army was an abler army than the British army: Rommel was merely an expression of that abler German army.”
We need to grow an abler army of designers; without it, there will be no lasting leaders.
Comment by Tom McKeag — November 9, 2010, @ 11:08 am
Nice hatchet job introduction! Landscape urbanism is nothing more than a vaguely conceived new beard for modernist sprawl apologism. Are you really that surprised Duany isn’t into it? Why SSS thinks that makes him an enemy of environmentalism is beyond me.
Comment by Greg — November 9, 2010, @ 3:27 pm
I agree with you Tom. Very catty!
I went to UIC and there were professors forcing the Landscape Urbanism agenda on me for the last year. They too were under “regime change” and it was never clear to me exactly what the product was from their direction/approach. In the end, I learned absolutely nothing from them. I did however learn how to study the context until atrophied and never actually design any buildings. The worst part about it all was that I was desperately trying to figure out where they were coming from and what they were looking for. During this time in school I also decided that I am tired of professors trying to make me their sidekick.
As a side note, I also had a New Urbanist studio professor in undergrad and it was the best studio of my architectural school experience.
Comment by Ronin — November 9, 2010, @ 3:49 pm
Duany at it again, alienating everybody.
Comment by Jensen — November 9, 2010, @ 4:36 pm
Just like a bunch of men to approach multiple ideas in the terms of war and competition.
Comment by Krista Sloniowski — November 9, 2010, @ 9:08 pm
So what we hear is really - in the words of Billy Bragg - “the sound of ideologies clashing”…
Having said that, one would be sadly mistaken to dismiss either Charles Waldheim or Andres Duany as mere ideologues, or to think of Landscape Urbanism, Ecological Urbanism or New Urbanism as mere ideologies.
I harbor a very critical stance towards all of them - for different reasons. But urbanity - and urban design - is complex, and urban form and process can (and possibly should) be interpreted as inscriptions of ideologies (as codified relationships of power) into built form and space. If not understood in that way, both theorists and practitioners (and I fail to see the need for that dichotomy) will just become inadvertently complicit in agendas they cannot or do not want to understand.
So can we just move on to an actual conversation? And conceive the faint possibility that neither “urbanism” might be “right” or “wrong”? But that they are different approaches based in different concepts that can and should be fodder for a critical discourse? After all, design fields, disciplines and professions claim to be “discursive”.
Whilst my sympathies lean toward landscape urbanism and its newest offspring, ecological urbanism, I not for a second see them as panacea or the magic bullet - merely as grappling with change, complexity, open-endedness and uncertainty in different ways. But - as clearly evident in Koolhaas’ incredibly naive interpretation of Lagos (anybody heard of post-colonialism?) - it might become merely an excuse to not change anything. And Duany’s brand of New Urbanism might just be a shallow interpretation of the pattern of the New England village, superimposed on any and every location without regard for context - cultural, social, ecological, economic etc.- (anybody remember the disconnect between his agenda and the realities of place in his Jackson Barracks project, right next to the Lower 9th Ward in New Orleans?).
I am sympathetic to Landscape Urbanism and its offspring, because it at least tries to understand conditions and processes before it attempts to change them (with a nod to Ronin, who apparently believes that studying context without ending up with a building design is not a worthwhile effort).
As it stands, Ms. Szenasy’s question is spot-on. Is there a constructive dialogue somewhere around here? The way Mr. Duany approaches it, I doubt it. Mistaking Duany’s comments for a constructive discourse is like mistaking Ann Coulter having a yelling match with Michael Moore for political discourse…or, in this context, it’s pattern monkeys (with a white upper-middle class bias) vs. wannabe cultural geographers. Not helping.
I am sure Mr. Duany will find ways to dismiss any and every critique of New Urbanism as elitist - or, as “comforting socialist” - I am sure he will next resort to “axis of evil” rhetorics and rally for “regime change” at the GSD…
Ladies and Gentlemen - please. The “solution” - whatever it is and however temporary it might be - cannot just lie in paradigms merely based on configuring density or in an obsession with process and performance over form.
The sound of ideologies clashing…. or, in the words of Terry Eagleton:
“All propaganda or popularization involves a putting of the complex into the simple, but such a move is instantly not constructive. For if the complex can be put into the simple, then it cannot be as complex as it seemed in the first place; and if the simple can be an adequate medium of such complexity, then it cannot after all be as simple as all that.”
Really, Mr. Duany.
Comment by Joern Langhorst — November 10, 2010, @ 6:27 pm
Duany’s concerns have merit as “the best and the brightest” from Harvard, planned, legislated and promoted one of the worst cultural and environmental disasters in the history of America: SPRAWL It started out as the 1938 minimum property standards for new housing and only new housing which followed its standards would be FHA insured. Its standards were a blueprint for sprawl. They wanted the “new” over the proven archetypes. The impact from sprawl has contributed significantly to putting us on the brink in terms of: environment, climate, economy, social capital, energy usage, transportation and landscape.
Then in a 1998 conference at Harvard GSD on New Urbanism, the brilliant Harvard faculty rejected New Urbanism as a solution to sprawl because it wasn’t a more politically correct theory of “urbanisms”.
Harvard’s hubris is dangerous and apparently keeps them from accepting the obvious, archetypes.
Comment by James Hubbard — November 10, 2010, @ 7:41 pm
As usual, Duany is substantially about Duany…..self righteous and emotional to the core….. the core being faux traditional nostalgia finagling for attention. Please, enough.
Comment by Travis Price, FAIA — November 11, 2010, @ 1:07 am
In 1970, I organized Earth Day in NYC. As an environmentalist I had chosen to work with William Holly Whyte on urban “ecosystems”. His book and movie, the “Social Life of Small Urban Spaces” and “City Life, City Spaces”, are still widely used and referred to around the world. To me ecology included not only natural, but also human ecosystems. While working with Holly Whyte, I also studied with Margaret Mead, the anthropologist, Barbara Ward, a development economist and taught environmental studies. They were all woven together in a period of great change.
Kathy Madden, a partner at Project for Public Spaces, got her design degree from the Environmental Design Program at Parsons. We have, together with 25 people, done Placemaking in all 50 States, 41 countries working with over 3000 communities for the last 35 years. Some of the best public spaces in the world are the result of our placemaking plans. What is most evident today is that communities want places they can gather in that reflect their values. Nature is certainly part of that, but only part. They are really tired of being handed a design from some professional that tells them what they should have. Those days are long gone. To me Landscape/Ecological Urbanism is a last gasp at trying to control outcomes for last few remaining communities that don’t know any better. Kathy and I wrote a book, How to Turn a Place Around that has been translated into many languages that outlines 11 principles of creating places. More than any time in our careers, these ideas resonate with people of every culture and setting.
http://www.pps.org/11steps/
Comment by Fred Kent — November 11, 2010, @ 7:28 am
As a new urbanist, I have to say this bluster is amusing at best and counterproductive at worst. Hopefully Duany will provide a nuanced critique of Landscape Urbanism in a few days at Harvard as he has done in the past, with less intentional or unintentional sabre rattling.
Comment by JLL — November 11, 2010, @ 12:25 pm
[…] evening. Should be interesting, and if anything, it’ll be fun to watch a good fight over this and […]
Pingback by Tactile Goods » Some Upcoming & Past Events — November 11, 2010, @ 5:08 pm
just read duany’s rant….”third world”…..really??!!
rather than comprehend Ecological Urbanism as an index of incremental responses to a post-industrial environment, duany chooses to villainize the publication as a threat against his own hegemonic approach to urban space.
Ecological Urbanism is hardly a manifesto and, aside from its volume, is nothing like SMLXL - that was a really cheap shot from someone who clearly hasn’t bothered to thumb through the book.
the publication does not go so far [as duany shamelessly would] as to posit a single approach to urban design. rather it attempts to catalogue a series of clever interventions and provocative thought as to how to DESIGN BETTER\more sustainable\ENVIRONMENTS…
this guy is a parody of himself, for sure.
such impotence….
Comment by Luke — November 13, 2010, @ 2:16 am
I have never heard of any of these people making these comments nor do I know what they have done (except for PPS and I am always amazed how great they think they are), but I have heard of Duany and know that he has enabled us to have a legal, pedestrian oriented alternative to the zoned sprawl. Maybe a little too late to clean up the cultural environmental mess of sprawl, but still much more than the GSD and its minions have done(putting aside for the moment that Harvard was involved in creating the mess in the first place). With the bitterness, sour grapes and emotional immaturity of these comments, I hope that these people don’t come within a mile of students…
Comment by James Hubbard — November 16, 2010, @ 10:31 am
[…] excerpt) together indicate something important that has been missing from the latest series of shots fired by various New Urbanists at landscape urbanism (those shots and related posts have been […]
Pingback by fracture-prone – mammoth // building nothing out of something — November 17, 2010, @ 12:25 pm
[…] however, was most reserved for the afternoon session featuring the trenchant Andres Duany, who recently laid down the gauntlet in an article for Metropolis, challenging the efficacy of the GSD’s new focus on Ecological […]
Pingback by Urban Omnibus » GSD Throwdown: Battle for the Intellectual Territory of a Sustainable Urbanism — November 17, 2010, @ 2:48 pm
Was this written by Glenn Beck or Andres Duany? It sounds like some sort of South Florida Cuban community teaparty manifesto against the socialist demons coming to enslave them. I think some people are seeing socialists in their breakfast cereal these days.
Only of course it’s really just the same old inter-departmental politics every university professor deals with, and really it’s pretty offensive to the people who suffered under dictatorships in Latin America to compare what goes on at the GSD to a communist coup, for the same reasons you wouldn’t compare it to the Holocaust. It makes light of real suffering for cheap semantic points.
The hyperbole in this country is out of control. The GSD isn’t Pinochet or Castro. Obama isn’t a fascist. If anybody was ever a fascist in the US, it certainly wasn’t anyone at Harvard or on the political left, let’s be realistic here. The last thing we need in architecture is for the melodramatic sensationalism of politics to start polluting the dialogue in our profession like it is in Duany’s Glenn Beck impersonation here. Really, this piece was an embarrassment for the entire profession. It’s the kind of thing that ruins a person’s reputation and totally undermines their credibility.
Comment by James — November 20, 2010, @ 2:08 am
Fred Kent,
You’re exactly right; there is a constructive dialog to be had about community versus critique.
Landscape Urbanists seem intent on distancing themselves from the frightening richness and potency of a culture that makes itself. Last Monday night, I was in a barroom called Mimi’s in New Orleans—with a hundred or so people who filled it with the smell of sweat and beer. The singer was in the shadows, filling the room with eighty and ninety-year old evocations to which the young crowd danced sixty, eighty, and hundred-year-old dances.
Some hours before that, I saw a video of Charles Waldheim in a North Carolina lecture hall. His ostensible goal was to elucidate the Landscape Urbanism. His real goal was to cast off culture.
He dismissed the supposedly easy answers of nostalgia and convention in short, parenthetical statements. He dismissed as“perhaps” well-intentioned nostalgia the modest efforts of New Urbanists to build spaces for living people. In contrast to this is Waldheim’s and his cohort’s capture of ecology. One project he showed proposed allowing plants to die in order to display subsurface toxins. Note that the design goal is not remediative; it is polemical. In another, by West 8, ecology is used as “a kind of public spectacle.” The project assumes that dark-feathered birds will alight on dark shells and light-feathered birds will alight on light shells. The lives of the birds are manipulated for polemical effect. To bad a bird cannot tap Mr. Waldheim on the shoulder and say, “Excuse me, but we’re trying to hold a culture, here!”
At Mimi’s, cultural virility was on full display. For the singer in the dark and the band playing for pocket change, it wasn’t about polemics. There was no thought of “nostalgia.” To dismiss such human connection and love as “nostalgia” must require a scission of mind from soul. Culture is a survival trait. It is made by taking part in it, at a critical distance from it. In the bar, people were talking about gas leaks. That morning, Emily T and I, among others, had reported smelling gas to Entergy. The difference between the firestorm in San Bruno and yesterday’s soggy morning in New Orleans probably comes down to culture and to love, not critique. The difference between Paul C’s forgotten jacket retrieved from conscientious safe-keeping behind the bar and that jacket on the back of a miscreant definitely comes down to culture. We should thank g-d (literally, if possible) that humanity perpetuates itself through such tenderness. They are the ones who carry the irritable critics such as Waldheim. Judging from the body language that night, there was going to be more cultural production that night than Waldheim’s distance could ever muster.
Comment by Bruce F. Donnelly — November 22, 2010, @ 6:20 pm
I think “evidence and evidence-based” need to remain at the forefront of all thoughts and efforts. It is the practice the NU movement was reborn out of 30 years ago, it is how we are approaching the reform of all of this and more as it applies to ecology, environment and culture. By sticking close to that evidence we can only come out victorious.
The simple truth is that LU is just avant-garde-ponzi-ism for no better reason than to be new and exciting and money/fame-making; it is bad modern architecture with a new green sticky note slapped on it. Evidence is starting to really build against those buildings now that they have aged and not lived up to their requirements nor served their purposes. LU, in being more of a “metaphor for ecology” uses simpler methods that we can refute now, before waiting for the test of time, as they are based in age-old concepts that are being run through the gauntlet right now by a myriad of closely affiliated professions and practices.
Comment by Karja — November 23, 2010, @ 11:43 am
Further, if you get right down to it, walking is the only means of locomotion all land-bound creatures share, and good urban design scaled around humans rather than cars also means more walkability for the rest of the critters along migration corridors, etc.
Even if you don’t take it down to the study-required metrics of the successes and failures, LU on an ecological scale fails, clearly, when it pursues a horizontal built/designed landscape.
By us pursuing the naturally derived complexity of human settlements through tradition and evidence we automatically allow for the complimentary ecological complexities to survive and flourish. Few understand these complexities well, none understand them totally, and trying to create false complexities leads to horrible results, whatever the field. Only by doing as we do, building off of age old complexities that we can replicate even if we don’t fully understand, can we achieve a harmony.
Comment by Karja — November 24, 2010, @ 7:01 pm
LU: FISH SEX PARK
Waldheim’s take:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iYEgrPBmCqw at around minute 57:00:
Clients take:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bEQiNXXgu4g
Toronto’s 2 minute video of the “Fish Sex Park” project (no mention here of fish). A strikingly different take on the project than Waldheim’s.
Comment by Paul — November 24, 2010, @ 7:16 pm
LU: FISH SEX PARK
How come these images look to me like they’ve been gleaned from the computer generated illustrations for the History Channel’s series, “Life After People” (LAP)?
The impetus behind LAP may be a natural post mortem fascination, driven by the old perceived schism between “man” and “nature” — i.e., Nature cannot return until Man is gone, humanity being seen as fundamentally separate & apart from a natural environment.
LU, in its embrace of Delueze & Guattari, has staked out for itself the role of conciliator — stating that Man and Nature are really one and the same. They are attempting to philosophically conjoin what the Modern experiment has rent asunder. And, by inference, stating that those who stand its way are of the old school and intent on denying the pleasure of reconciliation to humanity.
NU’s most powerful tool is the argument that a City is a functional, purpose-driven assemblage. Nature (as an organization of animate & inanimate objects) is also a purpose-driven system — one could argue that this system (this, ecology) is driven by one central force, Survival.
Yet a City adds another layer atop mere survival, it adds pleasure — in essence, happiness — to the equation. It isn’t just a matter of humanity surviving (since this can be done in small huts and isolated bivouacs), it is a question of gaining true pleasure out of a life, beyond survival.
The most damning characteristic of Sprawl is the forced isolation of the constituent parts of urbanism’s ecology. This vivisection of the City has precipitated all sorts of inequalities that deny the higher purpose of the City – the elevation of humanity above mere survival, in its pursuit of happiness.
LU in it broad-brush wallpapering of greenery over the urban environment is a damning of the City with faint praise. It no more attempts to reconcile Man and Nature than it attempts to address the inequities of Sprawl. The maps created for LU projects imply, with their green splotches, that “somewhere in there” happiness occurs. This is no more helpful than a Conquistador’s map that points to Incan territory and states that somewhere, over there, lies El Dorado.
Comment by Dean — November 24, 2010, @ 7:27 pm
I think “evidence and evidence-based” need to remain at the forefront of all thoughts and efforts. It is the practice NU’s movement was reborn out of 30 years ago, it is how we are approaching the reform of all of this and more as it applies to ecology, environment and culture.
The simple truth is that LU is just avant-garde-ponzi-ism for no better reason than to be new and exciting and money/fame-making; it is bad modern architecture with a new green sticky note slapped on it. Evidence is starting to really build against those buildings now that they have aged and not lived up to their requirements nor served their purposes. However, LU in being more of a “metaphor for ecology” uses simpler methods that we can refute now, before waiting for the test of time, as they are based in age-old concepts that are being run through the gauntlet right now by a myriad of closely affiliated professions and practices - we just have to do our part with the interaction of the urban form.
Really, if you get right down to it, walking is the only means of locomotion all land-bound creatures share, and good urban design scaled around humans rather than cars also means more walkability for the rest of the critters along migration corridors, etc.
Even if you don’t take it down to the study-required metrics of the successes and failures, LU on an ecological scale fails, clearly, when it pursues a horizontal built/designed landscape.
By us pursuing the naturally derived complexity of human settlements through tradition and evidence we automatically allow for the complimentary ecological complexities to survive and flourish. Few understand these complexities well, none understand them totally, and trying to create false complexities leads to horrible results, whatever the field. Only by doing as we do, building off of age old complexities that we can replicate even if we don’t fully understand, can we achieve a harmony.
Comment by Karja — November 24, 2010, @ 7:40 pm
It’s good to see the coming of age of new urbanism. Thanks for posting =)
http://www.monarchrh.com/index.php
Comment by Monarch Ridge Hill — December 2, 2010, @ 12:54 pm
“I recognized a classic Latin American-style operation. It was clear that the venerable Urban Design program would be eliminated or replaced by Landscape Urbanism.”
I am sorry but I am not aware of the classic Latin-American style of operating. I find this comment offensive and misleading.
Comment by Maria Diaz-Garduno — December 13, 2010, @ 11:21 pm
Landscape Architecture should embrace Ecological New Urbanism and it should be done NOW (2011)! If not, Ecological New Urbanism will certainly be introduced into Harvard by the next generation. If the dean at Harvard can’t step down to the rest of The United States, the fallen middle class will be soon sleeping in ruins and public parks— the lower class in sewers. There is no transparency. It is a moral responsibility for these two movements to reconcile their differences, and to co-exist at Harvard. Why don’t you behave like gentlemen?
Susan Peik-Dickey
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Comment by Steve Hernandes — March 28, 2012, @ 1:14 am
I would like to put forth the following question: How close are the ideas of Harvard’s LU to those of Post-Humanism? I assert that they are practically synonymous and that fact requires further scholarship. The reasonable and humane ideas of Neo-Urbanism are the architecture of the future and, happily, against the architecture of eugenics. We have so little time to fight the continous waves of cyber-scum. Fortunately, generations of ‘humans’, in this case, architects and planners, will follow Duany’s legacy. The venerable ideas (Post-Victorian) of Andre Duany versus those of LU should be debated in every School of Architecture and Urban Planning. The time is NOW. Let’s hope it is not too late.
Comment by Susan Dickey — January 19, 2013, @ 10:57 am