Proactive urbanism -with or without an urban designer

2014

Landscape urbanism emerged in the late 1990s as a critique of urban design’s inability to deal with the expanded character of urbanization. Landscape has been intended as the medium through which to interpret the contemporary city and to develop a more ecologically informed urbanism. In the last fifteen years, several books, academic programs, and design projects have been developed under the landscape urbanism banner, contributing to blurring the boundaries between the spatial disciplines and multiplying and enhancing urban strategies. It is the project of a “school,” whose main advocates are recognizable and whose intellectual history can be traced. Beyond Urbanism reassembles this story, starting from the main figures who developed the discourse and exploring the main cultural and academic contexts in which the field of landscape urbanism has emerged and been defined: from its origins to its new recommitment as “ecological urbanism” at the Harvard Graduate School of Design. A series of interviews conducted with Mohsen Mostafavi, Charles Waldheim, James Corner, Stan Allen, Sanford Kwinter, Ciro Najle, Eva Castro, Alfredo Ramirez, Chris Reed, Pierre Bélanger, Alan Berger, Kelly Shannon, and Manuel Gausa, lets the protagonists speak of the discourse’s origins, of their main references and research projects. An atlas of recent projects looks at the emerging practices, which are forecasting innovative relationships between the urban and the environment, and beyond traditional urbanism. Foreword by Charles Waldheim, Afterword by Mosè Ricci

Urban Art: Creating the Urban With Art, 2018

Urban Art: Creating the Urban With Art, in: Urban Art: Creating the Urban With Art, Proceedings of the International Conference at Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, 15-16 July, 2016, eds. Ulrich Blanchè and Ilaria Hoppe, Lisbon 2018, pp. 10-12

URBAN STUDIES / ARCHITECTURE / PLANNING "We live in the most urban of centuries. Yet, the Twenty-First Century cityregion differs from its predecessors. In Integral Urbanism, Nan Ellin provides a clear and compelling portrait of this new urban landscape. Integral Urbanism is essential reading for architects and planners-for anyone-who seeks to make sense of our present urban condition. Nan Ellin gives us hope for creating order out of chaos." -Frederick Steiner, Dean of the School of Architecture, University of Texas at Austin, and author of The Living Landscape "Nan Ellin has written a compassionate, incisive, and necessary manifesto for the design of cities that are sustainable, diverse, and humane. Standing outside the twin dystopias of Truman Show neo-traditionalism and Blade Runner hyper-modernity, Ellin calls for a third way, an urbanism impatient with any certainty that claims its authenticity simply through form. Like her great predecessor, Jane Jacobs, Ellin understands cities not simply as physical artifacts but as shifting and irreducible skeins of human relations. And, like Jacobs, Ellin is an acute, nuanced, reader of cities and a clear-eyed critic of the theories that seek to describe and remake them." -Michael Sorkin, Integral Urbanism is an ambitious and forward-looking theory of urbanism that offers a new model of urban life. Nan Ellin's model stands as an antidote to the pervasive problems engendered by modern and postmodern urban planning and architecture: sprawl, anomie, a pervasive culture-and architecture-of fear in cities, and a disregard for environmental issues. Instead of the reactive and escapist tendencies characterizing so much contemporary urban development, Ellin champions an "integral" approach that reverses the fragmentation of our landscapes and lives through proactive design solutions.

Diogenes, 1986

For most people the city, particularly the industrial city, is the antithesis of the aesthetic. While there may be sections of a city that have their charm, trucks and automobiles have conquered its streets, and pedestrians scurry before them like the vanquished before a victor. Gardens and parks are occasional oases amid the barren desert of concrete and asphalt, but the dominating features of urban experience remain mechanical and electronic noise, trash, monolithic skyscrapers, moving vehicles, and air heavy with fumes. The personal and intimate are swallowed up in mass structure and mass culture. And the human place precarious and threatened. This is no exaggerated picture but a realistic depiction of urban environmental experience in the great industrial centers of the world and, perhaps to a lesser degree, in smaller regional cities. Urban centers offer important gains, to be sure, primarily in the ability of such concentrations of wealth and population to support a cultural life rich in range and variety. But there are sacrifices, too often prescribed by those who do not make them, people whose financial and political power enables them to insulate themselves against much of the urban dross and to escape frequently to refuges of luxury and leisure. Yet the gains of urban living need not require human sacrifice. There is no necessary principle of quid pro quo governing industrial civilization that demands that grace, delight, and beauty be forgone in the name of material progress. Both city and civilization originate in the idea of community, and the city still holds the promise of the classical world as the place where people become human.

This essay presents some ideas on how to fix the disasters in European urban planning and design: how to repair Europe's damaged urban fabric. Governments have made tremendous efforts to implement solutions to problems that were obvious to everyone. Unfortunately, these solutions only exacerbate the situation, for reasons I discuss. Urbanist ideas have been applied since the 1930s that contribute to the deplorable state of urban life in many European cities. The effects of applying the 1933 Athens charter were so disastrous that a new one had to be prepared in 2003 (presented in Lisbon, not in Athens). Shamefully, the New Charter of Athens 2003 is unknown to most government planners in Europe. Time and again, politicians are seduced into constructing showcase projects that boast an alien, "contemporary" look. I also address the link between bad urban planning and ecological disaster. First published in two parts as "City of Chaos", Greekworks.com (May & June 2004), then as Chapter 20 of: Shifting Sense – Looking Back to the Future in Spatial Planning, edited by Edward Hulsbergen, Ina Klaasen & Iwan Kriens, Techne Press, Amsterdam, 2005, pages 265-280. Italian version is Chapter 10 of "No Alle Archistar", Libreria Editrice Fiorentina, Florence, 2009: pages 179-211.

Nature Based Solutions for Cities, 2023

This chapter presents an integrative notion of urban design as an array of small-scale practices that “trigger” (Merwood-Salisbury and McGrath 2013) regenerative social-natural processes towards achieving a just transition from extractive to regenerative economies (https:// cl imatejusti cealliance .org/ just-transition/ ). Our perspective is that equitable and sustainable urban designs are only achieved through the material resolution of the dynamics between socially produced spaces and natural processes, rather than exclusively as modern nature-based solutions (NBS). Good urban designs achieve not only the right to the city (Harvey 2008), but also the right to nature (Apostolopoulou and Cortes-Vazquez 2018). Since its mid-twentieth-century origins, however, urban design has had a troubling authoritarian, anti-social and anti-natural history, tied to the misuse of bureaucratic power based on Western ideas of modernization (Berman 1981; McGrath 2020) and the misuse of natural metaphors to describe urban social processes (Light 2009). Based on this troubling history, we argue against uncritically adopting modern NBS to the already overly technocratic disciplines of centralized urban design planning, and advocate for the cooperative formulations of continually evolving social-natural resolutions (SNR) negotiated through diffuse but nested consensual management and governance practices. Social-natural resolutionary processes can continually advance both new frontiers in ecological science as well as advancements in design justice (Costanza-Chock 2020). The growth of low- to medium-density urbanization across the globe is a pressing issue today with urban land consumption outpacing population growth (McGrath et al. 2017). We offer here indigenously based designs through the practice of “spatial ethnography” (Sen and Silverman 2013) in Chiang Mai, Thailand, as an example of designing for the new complex, connected, diffuse and diverse global urban realm (McHale et al. 2015).

The Wiley Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Theory, 2017

New Urbanism has been described as the most important architectural movement in the United States since Modernism. It embraces the concept of environmental affordance, the belief that the built environment can inform attitudes and behaviors. New urban practitioners are critical of much of twentieth-century urban design that propelled large-scale post-World War I suburban sprawl, and Modernist architecture. Drawing on prewar urban planning, new urbanists argue that by recreating walkable, mixed-use, mixed-income neighborhoods with civic architecture and green spaces, social, economic, environmental, historical preservationist, and democratic benefits will ensue. New Urbanism has been variously defined as romanticizing and reactionary, utopian, neoliberal, postmodern, as well as an antidote to postmodernism. Beyond the United States new urban developments are found from Europe, to Asia and the Pacific, Canada and Australia, South America, and Africa.

2005

This article provides an overview of new urbanism, a new influential movement in planning and architecture in the United States that is making a visible impact on the way american towns and cities are built. New urbanism challenges the current development practices in the US which have contributed to urban sprawl, inner city decay, degradation of natural resources, and loss of community identity. It advocates a return to the timeless goals of traditional urbanism and offers a complex set of design principles and public policies to guide development at all scales of the built environment: from the small scale (building, block, street) through the intermediate scale (neighborhood, corridor, district) to the large scale (region, city and town). The article discusses some of the lessons learned from this movement in the last decade, showing why it has gained wide support among professionals, developers, politicians and the general public, and why its principles have been adopted for pla...