Category Archives: landscape planning

From the ground up, the sky is the limit…

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Turned upside down land-scape becomes sky-scape. So what happens when the city meets the sky? 56 Leonard Street by Swiss architects Herzog & de Meuron disrupts the orderly rhythm of both the street-scape and of the skyline of New York with its jagged form from base to crown.

The base of 56 Leonard Street is firmly part of the city, while the crown of the building challenges the city limits: the blue space. Another blue space on the edge of cities is the coastal edge. The NSW government have included guidelines for protecting coastal edges near settlements.

At the limits of the green space of southern Californian cities according to biologist Paul Beier is cougar territory. While in Lincoln County efforts have been made to have developers include tree plans in their development applications (with fines for non-compliance).

In Germany there has been a conversation since the end of last millennium about ‘quality growth’ and ‘optimal growth’ at the edge of cities. In this paradigm according to Bruns and Schmidt in their paper ‘City Edges in Germany: Quality Growth and Urban Design’ “Land is valued for its own right, as landscape, as having character, contours, and limits. ‘Green walls’ instead of built walls are to be designed to border the city.”

How should a city meet its landscape in the twenty-first century?

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The separation between City and Landscape was very clear in the Middle Ages: the city stopped and the landscape began, as in Carcasonne. This was the relationship in Europe, India, China and elsewhere. Twentieth century cities learned to sprawl. The city centres were dense enough, but the suburbs often had too much wasted land and the surrounding countryside was littered with so many lumpy buildings that it came to be called Nowhere Land.
So what should we do in the twenty-first century? Some of the problems are (1) putting limits on city size has proved impossible (2) poor people always want to move to cities from the countryside (3) rich people, in Europe and America want to move from city centres into the countryside.
My answer to the question at the head of this post is: define greenspace as ‘landscape infrastructure’ in advance of city expansion. McHarg-type landscape assessments should be made of the land around cities and long-term designations should be made to create an extensive web of land on which no building will ever be allowed. My guess is that the web will be based on (1) the existing pattern of rivers, streams and ditches (2) skyline ridges. Urban edges should be defined on the margins of this future greenweb and these margins will become the future equivalent of medieval city walls.
The IFLA student competition on Urban Boundaries is a welcome contribution to the debate.

Photograph of Carcasonne, courtesy John Wesley Barker.

The Earl of Moray's Pleasure Ground, in Edinburgh is an excellent example of a greenway with an urban edge (just visible on the skyline)

Image of St Bernards Well in Edinburgh courtesy Jonny Ho

Theme Parks

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A design without a concept is usually not worth much. Where is the boundary where a concept becomes a theme? Where is the boundary where a theme becomes kitsch? And where is the boundary where a concept becomes art? Is there a context in which we can compare Disneyland with the Garden of Cosmic Speculation? Or with Little Sparta? Is Rousham merely an Augustan Theme Park? And where does Portmeirion fit in? Many clients – particularly in young, brash economies – confuse themes and concepts, how can we advise them? Does the West still have noble, Augustan-type concepts to offer the world, or do we only do cartoons these days?

The images show the Qasr Al Sarab Hotel on the fringe of Abu Dhabi’s Liwa Desert, based on an image engineer’s imagination of Arabia and very Disneyesque in its dreamweaving – but ultimately inauthentic – attention to detail.

Quarry garden sculpture at Pedreres de s'Hostal as an example of the after-use of mineral workings

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Quarries are famed for their propensity to create ‘a scar on the landscape’. But they can also produce wonderful results, as land sculpture on a supra-human scale and majesty. This has led me to conclude that the Permission for new quarrying projects should only be given when a restoration and after-use plan has been prepared and agreed with the planning authorities. BUT there is also a possibility of making something good, and something which is a work of art, when the after-use of the mineral working was not planned in advance. The Pedreres de s’Hostal quarry is a good example of this.
The Pedreres de s’Hostal stone quarry on the island of Minorca, Spain became disused in 1994. It was then taken over by a non-for-profit organization (Líthica) and is being made into a post-industrial heritage park

Image courtesy Carlos Pons

Panda pandemonium

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China’s number one mascot the giant panda (ailuropoda melanoleuca) are only found in the bamboo forests of south western China. “They occupy 6 small forest fragments in the provinces of Sichuan, Gansu and Shaanxi. (5,400 square miles).”

The panda is well travelled in popular culture, as well as being a local hero. With the recent release of Kung Fu Panda, the panda Po looks set to win over another generation of children to panda love.

Habitat fragmentation (by roads and railroads) and destruction and poaching (for their pelts) are still major threats to the Giant Panda, even though poachers and smugglers have received death penalties or long prison terms. Pandas are often injured in traps and snares set for other animals.

Emerging threats to the panda populations are mining, hydropower and tourism. A giant panda may consume 26-83 pounds of bamboo a day to meet its energy requirements.

How green is my neighbourhood?

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One of the unfortuneate consequences of the fight against urban sprawl, which has been largely taken up in the name of Jane Jacobs, is the loss of green space and the urban forests of many communities. They are disappearing in the manner environmentalists call ‘death by a thousand cuts’, that is (sometimes) slowly and incrementally.

Sherwood Forest is one of the old, upscale, districts of Detroit, ‘the city of Neighbourhoods’;

“Developers thought that the area should resemble an English village; thus, they selected appropriate English names and curved and winding streets. You will not find a rectangular street pattern here or in old English villages. There are about 435 homes, most of them built before the Depression terminated housing construction in the city. Many of them are Georgian Colonials or English Tudor homes in keeping with the English theme. Some of the homes are newer, having been constructed after building resumed in 1947. They are large, even by the standards of early 21st-century architecture since they average about 3,600 square feet with four to six bedrooms.”

In the adjacent suburb of Palmer Woods is the Dorothy Turkel House by Frank Lloyd Wright, which undoubtably also relies on its leafy surrounds for its ambience.

British biologist Professor Jeff Sayer in his lecture at James Cook University asked the apt conservation question, ‘Conserving the forests for whom?’