There is not a single answer. And yes, at its heart, urbanism must be concerned with quality of life issues (for all classes/societies) which are sometimes considered under ‘liveabilty’, rather than our ability merely to sustain biotic life (and lifestyles) into the future.

It is worth looking both at the best urbanism can offer (enhancing what some might consider already privileged lifestyles) and the worst that it must address (the contemporary equivalent of families living in basements amongst dead babies and pigs).

It this emphasis on the upper end as well as the lower end seems strange, consider Ancient Egypt: even at the upper end of society by the standards of today they would have been considered to be ‘underdeveloped’. [ http://www.reshafim.org.il/ad/egypt/people/index.html ]

Ancient Egypt with the agricultural, intellectual and governance capacities of the day reached
an overall population of seven plus million, even so (with infant mortality at 50%) there is said to have been difficulty in feeding this population consistently.

We must consider that this ‘academic’ affirmation of sprawl is coming from America, the most wasteful country on the planet. Is this really what we, as a society need? Do we really think we can continue on this path of not caring about anything but personal liberty of using as much petrol and space as we care to waste? Esp. with all other industrial countries coming to the fore (India, China, Brasil, etc)?

New Urbanism, or even Urbanism rarely condones the kind of rampant ecological indifference that the landscape urbanists are worshiping. And with America –via Obama– now tempting to ween the US off foreign energy, who will be to blame in the end when it all fails? My bet is that the ignorant ‘landscape urbanists’ will go down as entirely anti-ecological morons in their promotion of sprawl. All I see in the Landscape urbanists is progressive cartography. Nothing else other than ‘awesome’ maps. And the texts are hardly legible, or appreciated other than as utterances of corbusian megalomania.

I’d say landscape urbanism is dead – a selfish, whinny little brat nonsense of the 90s – with little to show other than ‘catalogues’, ‘indecies’, ‘compoenets’ and ‘prototypes’ of nihilism that hardly support the common good.

Another definition is that is a catch word that is meant to attract distract young, impressionable urban planning students from real urban and social issues and policy.

The proposals of parametric Landscape Urbanism mean nothing to the struggling working classes. It is insulting to propose some godforsaken parametric solution that costs $XX,XXX,XXX to the nomadic tribes of X.

You cannot tell me the simple formalism of ‘Landscape Urbanism’ actually contributes to the well being of the proletariat any more than the dreams of Saint-Simon, Fourier, or even the lunacy of vertical farming.

Look at the AALU itself. It has been infiltrated with corporate interests – EDAW, ATKINS, ARUP. Look at what these companies have done to Dubai. Towers in the sand without plubming, where infrastructure comes second, and the people third to financial gain!

Landscape Urbanism contributes nothing but hype and speculative imagery to lure in a new generation of students into mills – working for these corporate beasts for nothing. How can it be anything else?

It would be naive to assume that urban planners had previously ignored “water, landform, vegetation, vertical structures and horizontal structures”. These are merely the elements of the city itself– lets not forget people–they count too. The socialists and activists of the 1880s gave a shit about the fact that several families were living in basements amongst dead babies and pigs in the fowl streets of East London.

It is naive to assume that generations upon generations of planners did not care about social issues. They were dealing with much more than computational formalism.
Urban plans were then were anything but a fixed vision. Lets face it; urban planners were dealing with intellectual and industrial revolutions simultaneously not some computer ‘script’. Computer scripting will not solve the real issues and therefore nor will anyone at the AA/ landscape urbanism. It is nothing but corporate propaganda.