Operative Landscapes: Building Communities Through Public Space 9783034610858, 9783034608213

Table of contents :
PREFACE
INTRODUCTION
CONCEPTUALIZE
Introduction
Cristal Park, Biel, Switzerland
Licht-Garten, Berlin, Germany
London Guerrilla Gardens, London, UK
New Farm, Brisbane, Australia
New Suburbanism, Any Big-Box Store, USA
Poptahof, Delft, The Netherlands
Serenbe Selborne Center, Georgia, USA
PLAN
Introduction
BedZED, Borough of Sutton, UK
Chongming Island, Shanghai, China
Masséna-Grands Moulins, Paris, France
Grünewald-Kirchberg, Luxembourg
Markeroog, Ijmeer-Markermeer, The Netherlands
Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates
Pujiang New Town, Shanghai, China
Thu Thiem, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam
Xeritown, Dubai, United Arab Emirates
DEVELOP
Introduction
Discovery Green, Houston, Texas, USA
Hellenikon Metropolitan Park, Athens, Greece
Jenfelder Au, Hamburg, Germany
Reininghaus Brewery, Graz-Reininghaus, Austria
Sabana Grande, Caracas, Venezuela
The High Line, New York City, New York, USA
Tokyo Midtown, Roppongi District, Tokyo, Japan
CONSTRUCT
Introduction
Arbolera de Vida, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA
Belval-Ouest, Luxembourg
Bo01, Malmö, Sweden
Green Square Town Centre, Sydney, Australia
Lower Don Lands, Toronto, Ontario, Canada
Nanhu New Country Village, Jiaxing, China
Southworks Lakeside, Chicago, Illinois, USA
EVOLVE
Introduction
Dockside Green, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada
Eco-Viikki, Viikki, Finland
Ecobay, Tallinn, Estonia
Expo-Settlement Kronsberg, Hannover, Germany
Mentougou Eco Valley, Mentougou, China
Monnikenhuizen, Arnhem, The Netherlands
Whitehill Bordon, United Kingdom
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
ILLUSTRATION CREDITS
INDEX
COLOPHON

Citation preview

Operative Landscapes

Operative Landscapes Building Communities Through Public Space Alissa North

Operative Landscapes

PREFACE INTRODUCTION

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CONCEPTUALIZE 24

Introduction

30

Cristal Park, Biel, Switzerland

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Licht-Garten, Berlin, Germany

38

London Guerrilla Gardens, London, UK

42

New Farm, Brisbane, Australia

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New Suburbanism, Any Big-Box Store, USA

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Poptahof, Delft, The Netherlands

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Serenbe Selborne Center, Georgia, USA

PLAN 56

Introduction

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BedZED, Borough of Sutton, UK

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Chongming Island, Shanghai, China

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Masséna-Grands Moulins, Paris, France

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Grünewald-Kirchberg, Luxembourg

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Markeroog, Ijmeer-Markermeer, The Netherlands

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Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates

92

Pujiang New Town, Shanghai, China

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Thu Thiem, Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam

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Xeritown, Dubai, United Arab Emirates

DEVELOP 102

Introduction

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Discovery Green, Houston, Texas, USA

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Hellenikon Metropolitan Park, Athens, Greece

114

Jenfelder Au, Hamburg, Germany

116

Reininghaus Brewery, Graz-Reininghaus, Austria

120

Sabana Grande, Caracas, Venezuela

124

The High Line, New York City, New York, USA

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Tokyo Midtown, Roppongi District, Tokyo, Japan

CONSTRUCT 134

Introduction

140

Arbolera de Vida, Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA

142

Belval-Ouest, Luxembourg

146

Bo01, Malmö, Sweden

148

Green Square Town Centre, Sydney, Australia

152

Lower Don Lands, Toronto, Ontario, Canada

156

Nanhu New Country Village, Jiaxing, China

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Southworks Lakeside, Chicago, Illinois, USA

EVOLVE 164

Introduction

170

Dockside Green, Victoria, British Columbia, Canada

174

Eco-Viikki, Viikki, Finland

178

Ecobay, Tallinn, Estonia

182

Expo-Settlement Kronsberg, Hannover, Germany

184

Mentougou Eco Valley, Mentougou, China

186

Monnikenhuizen, Arnhem, The Netherlands

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Whitehill Bordon, United Kingdom

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

194

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

195

INDEX

196

COLOPHON

200

Preface

Landscape and the practice of landscape architecture, beyond providing an aesthetic component for public spaces, create an ongoing series of systems, patterns, and interactions between living things within designed spaces. Landscape and its design are operational – they have the ability to perform, in an intentional manner, through a dynamic rather than prescriptive design process. The operative landscape is an inherently dynamic and continually evolving medium that takes into consideration programmatic and ecological dynamics and uses landscape to direct communities toward resilient outcomes. The operative landscape approach accepts and incorporates change over time to reduce the need for continual material and maintenance inputs, while maintaining an active project agenda. Community landscapes are most effectively designed as operative landscapes: able to be continually remolded to foster resilient urban ecologies, to suit relevant community needs, and to further the notion that urban open space is an ideal medium for positive environmental and community transformation. Premised on the phases of design as related to community building through public space, the chapters of this book have been organized to emphasize the different design phases. Each design phase can assist the evolution of communities, from their social networks, building structures, economic vitality, visual presence and cohesion, to vegetative communities, environmental health issues, and urban ecologies. The visual communication of operative landscapes plays an important role in the conception of a project and is critical for relaying the project’s structure and evolution over time. The layering of functional levels such as vegetation, pedestrian and automobile circulation, water flow, and built and projected structures reveals the material components and ecological processes along with the strategies for, and evolution of, increasingly resilient landscapes. Throughout this book, the various designed landscape layers of each project have been diagrammatically dissected to reveal their operative structure. The individual layers help provide an in-depth reading of materials, proportions, and densities of these evolving, yet formally cohesive spaces. Operative landscapes will be of particular relevance with ever-increasing urbanization, where viable design solutions must account for growing populations through ecologically informed techniques able to foster resilient landscapes that are critical to effectively functioning urban environments. Landscape architecture, with its ability

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to relate and adapt to the many forces and complexities that comprise public space, is aptly positioned to guide solutions with and for communities. The operative landscapes approach aims to increase the diversity, habitability, and ecological resiliency of cities – and therefore the vitality and welfare of communities. The groundwork for this publication was initiated in the context of a graduate seminar course for Master of Landscape Architecture students at the University of Toronto. Students were required to select three case studies from a list of projects for which landscape was critical to the healthy functioning of the community. They researched these communities, delved into their landscape structure, found drawings of the proposals and photographs of the constructed projects, drew up site plans, and created diagrams of the community’s landscape qualities and built structures. Many projects revealed themselves to be technically proficient but less innovative in terms of public space. Discussion ensued regarding what makes a community landscape sustainable, along with a questioning of this elusive but ubiquitous term. In the end, only a small fraction of the hundreds of communities studied have been included in this book. Many of these students are now working in landscape architectural firms where they aspire to design and foster resilient landscapes, and I am sure that some day these too will be published in a similar compendium. A number of people were vital in supporting this publication, and they deserve much gratitude. A generous grant from the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation (LACF) made it possible to realize this publication. Thank you to my colleagues Liat Margolis, Richard Sommer, and Charles Waldheim. Special thanks for the assistance from University of Toronto students Martina Braunstein, Fionn Byrne, Michael Cook, Marc Hardiejowski, Hashem Hosseini-Mousavi, Sally Kassar, Kiana Keyvani, Melissa Lui, Mary Liston-Hicks, Elnaz Rashidsanati, Kyle Xuekun Yang, and the University of Toronto 2010 Master of Landscape Architecture class. It was a pleasure working with the expertise of Andreas Müller as editor for the publisher. Also thank you to Birkhäuser for belief in the publication of architectural works and to graphic designer Anita Matusevics for visual precision. I will be forever grateful for the unending support from Pete North, who provided considerable advice, and to the two people to whom this book is dedicated – Aili and Owen – thank you for your boundless enthusiasm. It is ultimately for your generation that exceptional communities must be created.

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Design proposals that are premised on landscape as operational aim at guiding the transformation of urban environments over time.

Previous page: The High Line, New York City, James Corner Field Operations. This page top: Gledhill Public School Open Spaces, Toronto, North Design Office. Bottom: Grünewald-Kirchberg, Luxembourg, OKRA Landscape Architects.

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Introduction By Alissa North Landscape – specifically the design discipline of landscape architecture – has exploded with potential to act as the leading organizational device to shape and direct urbanism, develop adaptable and resilient ecologies, capitalize on innovative technologies, advance economic restructuring, reclaim, and remediate spoiled lands, improve and reimagine antiquated and over-engineered infrastructure, and build and strengthen social and cultural capital. Contemporary landscape architectural works have advanced an agenda for landscape to intervene operatively through the design of frameworks, in contrast to the widespread perception of the designed landscape as a solely aesthetic endeavor. The ability to solve complex globally challenging issues in an era of extraordinary urbanization, at scales adequate to the issues at hand, is the likely reason for the leading role assigned to and taken on by landscape architecture. The operative quality of landscape can be considered common theory within the design disciplines, however, this process is less documented and celebrated at the community level. As exemplified by many practicing academics, the current design work found at most schools of landscape architecture, the proliferation of landscape proposals for international design competitions, and by a growing number of built projects demonstrating this theory, the design and implementation of canonical largescale parks have significantly and beneficially transformed their urban contexts. And yet the community unit is not only a comprehensible scale to design self-sufficient and evolutionary systems, but also a scale at which their effects can be recognized, understood, and easily adapted further. Design proposals that are premised on landscape as operational aim are guiding the transformation of urban environments over time. Related to this strategy, operative landscapes exhibit concepts regarding self-organization, emergence, ecology, systems, performance, and function. This specific approach tends not to focus on fixed landscape form, but rather develops a landscape framework that allows for future uncertainties to be adapted within a space over time. One of the earliest initiatives of landscape architects to theorize and propel this trajectory was that of James Corner, positing landscape as an agent of change without end, “a cumulative directionality toward further becoming”: a constant process of unfolding rather than a rigid reality. 1 Michel Desvigne interprets this notion as an indeterminate nature, a “long-time frame of landscapes and cities” and especially “the play with time: the highlighting of successive phases, the emphasis on early phases, the coexistence of different stages of development that concentrate and condense, in a short period, processes with historical rhythms.” 2 This approach can provide the clues to a landscape-premised reorganization of the societal territories of cities. Julia Czerniak suggests that these landscape frameworks register as “strategic organizations, dynamic infrastructures, provisional programs, and participatory processes.” 3 With landscape acting as framework for continual process, it is important for the designer to remain involved, along with the client and community participants, in pointing the site toward a desired trajectory. Nina-Marie Lister outlines this approach as “adaptive design [which] emerges from a deliberative, integrative, cyclic, and continuous – rather than deterministic and discrete – approach to planning, design, and management. The adaptive context is one where learning is a collaborative

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and conscious activity, derived from empirically monitored or experientially acquired information, which in turn is transformed into knowledge through adaptive behavior.” 4 Elizabeth Meyer combines the idea of the resilient evolving landscape with the cultural importance of beauty and experiential perception as a critical component of design, stimulating environmental understanding to promote action: “designed landscapes need to be constructed human experiences as much as ecosystems. They need to move citizens to action.” 5 Charles Waldheim, whose formulation of landscape urbanism has reached widely within the design disciplines and beyond, regards the operative potential of landscape as the “medium through which the contemporary city might be apprehended and intervened upon,” 6 through his often quoted description of his theory regarding landscape urbanism. At the urban scale, the city is typically understood by its major components including built form, infrastructure, transport systems, and its public spaces – both formally civic and unattended nature. At the scale of the community, the above universal components can be further understood characteristically, where detail expressions of architectural form, amenities, movement networks, and distinctive ecologies provide personality to the various communities that compose a city. The varied everyday needs of community members and how they change over a lifetime, as well as the generational shifts of a community, dictate that the public realm in which their activities unfold is able to adapt to evolving uses and demographics. In this sense the operational landscape can be easily comprehended through the community unit, since the iterative processes that its members impose on it can be clearly recognized. While the city certainly experiences this reciprocal relationship with its public realm as an operative landscape, an entire city necessitates interpretation of a larger scale, a greater complexity, a morphing boundary, numerous units, and longer durations to effect change and adaptation. A community, as a unit within the city, can be perceived relatively easily by its defined borders, its current condition, and recent demographic shifts. Communities Communities rely on their surrounding resources for their function; resources originally in the forms of intact ecologies of forests, bogs, rivers, and grasslands, and through cultivation transformed into reserves, channels, acreage, and plots. Within the context of expanding urbanity, these vital green elements necessitate planned and designed insertions into cities, as large regional parks and smaller community open spaces, which continue to effect health and viability for the communities, although often with a limited functional operation. In our current situation of globally shifting goods arriving at and fueling megalopolises, and the inherent carbon issues, a new paradigm for publicly accessible land is called for: a rethinking from the singularly functional or solely representational, to a multifunctional evolutionary landscape that can perform infrastructurally, while also providing the attendant benefits that seeing and breathing vegetative biomass provides, and the ensuing cultural formation. Serving as an easily understood unit within any civilization, communities provide individuals a structure of identification in which to function. While this cohesion can be fulfilled in many ways – online, or through ethnic affiliations, a group of friends, or shared interest associations – this book concerns itself with the territory on which one sets foot most recurrently, where the home is situated, and with the proximate spaces in which routine life unfolds. The degree of investment in one’s physical community, or neighborhood, is largely dependent on its quality, and particularly the

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characteristics of the collective public realm. Whether it is a park, a river corridor, community gardens, a plaza, or a streetscape, the public spaces where people interact provide a shared sense of ownership, and the qualities of these spaces influence how the communities operate and evolve. There are infinite ways to build a community, but public space, designed as the core for directing successful community development, is increasingly prevalent, making use of a landscape framework to support an operative landscape. The open-ended landscape framework strategy, as opposed to a traditional fixed-form landscape plan, is able to accommodate the flexibility essential for the community and its ongoing vitality. It lends insight on the effects of community input and sustained involvement. In this sense, community landscapes operate functionally in the constructive transformation of communities. The ongoing performance of the community’s landscape then serves as a clear success indicator of the multifunctioning infrastructure. Intentionally designed as catalyst for community building, public landscape space as landscape framework can sustain continual evolution. Therefore, as public open spaces evolve with their communities, they can be understood as dynamic rather than static and prescriptive. Alternately, and still common practice, a community plan will reveal the itemized infrastructure of pipes, sewers and electrical transmission, precise layout of roads and curbs, and the detail design of each building, but leave the key landscape spaces unresolved, as the last spaces to be designed in detail, manifesting on the plan as anonymous green shapes, or using temporary place-holder designs drafted to hurry the plans through approvals. With this conventional approach, the landscape will be limited in what it can achieve operationally for the community – likely serving as monofunctional public space punctuations, but lacking in connection, cohesion, and multilayered potential. Process and Approach This book is particularly interested in the phases of the design process as they relate and reciprocate with the specific public space design approaches that can evolve the many aspects of community life: its social networks, building structures, economic vitality, visual presence and cohesion, and environmental health. A well designed open space tends to foster strong community pride and involvement, inviting improvement of existing buildings or the addition of new structures, a process which simultaneously ingrains a strong sense of community that demands exceptional landscapes. This cyclic process has a crucial function in propagating the constructive development of the community. Organized by chapters of Conceptualize, Plan, Develop, Construct, and Evolve, the description of the phases of the design process, particularly in relation to the community involvement in this process, is followed by a trajectory of design approaches and case studies. Within the design process, Conceptualize typifies the first phase of inventory, analysis, and conceptual design; Plan is where consultation and site planning lead to schematic design; Develop focuses on the design development phase of further evolving the design and refinement of details; Construct realizes construction drawings and specifications leading to construction along with its administration; and Evolve involves ongoing maintenance, management, and possibly design adaptation. The case studies following the chapter essays are then based on design approaches that are most aligned with the above outlined phases of design: Conceptualize relates to project approaches with strong histories and resultant narratives; Plan to projects

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An operational landscape can be easily comprehended through the community unit and the iterative processes that its members impose on it.

Whitehill Bordon, Hampshire, AECOM. Gledhill Public School Open Spaces, Toronto, North Design Office. Jenfelder Au, Hamburg, West 8.

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with an emphasis on an overall master plan; Develop to public space projects intended to provoke intense private investment of their surrounds; Construct to projects necessitating technical innovation or remediation strategies; while Evolve relates to projects with particularly flexible, resilient, and adaptable landscapes. Public space as a focus for successful community development has set a course for the design of these landscapes to occur early on in the development or redevelopment process as a medium to structure the overall community development. Understanding community impact throughout the design phases of a project can lend insight on the effects of community input, development, and sustained involvement, and therefore guide the design of public landscape spaces as intentional catalysts for community building. Each case study communicates the basic project details of location, date, size, designer, and client. A plan drawing with layered components relates consistent design elements across all projects, while providing a scale-based understanding of the projects as situated in their immediate contexts. In recognition of community health through goals of sustainability, the case studies point to the relevant social, economic, and environmental functions of the exemplary community approaches. With landscape as driver of urban form corresponding with the theoretical discourse of the 1990s, the case studies reach back to this decade, and as such, are either still relatively new, just recently built, or in the planning and design stage. While most design processes commonly follow the above-mentioned phasing sequence, the design process is not always linear, with each project revealing its own unique circumstances. Similarly, the approaches as categorized within each chapter can involve characteristics from several chapters. However, the prime organization of pairing the issues of designing public space, from the point of view of a designer in charge of a typical project and a community member involved in this process, with individual case study approaches, in order to describe and analyze the exemplary aspects aligned with the particular project phase, aims to highlight the effect of the design process on community development for both the designer and community member. The pairing also intends to promote the idea that designers and community members can continue to work together to evolve a well-adapted community. Involvement The current capabilities of digital visualization used by landscape architects have increased the effectiveness and relevance of input from community members during the design process. Particularly in times of economic recession, where governments rely on the public sector to invest in their communities, the participation of the community, from a major corporate benefactor, to small business owners, to the individual community volunteer, is critical to generating connection and long-term vitality. This is not at all to say that governments should step away from supporting and investing in civic space and infrastructure, nor is it to say that community can or should take over the role of design. A lead designer can adeptly handle the requests of the client, fulfill the requirement of municipalities, accommodate stakeholders, and ensure that developers and contractors comply with the design vision. Beyond the design and its construction, the landscape architect acts as the mediator of the entire project process to ensure effective cooperation. A talented designer has the ability to organize the multitude of required elements, but within hierarchies to ensure that public space can provide multiple functions. Design by committee tends to try to satisfy all equally, bringing a jumble of competing interests and elements into the public realm. However, guided involvement by many in the design process is critical

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to ensure that governments are supporting the needs of their constituents, that the needs of communities are fulfilled, and that designers are receiving meaningful information by which to base their design decisions. Conceptualize Involvement A case in point involving critical community input and support is the increasingly prominent shift from massive and centralized engineered infrastructure toward ecology-based design solutions that actually increase in effectiveness over time. Due to the stresses on antiquated stormwater systems in North America, many of which are combined with sewage that is directly discharged into lakes and rivers in high storm events, the United States Environmental Protection Agency has set compliancy requirements for stormwater disposal in cities. Some cities have decided to remain on the conservative side with the precisely calculable engineering strategies they have relied on since the inception of the city. Those cities have pursued the long-term introduction of increasingly deeper and larger stormwater tunnels, which come at exorbitant cost and with a degenerative lifespan. On the other hand, many cities are aiming to meet the mandated stormwater requirements through multivariate and dispersed stormwater management strategies premised on the introduction of a landscape network coalescing as green infrastructure. Consisting of spaces such as rain gardens, absorptive parks, vegetated bump-outs along roads where once only sewer grates existed, bioswales, and gravel beds under sports fields and parking lots, the green infrastructure moves from singular engineering solutions toward decentralized landscape-based solutions. Here the community benefits include cleaner air, mediated urban heat island temperatures, enjoyment of plants and the attendant benefits of increased biomass, and lower taxes due to the massive disparity in costs of conventional infrastructure versus green infrastructure. Additionally, community members can see the stormwater as operative in the landscape, comprehend its function, and participate in its production and upkeep. These types of programs require small-scale investment, with collectively significant results. They also rely on educating their communities on these infiltration strategies, to engage direct participation in the re-conceptualization of their cities through the addition of landscape as a new supportive and beneficial layer.7 Plan Involvement In parts of the globe where populations are rising dramatically, the planning of communities is paramount to the continued functioning of existing cities. In places like Singapore, China, India, and the United Arab Emirates, satellite cities are housing exponentially increasing populations, and while the master planning of these cities and towns is very much from the top down, the government planning authorities and landscape architects are intensely aware that community integration is essential to the continued vital functioning of these new developments. Community bonding is encouraged through specific programs centered within civic spaces, and by direct involvement in the greening of community through planting programs and horticultural interests. Since everyone is new, a neighborhood focus premised on the public realm can develop a shared sense of community, particularly since the democracy of public space promotes the mixing and coalescing of diverse economic backgrounds and ethnicities. 8 In the context of established cities in Europe and North America, the master plan strategy tends to be one of smaller-scale insertions into urban cores, by making use of derelict, obsolete, and otherwise overlooked sites.

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The approach here is a careful integration into the existing contextual urban form to design new connections, stitching formerly disassociated and inaccessible districts into a continuum, often promoting a better functioning of the city as a whole, while maintaining and reinforcing the unique characteristics of each community. Again, it is characteristically the landscape that forms the central and critical binding element. Develop Involvement The effective functioning of connective corridors within and between communities is a crucial factor for community and urban success. The adept planning of transport through public investment can entice considered development, gathering private investment to complete the urban fabric. This framework approach, hinged around public transport, provides a pinpointed investment strategy based on this crucial city functioning service, while leaving open relatively predictable possibilities for growth with room for individual requirements and aspirations as developed by the private sector. In Brazil, Curitiba’s renowned bus transportation system transformed a concentric development direction that was contributing to congestion into linear reaches that effectively dispersed nodes of density while maintaining a stronger connectivity. 9 The strategy of using the transportation system as framework for dictating intentioned city growth has also been used in Bogotá with a particular emphasis on bicycle transport along with an investment in associated pedestrian public spaces, parks, sports facilities, and river corridors, which in turn has renewed investment in the urban composition. 10 The European Commission has adopted initiatives for further improving their transport system as competitive, by removing significant barriers and through increased mobility, to drive employment and growth for a functioning internal market and integration with the global economy. The initiatives simultaneously aim to cut transportation-based carbon emissions by 60 percent, thus significantly reducing Europe’s imported oil dependence. 11 While these continentally scaled initiatives might seem out of community reach, their implications for community development and mobility of community members play a significant role in everyday activities, as most people use these networks on a daily basis. Most importantly, effective transportation can minimize negative environmental impacts that degrade communities, and instead entice their improvement. Construct Involvement Complex projects, such as industrial remediation sites, often require multi-disciplinary teams to solve site issues. Community alliances can prove seminal in getting this work off the ground, pushing forward approvals and serving as crucial participants by sharing their opinions and experiences. The United Kingdom’s Post-Mining Alliance, based at the Eden Project in Cornwall, may have started with the reclamation of a single Cornwall mine site, but now operates globally to assist in transitioning blighted former mine-site towns by providing new economic focus, primarily through engaging the community in the mine’s rehabilitation. The strategy is most successful when integrated into the business plan of the mine from the outset, directly involving the community (especially considering that most were former employees at the mine) and ultimately enabling the progressive rehabilitation of both mine and community over time. 12 Many American industrial sites are also recognizing that when a development plan is in place for post-mine closure, the reclamation efforts are more likely to receive both public and private funding and support, particularly with community

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assurance of continued association. 13 Landscape architects are increasingly making use of advanced digital technologies to visualize what was formerly hidden in dense environmental reports, allowing renewal options to be demonstrated to the community to engender consensual directive agreement. 14 Evolve Involvement Some of the youngest community members can also participate in the design of their communities by providing information on their activity levels and preferences in public spaces. Particularly in regards to rising child obesity, researchers are looking to obtain information on how children use schoolyards and local playgrounds. They are tracking school children with GPS and activity tracking meters, along with asking the children to record their activities in a diary to understand why and when children use school playgrounds, and to determine if they are engaging in enough activity to provide health benefits. The study will continue to track students in various seasons, as well as in urban, small town, and rural settings. 15 The children become active participants in the metrics that will see their schoolyards transform from asphalt deserts with catalogue-chosen play equipment, to imagination-provoking play structures and elements interspersed with vegetation, water, and even wildlife. Design As of late, the design process is being applied by other disciplines as a critical mode of creative thinking. The flexible but systematic process is able to be inclusive of many perspectives, extremely amenable and pursuant of innovation, while nevertheless resulting in a clear direction and palpable result. The creative component and inclusivity are the prime reasons that community can be easily and effectively involved. Community members are not bound to conventions of knowledge, and this seeming lack of expertise can actually add unimagined potentials to a project. Even without a direct contributing idea in relation to the design, the daily experience of a community member can provide valuable information toward the outcome of the design. The professional discipline of landscape architecture is particularly suited to public involvement in the design process, as the majority of landscape spaces are located in the public realm – from large parks and green infrastructures, public precincts, urban plazas and squares, schoolyards, streetscapes, neighborhood parks and allotment gardens, even down to parking lot medians. It is important for communities to recognize that they can demand more of this public space, as the benefits it will provide them. Community involvement ranges from an opinion survey, where the project designer decides hierarchies of importance for the desired uses based on how they can work together in space, to a multiple-day charrette, where all decision makers are present, allowing for compressed feedback loops and therefore minimal rework on the design. In the former, the landscape architect typically presents a plan to the community for approval, to be revised based on further community input. In the latter, the community collaborates on design, with the landscape architect as an overseer, providing technical expertise when necessary. Such involved participation often results in demonstration projects that serve as catalytic developments. This community-driven momentum successfully garners political support followed by funding that will permit the design and construction of the project. With either approach, exemplary and sustainable landscapes are a result of thoughtful design and quality materials that will remain resilient to time – both aspects requiring committed investment. Vegetation is a crucial component of this investment to form Opposite: Tokyo Midtown, AECOM.

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Urban open space is an ideal medium for positive community transformation, in its ability to be continually remolded and shaped to suit community needs.

Top: Lower Don Lands, Toronto, Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates. Middle and bottom: Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, Foster+Partners.

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space and create operative ecosystems; it is similarly important to understand the social implications of this living material and its ongoing survival, particularly in challenging urban conditions. Few disciplines make this direct connection between urban vegetation and its everyday impact on living. The simple understanding and projection of growth over time of a species or ecosystem is inherent to landscape architectural thinking. This type of systems thinking, conceiving of changing parameters over periods of time, is an ability highly valued in many disciplines. This skill allows the landscape architect to deliver a broad and durational vision for a project. Design expertise regarding long time frames is also shared with planners and urban designers, however the landscape architect tends to think over time, as well as in detail, which in the spectrum of design disciplines is more aligned with the architect’s expertise. Other disciplines, including civil, structural, mechanical, traffic, and environmental engineers, hydrologists, ecologists, artists, lighting designers, historians, preservationists, and conservationists, all contribute their expertise to the various components of community design. Local politicians, developers, business organizations, institutions, community groups, and individual community members with interest in the public realm can also influence community design, both constructively and adversely. As such, the importance of a lead designer with experience in community design, able to foster the necessary cooperation required for integration of expertise and input from all involved participants, is crucial to the design of the community, its realization, and its continuing vitality. A lead visionary designer is also able to premise a project on innovative and unique qualities, introducing community developments into the cannon of precedents that designers refer to most often. Such archetypical communities shaped by the design professions include Sir Ebenezer Howard’s Garden Cities of Letchworth and Welwyn, Frederick Law Olmsted’s neighborhood transformations through the development of Central Park and the Emerald Necklace and his Riverside Community, Frank Lloyd Wright’s Broadacre City, Le Corbusier’s theoretical proposals for the Ville Contemporaine and Ville Radieuse, realized in part in Chandigarh, Macklin Hancock’s design for the community of Don Mills, Ian McHarg’s The Woodlands community, Lawrence Halprin’s Sea Ranch, the urban design work of Palmbout with Ypenburg, West 8’s Borneo-Sporenburg, and the recent development of sustainable communities on a massive scale such as Foster+Partners’ notorious Masdar City. These types of visionary communities, on which this book is premised, gained notoriety by solving specific urban issues, from the ills of industrialization, to development of density for livability and housing shortages, environmental concerns, and sustainable development in the global era of the city, and continue to provide lessons for contemporary urbanity. They remain successful in what they were able to accomplish for their first residents, but also in their foresight in remaining relevant for future generations through their ability to adapt. By accepting that open space evolution builds stronger communities, community landscapes can be designed as dynamic systems through an understanding of the phases of a project and the impact that each design phase has on community development, including how the community can be involved. This furthers the notion that urban open space is an ideal medium for positive community transformation, in its ability to be continually remolded and shaped to suit community needs. The workflow-based structure examines community public space through the typical phases of a design project to understand this resultant landscape as process-oriented and practice-driven. The categorization of design approaches outlines the function of

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landscape as a medium for developing thriving communities, as related to the design phases and the overall community building process. The combination of process and approach seeks to align the community landscape design process and the resultant public space approaches to promote viable and flexible frameworks for design, as opposed to rigid and strictly form-based proposals. The inspiring design solutions pursue the relevant evolution of individual communities, along with their unique environments and contexts – all continually progressing as operative landscapes.

Endnotes 1 James Corner, “Ecology and Landscape as Agents of Creativity,” Ecological Design and Planning, eds. George Thompson and Frederick Steiner, New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1997, p. 81. 2 Michel Desvigne, “Introduction,” Intermediate Natures: The Landscapes of Michel Desvigne, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2009, p. 12. 3 Julia Czerniak, “Appearance, Performance: Landscape at Downsview,” Case: Downsview Park Toronto, ed. Julia Czerniak, Munich: Prestel Verlag, 2001, p. 14. 4 Nina-Marie Lister, “Insurgent Ecologies: (Re)Claiming Ground in Landscape and Urbanism,” Ecological Urbanism, ed. Mohsen Mostafavi, Baden, Switzerland: Lars Müller Publishers, 2010, p. 540. 5 Elizabeth Meyer, “Sustaining Beauty: The Performance of Appearance,” Landscape Architecture Magazine, October 2008, p. 130. 6 Charles Waldheim, “A Reference Manifesto,” The Landscape Urbanism Reader, ed. Charles Waldheim, New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006, p. 16. 7 Arthur Allen, “Green City, Gray City,” Landscape Architecture Magazine, September 2011, pp. 72-80. 8 “Planning for Singapore’s Future,” Singapore Government, Urban Redevelopment Authority, http://www.ura.gov.sg/MP2008/intro.htm (accessed October 12, 2011). 9 Vidisha Parasram, “Efficient transportation for successful urban planning in Curitiba,” Horizon Solutions Site, Transportation, 2003. http://www.solutions-site.org/artman/publish/article_62.shtml (accessed October 14, 2011). 10 “Best Practice: Largest Bicycle Path Network, City: Bogatá,” New York City Global Partners, 2011. http://www.nyc.gov/html/unccp/gprb/downloads/pdf/Bogota_CycleRoute.pdf (accessed October 14, 2011). 11 “White Paper 2011: Roadmap to a Single European Transport Area – Towards a competitive and resource efficient transport system,” European Commission, Mobility & Transport, 2011. http://ec.europa.eu/transport/strategies/2011_white_paper_en.htm (accessed October 14, 2011). 12 “Our Work,” Post-Mining Alliance, http://www.postmining.org/index.php (accessed October 11, 2011). 13 Jon Cherry, “Case studies of successful reclamation and sustainable development at Kennecott mining sites,” Designing the Reclaimed Landscape, ed. Alan Berger, New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008, p. 107. 14 Alan Berger and Case Brown, “Digital simulation and reclamation: strategies for altered landscapes,” Designing the Reclaimed Landscape, ed. Alan Berger, New York: Taylor & Francis, 2008, p. 115. 15 Kate Hammer, “Why is there so little play in playgrounds?” The Globe and Mail, August 31, 2011, A1, A5.

Opposite: Cristal Park, Biel, Klötzli Friedli Landscape Architects.

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CONCEPTUALIZE

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The conceptualization phase of a design requires the generation of an overriding theory to organize and direct all aspects of the design process to follow. When conceived as a clear singular idea, a good concept is able to consolidate the myriad complexities of any given project. The project’s concept can help narrow a relevant selection of inventory in increasingly information-dense circumstances and direct a pointed analysis for relevant project insights. The fact that many of the answers to a design challenge reside within the site itself as well as the dynamics of its context indicates the importance of this phase in setting an informative and consequential project trajectory. Sites with rich histories or narratives adeptly offer this inspiration, and the case studies in this chapter are exemplary of a strong conceptual approach. The projects make use of site history to generate formal responses that indicate a narrative, trace site layers as a revealing palimpsest, or reuse and repurpose existing fabric to generate projects with multiple meanings, values, uses, and interpretations. The essential story-telling of the site incites community members regarding their own presence, fastening them into the narrative and implicating their immersion. Process With context and history situated, in relation to the desired program, through an inventory of qualities, and site-specific analysis forming the basis of a conceptual design, a designer can begin with a base map to understand the spatial characteristics of the site and its context. The analysis of applicable site-related information helps solidify the potential of the site and provides an early indication of whether the client’s desires for the project are achievable. For instance, zoning requirements may not allow for certain types of development or programs, or unknown issues such as contamination may cause the project to be prohibitively expensive. Specifically, the analysis will consolidate the factual inventory to find interrelationships, thereby providing a basis for problem-solving and design decisions. This assessment, which not long ago was done by overlaying information on trace paper over the base plan, can now be captured through statistics on spreadsheets, it can be displayed digitally and geographically located with information software to determine where conflicts and confluences occur. With the proliferation of digitally available information, a logical direction for the project can often be difficult to discern, and it is here where the project’s concept is imperative to consolidate its direction for the design team, the client, and stakeholders: where an environmental group may value existing site trees, a mayor might favor the added tax revenue that a built structure can bring. With these conflicting perspectives, it is the project’s concept that can act to galvanize consensus. If the concept of the project is to foster diversity over time – which may include aspects of economic development, biodiversity and resiliency while accommodating demographic changes – it will implicate flexible design solutions rather than static and unchangeable components. Since design is a very open-ended creative process, with no singular correct solution, defining a basis on which to make decisions can often be one of its most perplexing aspects. The start of a project is an exciting point full of endless imaginative potential. The Conceptualize phase instigates the first seeds of the project’s narrative, in which much can still be discovered, designed, rethought, and revised, but it is the concept that provides the overall frame in which the project will develop.

Opposite: Grands Moulins Open Block, Paris, Christian de Portzamparc.

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Approach – Concepts of Integrating the Past Projects that exemplify this stage of design have interesting histories, powerful features, or an existing structure of buildings. The new landscape layer is added to transform the community and as a complement to its new purpose. These types of communities have rich histories that remain legible, with the new landscape as another layer of the site’s narrative. As cities approached their edges, the former private hunting grounds of monarchies emerged as some of the first public parks. The carriage routes and hunting trails formed the basis for new park circulation, with features such as tree plantations also remaining as legible layers of the site’s former use. The Vienna Prater, with many a noble owner, was completely forbidden to public access to deter poachers. It was eventually made publicly accessible in 1766, and with increasing use as a public park that included cafés and an amusement park, it was fully transitioned to this function when in 1920 hunting fully ceased. The park’s main avenue of the Hauptallee, the magnificent artery lined with horse chestnut trees that runs straight through the center of the park, is an exact trace of one of the prime lines that comprised the hunting circuit, radiating from the Lusthaus, itself now a restaurant but once an imperial hunting pavilion. Berlin’s Tiergarten, as the former hunting reserve of the Prince-electors of Brandenburg, was designed as a publicly accessible park in 1830 and since has seen the addition of major roads, monuments, playgrounds, a zoo, and is crisscrossed by underground tunnels and trains. Similar transitions occurred with the Boston Common, which had seen use as pasture land, as an American Revolution war camp, and as a site for public hangings before being granted park status in the 1830s; and also with London’s Hampstead Heath, which transitioned from land granted by nobility, to common grazing land, to officially and fully publicly held parkland in the 1940s. Here the cattle-worn paths of former public pastures remain as traces within the contemporary footpaths of the parks. The historic traces reveal the durations of these evolving landscapes. This integration of the past while accommodating current uses, places community members in the historic trajectories of these parks, allowing them to directly participate in the ongoing cultural importance of these public spaces. Whether experienced as a lifetime community resident or a newcomer, the identification with and connection to public space unites communities. While the historic traces of navigation networks serve as subtle reminders of a site’s history, contemporary examples of projects are much more explicit about their sites’ previous layers, using them as a conceptual strategy to narrate the project and as a basis to add further meaning. Often referred to in design as a palimpsest, this technique, which leaves traces of the site’s former uses, can bring a richness and sense of duration to a project, resulting in a rootedness that projects commencing with a tabula rasa approach cannot achieve. Vancouver’s Granville Island was ideally located for the purposes of sawmills and factories, where raw material could be delivered by ship into the core of the city, and then leave fully processed by train. With the city’s growth enveloping the island, the central location proved to be more of a liability with the cramped factories often catching fire and the adjacent river now heavily polluted. In the late 1970s, the government was compelled to invest heavily in the island’s reclamation and transformation, which has resulted in one of North America’s most successful urban redevelopments. At the base of its significant success was the design decision to maintain much of the site’s history through its pedestrian network, benefiting from the texture of the historic cobblestone streets with inlaid railway tracks. Much of the

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mixed-use district’s built form is also intact, where the industrial heritage is evident in the repurposed shed architecture, which is now occupied by artist’s studios, shops, housing, educational facilities, exhibition spaces, as well as parklands and a vibrant food market. At another harbor industrial site, Philadelphia’s former industrial Navy Yard, D.I.R.T. Studio developed a design strategy in 2005 for Urban Outfitters’ new corporate offices that salvaged site materials through novel reuse. Existing concrete was broken up into large pieces and reset in a new pattern with stone dust filling the gaps, allowing spaces for planted trees to emerge. The reuse of 100 percent of demolition debris leaves an imprint of former material history on the site, while adapting materials in new and novel manners to relay a contemporary ethos on waste. With their regeneration, industrial lands formerly ignored by adjacent communities are now available as new public territory, as hubs of economic and cultural activity, and tend to spur further regional development and renewal. Toronto’s Yorkville Park, designed by Martha Schwartz/Ken Smith/David Meyer in 1991, uses a triple-layered narrative to ground the small urban park in its contemporary and historic context. As a former working-class Victorian row house neighborhood, Yorkville, despite its downtown location, has maintained its smallscale structure through a gradual evolution from a notorious artist precinct to the upscale boutique district. Inspired by the Victorian development lot lines, and the era’s popular practice of the specimen tray collection box, the designers relayed this concept by tracing the facing lot lines across the site to divide the park into collections of small garden-sized parks. The gardens were then themed with iconic elements of the Canadian landscape, including a massive granite rock from the Canadian Shield. The last referential layer of the park used vegetation and materials such as orchard trees, wood, stone, and yellow brick to evoke its provincial location. Starting with the broad concept of collection, through the use of forms and materials, Yorkville Park successfully overlays a density of site and contextual history, resulting in a rich narrative firmly grounded in its site. Instead of a completely new formal language for the park, the drawing of the site’s historic context into the park allows community members to appreciate the unique scale of this historic neighborhood, while participating in contemporary public space activities. The 1995 large park design on the former Munich Airport lands, now Landschaftspark Riem, by the French landscape architecture team of Latitude Nord, uses a strong framework of massive tree plantations, groves, hedges, and individual trees to evoke the long lines of the former runways, urban plot lines, and historic fields, which also follow the prevailing winds. Its conceptual composition was additionally deduced from an analysis of the regional woodlands and hydrology, informing a variety of wildflower meadows and grasslands. The entire plane of the site is gently tilted, suggesting this urban fringe land as a subtle tectonic fold, playing with its location as a new critical node of the urban periphery that will attract density to its edges over time. The large park as community focus, while a reminder of history, has been designed to accept new narratives as imprinted by the next generation of residents that will view this landscape as their own. Another large park at the urban periphery, Orange County Great Park in Irvine, also engages with many layers of the site’s decommissioned military base lands in California to restore ecologies and guide development. The 2007 approved park master plan was generated by a multidisciplinary team led by landscape architect Ken Smith, and aims to create a new type of park experience where visitors can gain new perspectives on the built environment and the natural world. The project draws not only on its historic elements and legacies to develop the

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park and its program, but also the participatory process of the visitors as an emerging layer, made legible through an orange theme. Park visitors can take rides in a massive orange tethered balloon to see the evolving aerial perspective of the site, speak with an orange uniformed volunteer park ranger, ride around the park on orange bicycles that can be used for free once visitors have left their cars at a peripheral parking lot, and for those not able to bike, small orange electric vehicles are ready to tour visitors around the park. The project aims to connect the history of the site and community with its current needs as a means to restore natural heritage. The project design sets a framework which draws out layers of history, while providing means by which community members can actively participate in future processes to further inform the park’s design, simultaneously constructing the park’s cultural significance and ensuring its continued relevance. When sites have rich legacies, which are maintained even just as traces, and relayed as part of the designed project’s narrative, the spaces can act to preserve and educate about cultural features. Culture, as a set of shared attitudes, is an extremely powerful galvanizing tool for a community. Public space provides an ideal forum to disseminate stories, as the direct tie to landscape’s dominant spatial qualities – stories that are inherently tied to location and therefore to meaning. The clear conceptualization of these narratives, as transformed into formal space, is what allows for a site’s reading to be understood by many. In this sense, a project’s concept is not only crucial for navigating the design process, but also for its success as it accrues further meaning in the public realm.

Opposite: Hellenikon Metropolitain Park, Athens, Serero Architectes.

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CRISTAL PARK, BIEL, SWITZERLAND 2006 (COMPETITION), 2008 (COMPLETION) Size: 0.6 hectares / 1.5 acres Project Lead: Klötzli Friedli Landscape Architects Team: Tschopp + Kohler Engineering, Geotest Client: Municipality of the City of Biel, Infrastructure, Nurseries and Cemeteries

Formerly used as a waste disposal site, prohibiting built structure, the site of the current Cristal Park developed into a valued community park. It emerged from an invited landscape competition with the redevelopment objective to create an open space serving a wider variety of purposes for all generations of local residents. The design integrates existing elements to a large extent and adds layers of use and meaning to the site, accommodating the needs of the community. The park has enjoyed positive acceptance from local residents from the beginning.

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The original outdoor spaces consisted of an open meadow in front of a senior citizens home, a densely tree-populated area in the center, and another open area covered with gravel. The designers chose to preserve and complement the numerous existent trees, using the spaces under the ambiance of the mature tree canopy for a variety of purposes. Interaction between the pioneer tree species and “noble” park trees creates gradations of light and dark to promote diverse atmospheres within the park, which are also marked by tall grasses and further animated in springtime by the addition of masses of white tulips. The original dirt footpath has developed into an asphalted path, which apart from being walkable is also well suited for wheelchairs and baby strollers. A cemented area and a field create new playing areas. Benches set along the periphery enable contact between people of all ages, including the senior citizens whose residence is situated directly adjacent. Proposing change to existing public space is often contentious, regardless of the recognition that spaces need to evolve to suit the changing needs of their communities. Through sensitive additions of public space elements to an existing mature park structure, the redesign of Cristal Park successfully adapts and increases park programs while meeting broad community approval.

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Opposite: Existing mature trees are retained in the plan, while new understory vegetation updates function and meaning. Plan components from top: vegetation, circulation, buildings, primary open space, all layers.

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Retention of existing mature vegetation provides a rich layer and familiar base for the site. The paved path invites pedestrians, cyclists, wheelchairs, and strollers, supporting community interaction of all ages. An open meadow allows views from an adjacent home for the elderly into the park.

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A wide paved area accommodates a variety of programs. New and older trees create a variety of atmospheres through gradations of light. Masses of tulips animate the site in spring. Retention of valuable elements with sensitive updates ensures community approval.

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licht-garten berlin, germany, 2007 Size: 0.1 hectares / 0.25 acres Project Lead: atelier le balto Team: European Landscape Architecture Student Association assistants, Tourne & Lindmüller Client: Stadtkunstprojekte e.V., Municipality of Berlin-Köpenick

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As city centers evolve and residents insist on high-quality public space, opportunities for creative redevelopment of even small-scale spaces can have transformative effects on their surrounds, and bring new uses and layers of involvement to formerly neglected sites. atelier le balto has formed a practice of transforming forgotten city niches, both public and private spaces, into vibrant and flourishing gardens, inviting visitors to explore these formerly unused spaces. The Licht-Garten, paired with the Schatten-Garten, form the Garten Duett, installed as part of a city renewal effort through small-scale public art installations. The purpose of the project was to transform neglected lands in Berlin’s old city fabric. Surrounding streets and several public spaces in the Köpenick district had already undergone recent transformation, but several abandoned private plots distracted from renewal efforts as they were easily viewed from outside. Choosing to work with two plots, the practice transformed the inactive lands into gardens, designed to be related to their microclimates and solar orientations, becoming the Light Garden and the Shade Garden. The natural vegetation at the edges of the sites was maintained as a stratum of former existence, while perennials and annuals were introduced in the middle of each plot: sun plants for one garden and shade-tolerant plants for the other. An existing wall with support walls was easily adapted into compost alcoves. The once abandoned lands are now available in the public realm of the city, with local residents visiting daily to take a break, visitors arriving on weekends for picnics, and annual performances organized by city theater groups in both gardens.

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Opposite: Community garden plan for a neglected site, using former elements as stratums. Plan components from top: vegetation, circulation, buildings, garden plots, all layers.

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Opposite: Remnants of an existing structure serve as mulch and compost alcoves. Events occur in the garden, including performances on a raised platform. The next generation reinvigorating the site that now flourishes as a public garden.

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London Guerrilla Gardens London, United Kingdom, 2004 - ongoing Size: various Project Lead: Richard Reynolds Team: Guerrilla Gardeners Client: n/a

Guerrilla gardeners seek to promote the renewal of undermaintained public spaces by taking the task of renewal into their own hands. Their approach combines community activism and civic ownership, in that they garden without permission from the local authorities who hold official responsibility for the upkeep of the territories. They initiate urban change at diverse scales in their communities, by planting neglected public spaces such as vehicular roundabouts, forgotten and weed-infested planting beds, street frontages, or single tree wells. Operating through an interactive online community forum and varied involvement in the field, guerrilla gardeners share information and advertise new initiatives including their scheduling, seed-sharing, equipment lending, donations, and gardening advice. A pioneering campaigner to encourage others to do the same, what began for Richard Reynolds as a solo activity to transform the neglected open ground in the immediate vicinity of his tower block home now includes a spread of guerrilla garden locations in his community of South East London, with similar efforts unfolding globally. Guerrilla gardening in South East London began at the dead of night, in the interconnecting raised brick beds of the Peronet House. There was no grand design, just gradual and opportunistic additions and changes based on availability of funds or donations of plants. Gaining confidence, gardening could occur in daylight, with the increasing help of encouraging neighbors. Eventually, written permission to garden was gained, and council authorities acknowledged their negligence by refunding residents maintenance charges for years during which they had done nothing. However, through a recent loophole the council can again legally charge residents as if the council were gardening, while providing no support, either financial or verbal, for the guerrilla gardening efforts. Resembling a traditional English cottage garden, it is a gloriously incongruous spectacle besides the high-rise architecture and four lanes of traffic.

Planting of the Sunflowers of Parliament. Traffic islands are ideal public spaces for guerrilla gardening. Opposite: The ease of planting sunflowers is an ideal initiation into guerrilla gardening. Plan components from top: circulation, city blocks, guerrilla garden sites, all layers.

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The London Lavender Field consists of two raised beds in the center of a crossroads. Prompted by the dullness of the typical low-maintenance landscapes of London traffic islands, a force of twenty guerrilla gardeners cleared the existing grass, which was replaced with hundreds of lavender plants and random shrubs brought by the gardeners. Every year the lavender is harvested to make fragrant pillows to raise funds for more guerrilla gardening. Under-planted with tulips, the bed provides seasonal color, and is thriving with no formal agreement from authorities, for whom it is convenient to turn a supportive blind eye. Annually, on May 1, guerrilla gardeners are encouraged to plant sunflower seeds. Some flourish, some fail, but the seeding serves as an energizing landmark in a guerrilla gardener’s year and an easy way for the newcomer to get involved. Planted in a neglected rose bed by the Thames, Sunflowers of Parliament were a spectacular success, which flourished as a proud beacon of horticultural triumph opposite the Houses of Parliament. Adding landscape as a layer to neglected public space demonstrates that community stewardship can initiate civic renewal, and that public claims of ownership and transformation are available to the average citizen.

Guerrilla gardening often takes place at night, with donated vegetation and interested community volunteers. Opposite: Harvesting at the London Lavender Field. Night and day gardening at Peronet House.

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New Farm Brisbane, Australia, 2005-2010 Size: 200 hectares / 494 acres Project Lead: Mirvac Design Team: FKP Property Group Client: City of Brisbane

The riverfront community of New Farm provides a rich contextual narrative for a site that has experienced multiple morphological and cultural transformations. New Farm is a rich piece of the inner suburban fabric of Brisbane; one that is characterized by multiple architectural and cultural identities. New Farm’s name traces back to the portion of the site’s peninsula that was once a farming settlement in the late 1800s. The current state resulted from a master plan formed as a manual: designed to function as a conceptual framework, it outlines a range of possibilities and processes, rather than precise design intentions. New Farm’s adaptive master plan, which was initiated by the City of Brisbane, interprets the spatial and historical processes of socioeconomic change, the physical realities of the site, as well as its heritage quality informed by the site’s previous industrial nature. It has enabled New Farm’s regeneration to outline the preservation of the community’s historic housing stock, by providing guidelines that prescribe the creation of a heritage park system with reference to some of the legacy features of the site. Much of what makes the New Farm community sensitive to its context, while at the same time engaging in its efforts to recharge a once downtrodden community, is made possible through acute analysis of data and site characteristics. Those involved in the documentation of the site’s characteristics, as well as those charged with the task of developing the unconventional master plan, paid careful attention to the demographics of the site, which suggested that a creative industry of artists and young entrepreneurs was beginning to unfold in some of the site’s older buildings. One such site of artistic activity was forming in the former Brisbane Powerhouse. The planners took this cue and identified the Brisbane Powerhouse as a building that would become the epicenter of the emerging performing and visual arts scene. Now the Brisbane Powerhouse stands as a landmark for the community’s creative activities. The planners also calculated the projected trends of population growth and have allocated the former gas meter building as the focal point of a new civic center with a public plaza.

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The incorporation of historic buildings into new public spaces, the design of which have all been guided by community consultations, demonstrates the master plan’s ability to outline programmatic opportunities while leaving the detail design characteristics to a variety of designers. With this strategy, the project can continually unfold in concurrence with community needs, adding layers of richness and diversity over time.

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Opposite: Adaptable public spaces connect historic and contemporary buildings. This page: Public space is predominant, particularly at the desirable water‘s edge. An emphasis on processes defines and redefines public space programming. Plan components from top: river edge, vegetation, circulation, existing and proposed buildings, public space, all layers.

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New Suburbanism Location: Any big–box store, USA PROPOSAL: 2000 Size: n/a Project Lead: Lewis.Tsurumaki.Lewis (LTL Architects) Team: n/a Client: n/a

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New Suburbanism is a provocative design proposal exploring the potential use of big-box retail stores as a platform for innovative community design strategies. The theoretical approach recalibrates the residual spaces on top of and surrounding suburban big-box stores as the spatial infrastructure that is required for suburban densification in North America. Projects at this level of conceptual design encourage the much-needed dialogue between policy-makers, developers, public interest groups, designers, and community members to stimulate innovation in the face of sprawl. The proposal emphasizes the importance of considering land reclamation as the key strategy for reversing suburban sprawl by appropriating unproductive pieces of suburban land and converting the land into viable community housing and public space. It also creates an awareness of the environmental impacts of big-box retail stores regarding issues of storm water management and energy consumption. As a result, it intends to provide a strategic lens through which policymakers, planners, designers, and communities can begin to reconsider the ubiquity and environmental impacts that bigbox retail stores have had on their specific locales. Through the lens of the New Suburbanism scheme, the big-box retail store is transformed from a place that is quite debilitating in terms of its ability to stimulate recreational activity, cultural programming, accessibility, and environmental sensitivity, into a place that contributes to new community building by promoting a densification strategy that mirrors that of its urban counterparts – building housing upwards, not outwards.

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Opposite: Layering a community atop a big-box retail store. Plan components from top: water, contextual circulation, proposed buildings, public space, all layers.

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The proposal demonstrates the need to rethink the approach taken by most suburban developments, which allocate land for single-use programming, be it residential or commercial. In this case, what begins to unfold is a series of possibilities in which the vast residual spaces of the store’s rooftop and parking lot are reprogrammed to include the many-layered components of residential development. Instant densification and a new urban morphology are created with the inclusion of residential housing on the commercial rooftops.

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The big-box store itself then becomes the nexus for the development of a new type of community, operating at two scales. The first is the scale of the individual house: the houses and the new ground plane can be programmed in a variety of ways to accommodate community amenities such as pools, open spaces, recreation fields, and integrated multi-layer parking. On the second scale, that of the store as a ubiquitous land-consuming typology across North America, community proposals can begin to provide suburban densification at just about any location of these types of big-box stores. New Suburbanism literally becomes a superimposition of traditionally oppositional suburban building typologies, initiating a dialogue that attempts to create new and more versatile suburban communities.

Far left to right: Swimming on the rooftop. Field sports amid big-box parking. A community member is mowing the communal lawn, while his neighbor shops below. Above: Making use of the typically barren big-box rooftop to create a community above retail. A typical section. Green infrastructure replaces the formerly barren rooftop.

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Poptahof Delft, The Netherlands, 2004 Size: 14 hectares / 35 acres Project Lead: Palmbout Urban Landscapes Team: OKRA Landscape Architects Client: GEM Poptahof

Poptahof is a 1960s residential block of tower buildings, whose community has been overtaken by parking and the delivery logistics of the site’s shopping precinct. The primary strategy of the urban plan for its restructuring is a redesigned landscape, surrounding the new and existing buildings as a structuring framework. The landscape framework, which forms the heart of the plan, consists of linear public spaces that have an important circulation function and provide visibility lines to give the area an open spatial character. The pervasive atmosphere of the landscape strengthens the connections between the community and the adjacent residential streets. Topographical elevations are re-contoured such that the interior courtyards of the buildings can now open up directly to the wider space, thereby interconnecting the semi-public courtyards and the public landscape. High demand for parking spaces in the area makes densification and double use indispensable, so that for instance parking areas and their routes with slowed-down vehicular traffic serve also for walking and occasionally for community events. A new system of water elements serves the sustainable handling of surface water together with the recreational use of the community park. Other features of the landscape framework are plazas and vegetated parks, where large trees create intimate environments covered by shadowy canopies, while remaining visually connected to the surrounds. Furthermore, to ensure consistency the plan stipulates specific rules for architectural additions and the quality of public space constructions, while remaining sufficiently flexible to anticipate programmatic changes.

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Opposite: Restructuring a connective landscape framework. New buildings help define a public landscape corridor. Topographical manipulations strengthen interior connections to public spaces. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, existing and proposed buildings, primary open space, all layers superimposed.

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Top: The site under construction, gaining building density and connective public space. Lower left: Paved areas serve multiple event and circulation purposes. Lower right: A child-friendly environment to encourage community interaction.

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This spatial redesign of Poptahof is an attempt at a contemporary rendering of the neighborhood’s original scenic quality, where the residential function and the shopping function converge on safe and accessible public spaces, offering many applications for the child-friendly and multi-ethnic neighborhood. The Poptahof project is not only an urban plan, but also a process in that it aims to use the landscape to further build the community.

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Serenbe Selborne Center Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia, USA 2002-ongoing Size: 90.6 hectares / 224 acres Project Lead: Reed Hilderbrand Team: Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects Client: Steve and Marie Nygren

The Serenbe community development project was greatly influenced by a public stewardship program advocating the preservation of farmland in the face of development pressures during the housing boom of the past decade. Sited within maturing pine woodlands and the rolling farmstead hills of the Chattahoochee River watershed, it comprises the largest remaining undeveloped stretch of forested and agricultural lands in proximity to Atlanta, Georgia. Stewardship efforts include the conservation of a heritage farmland site, forests, and river tributaries. They were initiated by a former Atlanta restaurateur, Steve Nygren, who formed the Chattahoochee Hill Country Alliance along with surrounding area residents. The particular strategy, along with customary conservation practices, aims to save as much as 80 percent of the existing land use pattern, arranging additional population in clusters of villages and hamlets. Balanced growth programs, developed by the Alliance in cooperation with four county governments, changed the land use and zoning on 40,000 acres and introduced transfer development rights. In this framework, any property-desiring development must have a minimum of 200 acres, and all density development must be kept within 30 percent of that land, thereby saving 70 percent for agriculture or preservation purposes. 52

Serenbe’s original design team evolved a plan to build three village centers, oriented toward specific programmatic identities and focused on particular landscape features. Circulation and water infrastructures were devised to be responsive to the historical farming patterns and the property’s topographical and hydrological systems. Selborne, the first of these centers, was partially completed when Reed Hilderbrand and Mack Scogin Merrill Elam were engaged to develop projects for arts programming and gathering spaces, to be situated at the point where the main street crossed one of the property’s drainage creeks.

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Opposite: Selborne Center site plan. Biological wastewater treatment plant with boardwalk integrated as an infrastructural park. This page: Community development responsive to topography. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, open space, all layers.

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Though the arts center is yet to be completed, a set of linkages was conceived that could be implemented in modest stages. The 22-acre meadow, conceived as the town’s common, was improved through the planting of beneficial meadow mixes and woodland edge restoration. The biological wastewater treatment plant, originally implemented by Michael Ogden and others, was transformed through plantings, boardwalks, and bridges as an integrated infrastructural park. Trails connect the center and the common with more remote parts of the land and reveal the former terracing patterns from cotton production. The productive capacity of Serenbe’s land continues to be generative: community-supported agriculture supplies the town’s restaurants, shops, and citizens with produce, and businesses and homes place a high value on local resources. Serenbe’s planners have successfully fused limits on growth with permanent protections on farming. The town’s historicist building fabric promotes a market-driven but sincere return to small-town life; more fundamentally, the working agricultural landscape is palpably present at the margins and in the center of town, and the reciprocal growth restrictions that save up to 80 percent of the land area from intensive development define a workable planning model for other landscape-based community planning approaches.

Meadow as town common. Opposite: The rolling hill landscape defines the character of the community, improved by meadow and woodland edge restoration. A boardwalk connects community elements into an integrated infrastructural landscape.

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The planning process thrives on community involvement. For those members committed to and intent on participation, this is the design phase where community involvement can have the most effect. Through consultation, the design team listens to the interests and expectations of the community’s constituents and proposes broad planning gestures, which become increasingly refined through additional input into a schematic design. The most common approach for realization is the master plan, which can be relayed efficiently and effectively on one sheet of paper, and which serves as a referential template for the design of multifaceted sites such as entire communities. Master planning facilitates efficient construction of the project, which can often be accomplished in a single construction phase. The projects in this chapter provide innovative solutions to this enduring planning technique, and are premised on the design of innovative public landscape networks, or an open space matrix, as their primary feature. Process With an involved process resulting in an overall master plan, the planning of a community landscape can encompass the future residents’ aspirations, as drawn through elements of land use and circulation, while informing and complementing the layout of the built form. Consultation is an effective way to gather information on community needs and wants, and allows members to develop a sense of involvement in the design of their environments. Community consultation can be a very engaging process of drawing consensual visions, but can also be very divisive if interests are at extreme odds. While the concept should serve to guide design progression, it is also the involvement of stakeholders through the incremental steps of site planning that can help foster a mutual trajectory. This is often conducted in a public facility and can involve discussions, questionnaires, brainstorming, and engaging community members to draw their visions as pictures or on plans, which are categorized and given hierarchy by the design team. The master plan encompasses a broad conceptual idea premised on inventory research and analytical conclusions, and indicates anticipated scales and spatial relationships as determined through the consensus-building process. Since the master plan is typically drawn and illustrated on a single sheet of paper, it serves as the most valuable document to guide the remaining design steps. It can also be considered the summary document of the project’s progression to date. The master plan is often accompanied by an elaborated document that further illustrates and explains individual components, however it is primarily the illustrated master plan itself that forms the most critical document of this phase. Approach – Planning Community Participation The ability for an adept master plan to encompass a concept as well as a precise spatial layout is what also makes it a persuasive tool for constructing a project in one singular phase. Through the master plan approach, not only are the landscape and buildings designed as an overall unit, but they can also be constructed as one. Although plans are increasingly phased over long periods of time and premised on flexible frameworks, allowing adaptation of the design to adjust with evolving community circumstances, the use of the master plan as a static entity is a prevalent convention.

Opposite: Thu Thiem, Ho Chi Minh City, Sasaki Associates.

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For communities premised critically on the landscape, certain seminal master plans remain canonical for the planning and design disciplines. The Garden Cities of Letchworth and Welwyn, planned by Britain’s Ebenezer Howard with precise configurations of relationships, offered communities that could benefit from towns of limited size, with their opportunities of amusement and high wages, surrounded by the beauty, fresh air, and low rents of agricultural land. Howard’s 1902 book, Garden Cities of To-Morrow , famously conceptualizes his idea of three magnets pulling people toward the town, the country, or the ideal of the town-country promoting freedom and co-operation. Frederick Law Olmsted designed North America’s first planned community, Riverside, in 1869. The Riverside plan follows the gentle contours of the Illinois landscape and its winding river through a meandering network of streets under the canopy of a mature oak-hickory forest. A park system forms the community’s master plan framework, with a linkage of large parks and a village square, and several smaller parks and plazas. A similar community subdivision strategy was proposed by Olmsted for World’s End, located on a peninsula in Boston’s Harbor, but the homes were never built. Today, the site remains as a legacy, now accessible as a public park, where the structure of this landscape-premised framework approach is abundantly visible through the miles of empty carriage roads and mature street-tree canopies. Transitioning the Garden City ideals into a modern ethos was the continual work from 1932 to 1959 of Frank Lloyd Wright with his Broadacre City speculative proposal. It comprised visions for a decentralized city as a new suburbia, where each family was granted one-acre plots of land on which to farm their own food and construct their own dwelling. Wright’s vision was largely a response to the modern developments of the automobile and telephone as technologies granting spatial dispersal. North American land availability fostered a series of well-known community developments, and while many can be criticized for promoting the contemporary wastelands of today’s predominant suburban developments, several produced thoughtfully designed landscape-centric master plans as a strategy for creating livable communities. Several notable landscape architects furthered modern ideals through their community planning projects. Garrett Eckbo’s 1952 master plan for the Wonderland Park community used strategic tree planting aimed at making public and private domains indistinguishable, thereby extending the interior home space into the exterior landscape far beyond the property boundary. As a result the community, tucked into a Los Angeles valley, was provided with a sense of expansiveness through the use of vegetation to emphasize the dramatic topography. Eckbo was also hired to design many of the residential gardens, where he was able to further the notion of interior to exterior and public to private connections. Dan Kiley’s 1953 Hollin Hills was equally shaped by trees throughout its existent forested landscape; Kiley also obscured property lines through the geometric ordering of vegetation to promote views, along with the strategic placement of landscape elements such as parks, paths, and school sites. Alfred Caldwell’s 1956 landscape strategy for Lafayette Park in Detroit adeptly weaves private and public space into a continual whole and supports several housing options from high-rise to two-storey row houses, where a walk to school avoids any major road crossing. Lawrence Halprin’s 1963 California seaside community of Sea Ranch, located on the coast’s dramatic cliffs, was inspired by the wind-formed landscape and vegetation, prompting the architectural guidelines for angled roofs. The community’s buildings are additionally structured by windswept tree hedgerows and formed into clusters of sub-communities, carefully placed to ensure that every community member benefits from the wide views of the dramatic landscape. As a

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transitional figure from late modernism to postmodern conditions and circumstances, Halprin was also a leading proponent of design consultation, which became increasingly popular in the 1970s and 80s. He espoused the technique in a variety of creative approaches to bringing true consensus to community-based design. The global shortage of contemporary housing placed Dutch designers in the spotlight throughout the 1990s, with their internationally admired creative community design solutions. The 1994 master plan by Palmbout Urban Landscapes for The Hague’s Ypenburg community set out a minimal landscape framework by outlining a series of public spaces and routes, which formed fields that have been further developed as sub-communities by a selection of designers, including MVRDV, West 8, and Rapp+Rapp. Following an intense community consultation process, a unique and favorably varied community has evolved at Ypenburg. The notorious BorneoSporenburg in Amsterdam, designed by West 8 in 1996, was premised on a master plan outlining guidelines for streetscape, parking, private open space, storey height, and plot width, with a repeated typology of buildings, divided into three zones and interrupted by sculptural landmark buildings. The detail designs of individual structures were granted, again, to many architects. The public space includes diagonal swaths of lawn and plazas, narrow streets, and sculptural bridges, all designed with enough flexibility to accept a potential diversity of uses over time. With its strategy of merely providing guidelines for development, Borneo-Sporenburg is successful in initiating a wide range of housing, making neighbors of people at all income levels. The streetscapes are very popular and welcoming, and can be claimed by both the public and the unit owners, creating a clever boundary of public-private interface and promoting social neighborliness. Recognizing landscape as an increasingly valuable asset to community desirability and livability, urban design continues to strive for vibrant public space. In North America, towns premised on the principles of New Urbanism, such as Florida’s Seaside, aim through traditional modes of community landscape design to achieve walkability and communal participation in civic space. The government sponsorship of Eco-towns in the United Kingdom places an emphasis on the public landscape to serve a multitude of recreational destinations, alternative transportation, and ecological functions to help achieve carbon neutrality. The emerging urban centers of Chinese New Towns take advantage of waterfronts, existing wetlands, and agricultural lands to develop new cities that intend to ecologically improve their environments. In the Middle East, the massive developments of Dubai and Abu Dhabi are pioneering technologies as well as readapting historic construction techniques that are premised on knowledge of the landscape and its microclimates to allow sustainable habitation of the severe desert environment. There is a wide range of methods and forms for community involvement in master planning. While the general goal is to obtain input to ensure project success and ultimately acceptance, the intensity of this involvement varies widely. The designers are seeking to understand the history of the community and how it currently functions, obtaining this information from a public meeting or a series of issue-based meetings. Designers often rely on existing community organizations and groups as forums to gather community members and interest groups. It is important that the purpose of community involvement be defined, so that input can be precise and generative of potential solutions. In broad brainstorming sessions community members are asked to write down thoughts and information, which can be displayed and organized into categories, or participate in mapping exercises where community

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members are asked to draw cognitive maps, write or draw on maps, or place colorcoded stickers on functioning or problematic areas and major hubs of community activity. At advanced stages, preliminary designs may be displayed for the community to contribute direct feedback. Further along the design process the designers may provide design options based on community suggestions, so that various scenarios and their impacts can be relayed and technical information can be made clear to the community. Three-dimensional preliminary visualizations may also assist in explaining the project and in garnering community consensus. Interactive digital media is increasingly being used to immediately visualize consequences of community-desired parameters. The planning of communities is becoming increasingly complex with global issues and their scales of economy. This requires multidisciplinary design teams with experience and expertise in areas of advanced technology, ecology, social demographics, and economic restructuring. Even though many more design decisions are to be made, a well-drafted master plan can serve as the definitive reference document, ensuring that design development does not veer from the project’s concept and judiciously attained consensus.

Opposite: Grünewald-Kirchberg, Luxembourg, OKRA Landscape Architects.

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BedZed Borough of Sutton, United Kingdom, 1998–2002 Size: 1.9 hectares / 4.7 acres Project Lead: ZEDfactory Team: Arup Engineers, BioRegional Development Group (sustainability consulting) Client: Peabody Trust Housing Association

Beddington Zero Energy Development, known as BedZED, is the United Kingdom’s first carbon-neutral housing community, and emphasizes the landscape as a primary element to guide its master plan. The landscape strategy follows the well-known principle that residential communities are successful when they offer a variety of service amenities and public spaces, but also capitalizes on landscape for the materials that are required to provide heat, energy, food, and waste services to the community. Employing landscape on many functional and spatial levels is a key operation in BedZED’s goal to reach carbon neutrality. The community consultation process involved a wide range of aspects, from the design of individual homes to the impact of lifestyle choices as related to the consumptive and behavioral patterns of community developments. The process also recognized the importance of policy to encourage positive choices, as well as strong partnerships between landlords, utility firms, government, and the community’s residents. The landscape design responds to its context and the building development at a variety of scales, integrating regional-scale planning issues such as efficient public transit options through transportation connectivity, bicycle networks, pedestrian streetscapes, as well as site master planning issues which include the mixed-use development’s allocation of a village hall, a bar, a special needs school, 18 live-work units, a show flat and two showrooms, and a village square. The master plan’s landscape design continues through to the scale of the block and individual homes, which use a series of landscape strategies to minimize the environmental impact of the community. Most of the development employs green roofs in order to minimize stormwater runoff, while rainwater collection is contained underground and then recycled for flushing toilets and garden irrigation. Each dwelling contains outdoor space for a balcony or rooftop garden, and dwellings are south-facing to support active solar gain.

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For the first few years of operation, the thermal and electrical requirements of BedZED were met by a combined heat and power woodchip fuelled gasifier (supplied by tree waste from a nearby borough). This form of power required excessive maintenance, and has since been replaced by a very small gas boiler, which will again be replaced by a more reliable micropyrolysis unit once funds permit. Organic food and waste-collection boxes and a carpooling system all rethink landscape to influence lifestyle behaviors toward carbon reduction. Materials used to construct the homes are sourced within a 35-mile site radius. BedZED’s goal of reducing each community member’s carbon footprint is largely enabled by the thoughtful spatial planning and organization of the landscape. In this case, landscape design is used as a pragmatic tool that is reliant on an effective transportation infrastructure, the organization of communal spaces as a framework for containing and distributing resources and as a medium to reduce the impact of environmental factors such as rain, heat, and wind, such that they can be converted into reusable resources.

Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, open spaces, all layers. Buildings oriented to support active solar gain. Individual balcony and rooftop gardens, imbued with a sense of connectivity.

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Live/work, studio, and maisonettes with access to balcony gardens, land gardens, and pedestrian walkways. Opposite: Private balcony gardens blend with public access ramps. Individual land gardens interface between public walkways and private interior spaces.

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Chongming Island, Shanghai, China 2004 (master plan) 2020 (projected completion) Size: 194,200 hectares / 480,000 acres Project Lead: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Team: AECOM, Arup UK Client: City of Shanghai

The Chongming Island project, situated north of Shanghai at the mouth of the Yangtze River, is a master plan for a series of dense cities that address the issues of sprawl, and are sensitive to the site’s agriculture and natural resources. The focus is on developing communities that can use the resources of the landscape in both sustainable and productive ways. The adopted master plan by Skidmore, Owings & Merrill was born out of an international design competition that sought to generate ideas concerning how to develop the greenfield of Chongming Island into a sustainable assembly of coastal cities. The metropolis of Shanghai is experiencing a surge of growth in both its economy and population. This exponential growth has resulted in a scarcity of land, in response to which the City of Shanghai has struggled to find spaces that can be developed for both economic and domestic uses. Local planners have identified the adjacent lands around the mouth of the Yangtze River as a site for urban development. SOM’s proposal focuses on maximizing the concentration of human settlement within a small fraction of the island’s available land. The density of the built form preserves the site’s existing vegetative wilderness reserves and also capitalizes on the land’s potential to generate revenue through agriculture. Approaching urban development through awareness of the landscape’s economic potential will also support Chongming becoming a hub for the production of organic produce, targeted at the market of local restaurants in Shanghai.

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As a catalyst for community prosperity and growth, the master plan proposes the creation of eight coastal cities along the shoreline of the island. Each city will have the capacity to contain 800,000 people, while covering only 15 percent of the island. The cities will be connected to one another, as well as to Shanghai through a robust public transportation network, thereby reducing capital investment that was previously expected to be necessary to fund the construction of over-scaled highways. This strategy ensures the maintenance of Chongming’s ecological corridors, as well as to fund future environmental project proposals. Investment proposals include a wind energy system and the implementation of naturalized water treatment corridors, which will guarantee a low discharge of sewage into the sea and improve Chongming’s complex lake and river system.

Opposite: Pearl Lake City aerial rendering. Plan components from top: water, circulation, cities, landscape space, all layers. This page: Xianghua City: canals, industrial, major roads, water system, local roads, natural cooling, city center, solar access, walkable neighborhoods, composite of sustainable principles.

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Recreational fishing. Cycling in green system. Reaping bounty of green system.

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Organic farming. Bird watching. Touring the landscape.

Captions: minim veniam, quis nostrud exercitation ullamcorper suscipit lobortis nisl ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat. Duis autem vel eum iriure dolor in hendrerit in vulputate velit es

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MASSéna-Grands Moulins Quartier Masséna-Grands Moulins, Paris, France, 1995–2009 Size: 12.5 hectares / 31 acres Project Lead: Christian de Portzamparc, Atelier Christian de Portzamparc Team: Marie-Elisabeth Nicoleau, François Barberot, Barbara Bottet, Karol Claverie Client: Société d’Économie Mixte d’Aménagement de la Ville de Paris (SEMAPA)

Located on the left bank of the Seine River, the development of the Masséna-Grands Moulins District in Paris provides an example of how urban public space can act as the key operational mechanism to organize and promote dense urban form, thereby producing a socially vibrant community. The development project, which is built on land that was once the location of rail and bus factories, is a response to demand from the city of Paris for increased housing options within the tight spatial confines of its metropolitan core. The open block that forms the core of the concept and the governing guidelines for this urban composition is structured by a gridded narrow street pattern which connects the district to the city. While the resultant blocks accommodate a variety of housing and building forms, all buildings have front doors that open onto the street network to produce vibrant street life. The traditional streetcorridor elevations are replaced by a wide variety of architectural constructions, which vary in height and are mediated by private gardens and public landscapes. Views, light, and vegetation can penetrate the blocks, in a mutually enriching juxtaposition of public and private spaces: the private open spaces are separated from the streets by walls or fencing that contribute to the continuity and readability of the public space, while allowing it to visually profit from the vegetation of the private gardens. The linking series of geometrically rigorous and well-defined public spaces ensures spatial readability and provides a network of pathways which flow through the residential, commercial, and institutional spaces. An aerial survey performed for the site demonstrated the legibility and dominance of this vegetative network. Vantage points and vistas witnessed from both the ground plane and from buildings are dominated by gardens, street tree canopies, courtyards, and balcony terraces. In the urban environment, the street has proven to be the simplest and most open form, able to adapt over time and incorporate unpredictable events. Structured around this network, the added flexibility of the open block allows for very different typologies to be applied similarly to office, university, or housing programs, and affords each facade an opportunity to modulate natural light and take advantage of generous views.

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The open block can integrate the uncertainties involved with attracting developers and their particular demands while still maintaining cohesive urban form. At the same time, the open block permits a considerable degree of architectural and social mix. It constitutes a methodology rather than a fixed block plan, relying on a tactical manipulation of dense built form, made acceptable through the porosity of voids. The open block is a concept that Christian de Portzamparc envisioned and has developed since the 1980s. It was initially criticized by urbanists concerned that community cohesiveness could only be achieved if authored by a single architect. However, with the Grands Moulins District as the first realization of the concept, the strategy has proven not only flexible toward architecture’s capacity to generate a viable mixed community, but it has also provoked enthusiasm and promoted the works of over 30 architects.

Plan components from top: river edge, vegetation, circulation, existing and proposed buildings, public spaces and courtyards, all layers. Shadow study.

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Opposite: Open block scheme and conceptual sketches. This page: Social vibrancy through unique architecture, responsive to a connective public realm. Next page: A central park, providing both connection through and focus for the district.

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Building activity fronts on a variety of public spaces including major parks. A well vegetated connective corridor. Opposite: Inviting pedestrian boulevards promote interaction. Private courtyards provide visual depth.

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Grünewald-Kirchberg Kirchberg, Luxembourg, 2008 Size: 2.8 hectares / 7 acres Project Lead: OKRA Landscape Architects Team: n/a Client: Fonds d’urbanisation et d’aménagement du Plateau de Kirchberg

While architects and landscape architects are increasingly working collectively to design comprehensive master plans, at times the landscape master plan is generated after the building footprints have been set. With the Grünewald-Kirchberg project, the challenge for the landscape architects was to weave a cohesive landscape master plan between the apartment buildings, private parcels, and a fragmented layout of squares that lacked clear programmatic use. To provide the community with a consistent identity, the design proposed an urban orchard planted with apple and pear trees, giving the public spaces coherence through the theme of the “edible city.” The urban orchard consists of many little orchards, each with its own atmosphere, but everywhere passers-by are invited to pick the fruit. The different orchard environments provide a specific sense of place to each area of the new district. A network of circulation lines binds the various public spaces in order to create a narrative and spatial link between each of the public space fragments. The geometric gesture within the rigid alignment of buildings unfolds in a gradual change in the types and the densities of planting, creating associations and links between the urban and business edge of the community and the edge bounded by a park. The landscape master plan thus accomplishes cohesion through a strong vegetative theme and sharp geometries to create purposeful community-scaled public spaces with a strong identity.

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Plan components from top: vegetation, circulation, buildings, community public space, all layers.

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Each sub-orchard has its own identity, here as the reinterpreted orchard. The wild orchard. The public space, planted as an urban orchard, provides a consistent identity to the community,.

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Circulation lines bind the architecture. Night view. Passers-by are invited to pick the fruit. Inscribed location detail.

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Each community sub-space has its own atmosphere, with vegetation providing both cohesion and variety. Ample open space promotes limitless programmatic possibilities.

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Markeroog IJmeer-Markermeer, Netherlands 2006 (competition) Size: 2,500 hectares / 6,177 acres Project Lead: West 8 Team: Boskalis, AT Osborne, Witteveen + Bos Raadgevende Ingenieurs Client: EO Wijers Competition

The Markeroog community project takes an environmental dilemma to invent productive landmass, thereby attracting and directing urban growth in an effective, layered manner. The project involves the implementation of 80,000 housing units and the creation of new commercial, institutional, and cultural facilities. It is based on the development of wetlands, and effectively connects through a new lock the freshwater of Markermeer with the urban waters of IJmeer and the canals of Amsterdam. The project is contextually rooted in the ongoing process of Holland’s efforts to reclaim land from the sea. Past reclamations have deprived the IJmeer-Markermeer water system of major areas of shallow water for the development of wetlands, and have prompted an ecologically problematic accumulation of eroded silt. Catalyzed by the need for infrastructural improvements of Holland’s dikes, along with a larger vision of intensifying the use and productivity of wetlands by coupling them with sensitive building development, the proposed solution capitalizes on available silt for land development. 82

The design’s multi-tiered strategy of creating land connections and remediating polluted waters uses a new lock, and marshes and dunes built with local sand and silt, to address the issue of creating more land and nature to accommodate housing for a growing Dutch population, and to improve the ecological quality of the IJmeer-Markermeer. Two channels, one straight and another sinuous, configure the emerging surface into two distinct community developments. Secondary naturalized canals further structure the residential and institutional districts, while a vast wetland, oriented toward the Markermeer and protected from the waves by encircling raised land masses planted with willow forests, serves to reduce pollution. On the landmass, the east side focuses on density, while providing half of the residents with an address along the water through a number of moorings, meandering ditches, canals, and quays. The west side provides a low-density grid of freestanding buildings. The original towns and villages around the former Zuiderzee provide examples of thriving community-scale urban developments.

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Opposite: Strategies for wetland development. Plan components from top: water, wetland vegetation, circulation, buildings, open space, all layers.

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The contemporary interpretation is formed to the east as dense lowrise urban form with accent buildings as skyline landmarks, which in the past would have been the churches. The city is walkable, with front doors on the streets to encourage meeting neighbors, and all residents are within 500 meters of public transport and a central car-park, which directly connects to Amsterdam Center and Almere. Everybody lives at or around the corner from water to create a clear relation with the larger lake landscape. The west part of the island is formed by a continuous elevated sandy topography that drops towards the north into wetland creeks. The higher land is divided into large plots, allowing inhabitants to build their own houses and live within the evolving landscape. Just like in Amsterdam’s heyday of the 17th century, the waters will again be inhabited by an armada of boats, water taxis, and ferries. Commencing with land building where there was none, and ending with a community rooted to its context with high ecological value, the project demonstrates a longer-term vision for master planning, which incorporates design as a process for building complex, vibrant, and resilient communities. Markeroog situated at the IJmeer-Markermeer interface. Community landmass development as catalyst for wetland development. Master plan as premised on sensitive building development to promote ecological improvement. Aerial rendering.

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Silt catchers and soft-soil deposits.

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Masdar City, Abu Dhabi, United Arab Emirates 2007 (competition) 2007-ongoing Size: 600 hectares / 1,482 acres (total area), 280 hectares / 692 acres (city squares) Project Lead: Foster+Partners Team: n/a Client: Masdar

The master plan for Masdar City is a highly specific response to Abu Dhabi – climatically and culturally. Establishing a progressive modern city, progress in Masdar’s context is rooted in an understanding of the planning traditions of historic Arabian settlements and in creating the kind of public spaces that encourage interaction. Premised on a carbon-neutral development in the harsh desert climate, the city’s compact urban form reflects both current and ancient technologies, which pre-date electricity and rely on passive cooling strategies, in accord with historical and contemporary lifestyles. The importance of public squares historically was understood in helping to create a sense of community.

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The resulting spaces are not prescriptive, but are highly flexible to support markets, festivals, and the day-to-day life of the city – crucially, public spaces are designed to feel comfortable, using landscape and building orientation to provide shade. Analysis of the sun’s heat distribution patterns informed the design team as to how and where to situate building configurations coupled with planting, to encourage shade and ventilating winds for much of the city’s built form. Winds are funneled through linear parks to purge Masdar of the hot air that builds up during the day. Night winds are funneled into the city allowing the currents to provide cool air to the street corridors, outdoor courtyards, building skins, and interior volumes. Courtyard water features also take advantage of air movement, adding a moist cooling effect to the surrounds. Large screens dividing public spaces at the Masdar Institute permit the flow of air, while providing further shade. The combined design strategies of densely and strategically arranged buildings, evaporative cooling, shade structures, and strategic vegetation (dense planting is avoided as this would be too water intensive) provide the city with ample shading and cooling capacity, generated in the public space realm.

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Masdar as a climatic and cultural response. Plan components from top: vegetation corridors, circulation, buildings, significant open space, all layers.

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Perspective of Masdar City master plan, with two city squares. Opposite: Outdoor public space interaction made possible through ancient and contemporary landscape and architectural techniques. Screens provide shade while allowing air flow.

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The planning of the project relied on advanced simulation of the urban microclimate to develop strategies that improve comfort within the public realm. A combination of shade, careful selection of materials, design to control wind movements, and a modern interpretation of the traditional wind tower have been implemented in the first phase of construction. Performance monitoring has demonstrated a reduction in temperatures of up to 15 degrees Celsius in the summer, compared to conditions experienced in downtown Abu Dhabi. In a bold move, Masdar is closed entirely to combustion-engine vehicles, with driverless electric-car transportation provided below the city, to encourage the social benefits of pedestrianization. As a result, commuters leave their vehicles outside of the city and move around Masdar on foot, by bicycle, or using the Personal Rapid Transport system. Masdar City is poised to provide a number of lessons concerning city-scale planning through the lens of innovative environmental methods and available energy. Its continual evaluation will allow further development to be refined as the city grows. Coupled with the connective assembly of a culturally informed public realm, the project forms an exemplary response to an extreme environment. 89

Section demonstrating pedestrian passageways, with all vehicular movement under-ground.

Narrow pedestrian streets provide shade and funnel breezes. Public squares were historically important, and remain so in creating a sense of community. Water features add cooling moisture.

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Pujiang New Town Shanghai, China, 2001–2010 Size: 1,300 hectares / 3,212 acres Project Lead: Gregotti Associati International Team: Centro Studi Traffico, Arup, Alberto Cannetta, THAPE Client: Shanghai City Council

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Opposite: The gridded master plan distributes public infrastructure and is easily adapted for change. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, landscape space, all layers. Various water elements provide a sense of expansiveness. As focal points, water gathers community-promoting interaction.

As the middle class continues to produce exponential growth in Shanghai, the local government has embarked on a grand planning and design project that will allocate space to house Shanghai’s growing population. The enormity of this master plan has prompted Shanghai’s City Council to consult the Western nations, who have had an enormous impact on shaping both the growth and built form of this port metropolis. The local City Council proceeded with a series of charrettes that involved planning teams from the nine countries that have influenced Shanghai’s morphology, which included the United States, Russia, the United Kingdom, Spain, Sweden, France, the Netherlands, Germany, and Italy. The master plan operates under the title One City, Nine Towns and is a direct reflection of the plan’s goal to create nine new communities that will distribute over 500,000 people around the periphery of the city’s core. Expanding into the periphery of Shanghai means the development of areas along the east bank of the Huangpu River. Introducing mixed-use development along the Huangpu requires careful analysis of the river’s morphology. Land along the river is primarily used for agriculture and is transected by a number of canals. To skillfully navigate the site’s intense mixture of agriculture and industrial infrastructure, the Italian design team of Gregotti Associati created a simple planning scheme that could be adapted and transformed over time. The design was informed by a re-reading of history, which resulted in employing classical Italian and Chinese rectangular grids on the land along the river. The grids allow the organization and distribution of space for public infrastructure such as pedestrian circulation, bicycle, and green space networks, all densely planted with vegetation, and structured within numerous canals and water features. While the master plan advocates for a public space with a dense tree canopy, the zoning plan for the community’s built form includes height restrictions that do not exceed four stories, allowing tremendous views of the waterways. These strategies are complemented by the implementation of a forest conservation area. Designed to capitalize on a strong connective landscape to organize infrastructure, and coupled with definitive zoning regulations, the Pujian New Town master plan ensures that the public space can be comfortably enjoyed outdoors, as well as from the community’s interior spaces. Members of the community will experience both physical and visual access to a number of promenades, parks, and waterfront leisure areas that will offer a harmonious interplay between the intensity of the New Town’s built form and its public spaces. 93

Thu Thiem Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam 2003 (competition) Size: 647 hectares / 1,599 acres Project Lead: Sasaki Associates Team: DeSo Defrain-Souquet Architectes Client: Investment and Construction Authority for Thu Thiem New Urban Area (administration)

The Thu Thiem New Urban Area represents a massive master planning effort in a currently undeveloped delta area, located on the east bank of the Saigon River directly across from the main city center. The master plan was generated around three important landscape components as the ordering mechanism through which infrastructure and urban interventions take form: a Central Plaza, which will be the largest integrated park and plaza within Ho Chi Minh City; a Crescent Park, as the city’s great waterfront park and promenade; and the Saigon River Pedestrian Bridge as an impressive architectural symbol. The strategic creation of additional surface and subsurface landscape interventions is to offer a stable structure to direct the future growth and promise of the historic city. Given that much of the coast of Vietnam, let alone Ho Chi Minh City itself is prone to extreme tidal fluctuations, which results in disastrous flooding, the master plan, generated through an international design competition, takes a clear stance on this issue by designing a public open space network that will not only provide flood protection measures for the city, but also create the framework for the development of a dense urban community. Conceived as a multiphase urban design project, the master plan promises to deliver connections from the river to the center of the city and provide linkages to historic sites within the city, balance compact urban form with open spaces, and ensure flexible future development that will accommodate changes to demographic and economic growth.

Tidal and flood changes are accommodated in flexible open spaces around the central lake, providing a variety of experiences.

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Storm water management, neighborhood network, hydrology strategies, public realms, program distribution, master plan. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, primary public space, all layers.

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A critical requirement of the master plan is to acknowledge the instrumental role that the river delta plays in the daily affairs of the city’s inhabitants. To this end, the master plan illustrates a careful balance between delta-based commercial and residential development along the waterfront, and landscape infrastructure components that will create stable surface and subsurface planes. Tidal fluctuations and high-tide events are to be mitigated by the design of natural and man-made canals and basins, which help to offset and contain water during storm-related events while continually remediating the water. An extensive network of transit and pedestrian linkages to the historic heart of Ho Chi Minh City has been organized around these landscape infrastructure features. The maximization of the open space network, which is to ensure the success of the tidal management and water cleansing strategy, necessitates the built form be constructed in dense clusters. Seeking to take advantage of the river delta’s potential, the master plan will transform the river area from an underutilized site into an environmentally responsible, socially inclusive, and economically vibrant urban community.

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Opposite: Diagram demonstrating a dynamic mix of programs, public spaces, and transit options, making livable neighborhoods. This page: The autonomous water feature of the central plaza captures and filters stormwater. Model of building fabric integrated with public realm.

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Xeritown, Dubai, United Arab Emirates, 2006–2007 Size: 59 hectares / 146 acres Project Lead: X-Architects, SMAQ Team: Johannes Grothaus + Partners Landscape Architects, Reflexion, Buro Happold Client: Dubai Properties

Xeritown is a climate-responsive urban development in Dubai, forming a new extension of the city toward the inland desert, as a master-planned sustainable mixed-use community for approximately 7,000 residents. Unlike most projects in Dubai, which consider the site as a tabula rasa, Xeritown takes the desert and local climate as the context for the urban form to emerge, by working with the natural environment instead of against it. The influence of the landscape has resulted in urban massing exhibiting formal and functional dynamics similar to the dunes in the desert. Thus, the development appears as urban islands, which can be interpreted as a consolidation of desert dunes, while also exercising several passive and active strategies to conserve resources like water, energy, soil, flora, and fauna, as the desert does, creating a new benchmark for an environmentally conscious and socially vibrant community. As an immediate reaction to the harsh desert sun, the urban footprint has been compressed to occupy only 50 percent of the site. This creates a compact self-shaded structure defined by narrow pedestrian alleys and small squares, typical of Arabic towns, providing residents with climatic confort and cultural references for public interaction. The urban tissue is then divided into islands that are orientated and elongated to reduce solar gain and benefit from the prevailing winds crossing the site. The cool breeze from the sea is channeled between the islands and through the urban fabric wind corridors, while the hot wind from the desert is deviated above the development by the stepped massing. These urban measures, combined with the rugged skyline, create air turbulence to assist in natural ventilation and a reduction in energy demand for artificial cooling. Along with the passive strategies, the project also applies active systems for achieving high ecological quality and energy conservation, such as dimmable LED street lighting, photovoltaic panels and roof top turbines, using recycled greywater for irrigation and less evaporative sub-soil irrigation systems, reuse of excavated soil to create topography, and low maintenance irrigation free landscapes known as “xeriscapes.”

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Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, open space, all layers. This page: Wind study diagram. Bottom left: Shade and arcade features of the master plan. Bottom right: Urban hubs and components.

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To reduce carbon emissions and to encourage a pedestrian-oriented development, easy access to public transport is provided by an extensively shaded and well-ventilated pedestrian edge. This edge between the urban fabric and the landscape is a focal part of the design. This is where architecture, infrastructure, and landscape come together, coinciding with an intensification of human activity. A shading device composed of photovoltaic panels is distributed along this edge. The search for solutions that focus both on resource-saving principles, and on creating a pleasant environment for social interaction, also determines the design of the architectural typologies. Premised on the desert’s evolved conservation ecology, the addition of human habitation will stand a chance to adapt and endure as new members of the desert community.

Top left: Aerial perspective of development with 50 % built form and 50 % landscape. Top right: Arcade promenade with pedestrian solar shades. Sustainable energy strategies. Bottom: Perspective of dune landscape, with pedestrian circuit path.

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The Design Development phase solidifies boundaries and scales, operating through further research and refinement as a specific response to context and site. Design Development is a process mainly contained within the design office. The refinement of details will propel the design toward reality and constructability, while still leaving enough room for increasingly minute design adjustments. In the urban context, design projects taking a development approach are particularly concerned with remnant or derelict public spaces, which have typically been closed off to their urban contexts or located at their fringes. The complexly layered legacies, artifacts, and potential preservation issues associated with these types of sites pose interesting challenges for the detailing of the design. The reintegration of these lands back into the civic sphere is bolstered by a captive audience and the local amenities that density provides. For reconstituting these lands as public parks and landscape networks, the primary strategy is minimal intervention to encourage maximum private investment. This approach works best when the project site is surrounded by urban density, or the potential to be so, as speculative land value constitutes a significant portion of this strategy’s allure. Process Through design development the public space project meets the pivotal turning point from master plan to reality. The design details are refined by the opportunities afforded within the site and the constraints of how the design can be built. Entering as a concept, and emerging very close to reality, the transformative refinement of this phase renders the public space project very tangible. The document delivered to the client is likely a digitally rendered plan that looks very much like the final site will once it is constructed. The planned and presumed site activities can be inferred through the drawing, or are written in text on the plan. In addition to the rendered plan, digitally collaged perspective images are a favorite communication tool, especially when the design is being presented to a community constituency. The very realistic quality of these often seductive images can garner much support for the project, particularly from those not adept at reading architectural plans. Physical and digital models, increasingly seen as sophisticated video animations of the design, or even technologies which allow the client to maneuver through a digital rendition of the site, may also be constructed to aid in the design process and to relay spatial intentions. The influence of the Design Development phase to transform a community lies in this first emergence of a tangible reality. The community has bought into the concept, stakeholder consultation has likely reached consensus, and contractors can already imagine construction. The designer, who is now intimate with the site, has a collection of drawings that quite fully illustrate the project. The rendered vision for the public space provides a collective understanding, bringing even the most disinterested community member into the nearing reality of the project. This illustrated consensus is very appealing to developers, as they can picture the new public space with their building right beside it, along with the added marketing potential this landscape brings. Approach – Public Space to Entice Private Investment The type of community project that exemplifies this stage is the public park or network that is planned to entice and accommodate private developers to construct the surrounding buildings. While private investors may be attracted by a general notion of public space adjacent to their potential development, they are more likely

Opposite: Ecobay, Tallinn, Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects.

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to commit if the plan is resolved to a degree of conceivable detail. Particularly if the public space is planned to be reliant on funds from its adjacent development, a precise understanding on the investors’ behalf of the proposed design is crucial to ensure construction of the public space. The proven success of the strategy of using public space as a catalyst for privately funded urban development is becoming increasingly common as the first step in a development strategy, even prior to any contextual built form. This strategy is exemplified by historic and internationally renowned public parks, which to this day remain encircled by the world’s wealthiest neighborhoods. London’s Hyde Park, made publicly accessible in 1637, is surrounded by the well-heeled neighborhoods of Kensington, Belgravia, Chelsea, and Notting Hill, while French high society is drawn to the edges of the 1852 Parisian Bois de Boulogne. New York’s Central Park was designed and constructed when travel to the park required a considerable carriage or train ride away from the dense urban fabric of Manhattan. The construction of the park, which commenced in 1857, displaced squatters and marginal renters, but the park is now bordered by some of the highest global real-estate values, due to an unforeseen effect of public space on adjacent marketplace real estate. A mapping of income levels in almost any global city will reveal a decreasing gradient of wealth away from these publicly held lands. Low percentages of public spaces inversely indicate marginalized communities in urban centers. The strategy of using public investment in open space as an incentive for private investment, not only for built form but as a generator of general economic renewal, can take any number of trajectories. Public space can be set at the periphery of urban development, with the speculation that built density will eventually reach its edges, as exemplified in Central Park, or through the greenbelt and greenway forms of contemporary strategies. Or public space can be carved out of urban form or infrastructure, prompting an increase in both density of built form and value of its adjacent properties. The demolition of built form for public space, such as blocks of apartment houses in Paris for the Avenue de la Grande Armée, or Las Ramblas in Barcelona, is less common today as it tends to involve high cost and the expropriation of homes. It is perhaps best represented through the burying of urban infrastructure, such as the connected sequence of parks now covering Boston’s Big Dig, or Madrid’s M30 roadway going underground in conjunction with the aim to revitalize the city’s Manzanares River. Lands with previous uses, formerly at the urban edge but now surrounded or soon to be surrounded by density, can be repurposed as parks with the general result of gentrifying their communities. Cities may also choose a slightly different strategy to energize economic development through landscape: a strategy of city-wide regeneration of their public spaces, which may include the introduction or renovation of promenades, plazas, squares, streets, local parks, and public gardens. In the late 1970s in France, federal and municipal circumstances aligned to allow investment in the development of these spaces, and the organizations governing public spaces were given greater authority to act. In Paris, this resulted in Parc de Bercy, Parc André Citroën, and Parc de la Villette, which were all created to bring distinct identity to their communities, with the underlying agenda to catalyze neighborhood development. In Lyon, a highly coordinated effort to bring coherence, elegance, and cohesion to its public spaces was generated explicitly through development policy. Very specific guidelines were set, outlining a limited palette of materials, vegetation, and urban fixtures, with the goal to tame the automobile and regenerate public life in the city. Designed by respected landscape

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architects and urban designers, hundreds of public spaces have been created in the Paris metropolitan area since the late 1980s, individual in style but unified in urbanistic terms due to the establishment of guidelines. In Barcelona, this strategy of punctuated city-wide landscape investment was employed in conjunction with the stimulus of hosting the 1992 Summer Olympic Games. Unlike the cohesive approach in Lyon, the Barcelona strategy was strongly based in community associations, with each of them pursuing their individual goals. In this manner, as a genuine alternative to an overall master plan for the city, details could be implemented, the public could be involved, and community parks were promptly built. Moll de la Fusta connected the historic center of Barcelona back to its waterfront, Plaza de los Países Catalanes at the important commuter line Estación de Sants gave back important civic space with pedestrian priority, while Parque del Clot provided public space to bring together a neighborhood of different people with disparate incomes. Hierarchies of investment in infrastructure and public spaces created many foci that can service and renew each community in terms of their unique needs. An advanced variant in the strategic use of public space as urban catalyst is the development of both the park and built form by the same entity, such that the park attracts the development, which then pays for park construction and ongoing maintenance. Parc Downsview Park in Toronto, known best through OMA’s winning competition scheme, was tasked by the federal government to build a park that would not use taxpayer money. The park’s construction is currently financed by leases, rentals, and events. However, in the long term, it will be the sale of real estate that will fund park construction, maintenance, and operation. Various real estate consultants have evaluated raw and serviced worth, and have provided calculations on the market value of the proposed neighborhood development products. The design intent and zoning arrangements of the neighborhoods will be sold to developers, and a purchase sale agreement will ensure that they comply with the proposed vision. Control over community design will be exerted by Parc Downsview Park remaining involved in the development process with the ultimate owner. The development will continue to bring in income for park maintenance through long-term land lease annuities. New York’s Brooklyn Bridge Park extends the self-financing model even further, as the project is intended to resolve not only financial issues, but also social inclusion and ecosystem restoration, while also generating its own energy. Beyond making a park on this post-industrial land to serve and regenerate the surrounding communities, Brooklyn Bridge Park is setting precedent for public space as able to mend, regenerate, and self-sustain, positioning parks at the vital center for an ecological understanding and development of the urban condition. More than any other public space type, a project strategized to entice contextual urban development must either take into account a future demographic or be flexible enough to adapt to this inevitable change. The gentrifying community will place different expectations, demands, and uses on the public space, which must be foreseen or accommodated through specific programming and adaptation for future programs, or even alterations to park form. Maintenance and operation budgets for these potential changes are rarely considered at the outset, but clever and inventive design at this stage can and certainly should expect the unexpected.

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Discovery Green, Houston, Texas, USA, 2005–2008 Size: 4.9 hectares / 12.1 acres Project Lead: Hargreaves Associates Team: PageSoutherlandPage Architects, Doug Hollis & Margo Sawyer Artists, Lauren Griffith Associates, Dan Euser Waterarchitecture Client: Guy Hagstette, Park Director, Discovery Green Conservancy

Discovery Green transforms a former surface parking lot, located between a convention center, two major sporting venues, and downtown commercial towers, into a park that unifies the civic buildings and continues to entice further development. While the implementation of the park was to explicitly catalyze downtown renewal, the park’s success has prompted the dramatic and immediate transformation of the surrounding urban context and the broader perception and use patterns of downtown Houston as a whole. The project draws the urban grid into and across the site, transforming former road corridors into major pedestrian connections to serve as the primary circulation spines, while framing dramatic views of downtown. These spines, a wide promenade and a preserved historic Oak Allee, create armatures for the park’s dense programming, and link the park to adjacent urban destinations. Discovery Green receives an outstanding level of visitation, with many repeat visitors, attracting people from far beyond the immediate neighborhood, hosting markets, public and private events and activities, and all manner of play. The park has also become one of the region’s most important venues for public art. Through its connectivity and programming, the park dissolves social, economic, and racial strata to create a true common ground.

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As the park has rapidly become a character-defining icon of the ongoing transformation of downtown, it has already proven to be an extremely effective catalyst for redevelopment of the surrounding urban fabric, with USD 800 million in private investment in new residential, office, and hotel towers. The park’s ability to entice private investment, particularly during an economic recession, was an intent of the design from the outset. The design and programming of Discovery Green integrated applied research through the documentation of the uses and demographics of local open spaces, public activity preference surveys, interviews with community leaders and constituency groups, and precedent studies regarding the programmatic and operational aspects of parks across the country. The client group continues this research with ongoing visitor surveys, interviews, and the collection of visitor zip codes to place objective data on the often nebulous interconnectivity between design, programming, use, and economic sustainability. The use of Discovery Green by a broad spectrum of local residents and visitors, combined with the park’s ability to cover two-thirds of its required operational revenue through events, restaurant leases, and donations, are testaments to the park’s success. With the complete regeneration of Houston’s downtown, the park itself has proven to be an unparalleled investment.

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Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, primary open space, all layers. Oppposite: Urban redevelopment prompted by park. Following pages: Aerial perspective of park with surrounds experiencing a development boom. Public art is a significant program component. A historic oak allee was preserved, lending maturity. A water feature is another draw in the park‘s dense programming.

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Hellenikon Metropolitan Park Athens, Greece, 2004 (competition) Size: 530 hectares / 1,310 acres Project Lead: Serero Architectes Team: Office of Landscape Morphology, Erwin Redl, Stella Daouti, Dromos Client: Greek Ministry of Environment and Organization for the Planning and Environmental Protection of Athens

A former urban fringe airfield now surrounded by urban development, the site of the future Hellenikon Metropolitan Park exemplifies outdated urban infrastructure in conflict with its surrounds. Transformed into parks, such lands present a large-scale injection of public space. The design demonstrates how an analytical understanding of context, history, and site can inform an economical manipulation of site for not only the regeneration of ecologies, but also economic stimulation for urban redevelopment. The international competition for ideas, and following implementation of a master plan strategy, was first made possible when this airport property along the Saronic Coast was made available to public trust, due to the opening of a new airport. The program includes housing, offices, conference centers, hotels, and infrastructure, the restoration of modernist buildings including the airport terminal designed by Eero Saarinen, as well as an ecological area that allocates space for cultural, sports, and leisure facilities.

Aerial perspective of park inserted into existing context. The refined master plan. Opposite: Initial rendition of the site contours, conceptualized as traces of former water streams. Plan components from top: water and shoreline, vegetation, circulation, buildings, public space, all layers.

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The traces of the site’s former water streams, which were erased during airport construction, are resurfaced to reveal a set of connections between the two highways at the edge of the site. Through discrete modifications of the topography, the traces of natural irrigation combine soft programming and a water management strategy to slow runoff, while also linking the park to the city. On days of high precipitation, the water flow is delayed and temporarily stored along the traces in a series of retaining walls, embankments, and terraces. Instead of projecting an artificial landscape on the site, existing conditions are used to establish the root of a natural ecosystem, fostering the distribution of natural resources to the vegetation and thus reducing park maintenance. The design also capitalizes upon existing conditions through the reuse of the runways, maintaining their dramatic view corridors, and reprogramming their large concrete decks as pedestrian boulevards and recreation spaces. One runway is extended toward the sea, bridging over the highway to create a direct connection to the seashore and its beaches.

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The insertion of the new park into an established context will automatically induce change. The design of this interface will determine the success of its integration. In other projects, this scale of park is increasingly coupled with building development to fund the park, with buildings often placed barrier-like at the park’s perimeter, offering direct park access only to its new-edge residents. By maximizing the city’s frontage to the park, the design of Hellenikon increases the interaction between the park and its new and old built edges, thereby also increasing the real estate value of those buildings. Like the edge of a river in a delta, the progressive corrugation of the urban edge stretches the surface of contact between the urban and the natural, triggering inversion between park and city. The crenellated edge ensures that the park contacts both existing urban form and the new development, allowing it to serve as the coherently accessible public grounds for old and new residents alike.

Competition master plan, rendered as a strategy for the development of landscape and surrounding urbanity.

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Jenfelder Au, Hamburg, Germany 2005 (competition design) 2006 (competition announcement) Size: 29 hectares / 72 acres Project Lead: West 8 Team: Hamburg Wasser (inventor of Hamburg Water Cycle ® ) Client: Bundesanstalt für Immobilienaufgaben, Bezirk Wandsbek, City of Hamburg

The community of Jenfelder Au has been developed on a site formerly occupied by military barracks. The competition for the community’s redesign sought to elicit a design strategy that would create a strong definition of environmentally responsible community living. The winning scheme is a multi-tiered design that not only concerns itself with creating typological references to the site’s past to develop a strong image for this East Hamburg neighborhood currently considered characterless, but also includes technical design features such as rainwater harvesting, biomass energy production by using sanitary waste, and solar energy collection, to help reach the community’s goal of becoming neutral in terms of energy consumption. The district of Wandsbek, in which Jenfelder Au is situated, has a high proportion of social housing that lacks a central community focus. The district has prioritized the conversion of the site to take on the role of a much-needed destination center, as a place of neighborhood identification for the project site itself and to stimulate the entire residential suburban area. Its current quiet charm lies in its abundant open space character of relic green areas, allotment gardens, ponds and lakes, and the former barracks site that has overgrown as a green oasis with monumental trees. The design strategy builds on the existing character by clearly outlining a network of public spaces to define the new development, while connecting to the surrounding green areas to provide incentive for renewal of the existing neighbourhoods. Jenfelder Au’s public spaces consist of a main street, a central park, a river park, recreation fields, block-end parks, and inner block parks, which are all connected through landscape corridors and streetscapes. The public spaces are framed by a variety of brick-clad row houses and detached white houses, designed in a Hamburg vernacular style, and a series of small-scale commercial enterprises such as restaurants, a barber shop, a bakery, a cultural center, and a day care center. The human scale of the buildings provides a comfortable pedestrian streetscape environment, encouraging social interaction within the community. Each block consists of a Hamburg Water Cycle® rainwater harvesting system that collects, conveys, stores, and recycles rainwater for domestic use.

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The rainwater harvesting system is also employed at the scale of the streetscape, with rainwater collected and transported by small bioswales that convey the water along the aesthetic focal point of a cascading retention pool and into a large pond located in the district’s central park. Water at Jenfelder Au is designed to perform as a public amenity, an educational tool, and a vital infrastructural feature, as manifest in the exposed water infrastructure. At Jenfelder Au, landscape is used to build an identity that is both aesthetically inviting and operative. In this community design, the landscape is utilized as public space and as infrastructure, to offer recreational and educational qualities, while also reducing the reliance on outsourced energy and ultimately providing the community and its surrounds with a strong sense of place.

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Opposite: Aerial plan rendering, with ranges of public landscapes evident as connective structure. Perspectives of central public axis, river park, and neighborhood block courtyard. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, community public space, all layers.

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Reininghaus Brewery Graz-Reininghaus, Austria 2007–2010 (master plan) Size: 100 hectares / 247 acres Project Lead: Kleboth Lindinger Partners Team: Bramberger Architects and Atelier Thomas Pucher, Stadtland, ZIS+P Transport Planning, Sammer & Partner Consulting, Agence Ter, freilich, idealice, karres en brands, lohrberg, Monsberger, Mario Terzic Client: Asset One, Directorate for Urban Development of the City of Graz, Department for Urban Planning, Department for Green Space and Water, Department for Transport Planning Reininghaus Brewery entices development through a resilient landscape framework that provides character, cohesion, and involvement to its new residents. An evolutionary planning process is to make the industrial site an international showcase for ecological development and urban planning in touch with its citizens, while also providing an attractive location which is competitive on the international property market.

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With landscape designed as environmentally responsible flexible infrastructure, the project has a number of social and economic benefits to help stimulate the local community. Premised first on a master plan, Reininghaus Brewery incorporates many of the techniques described in the previous chapter; however, the project is unique in its foresight to accommodate future unknowns, as hinged around flexibly allotted public landscape features to entice development. The former industrial brewery land, located to the west of the historic city of Graz, contains a number of interesting landscape and architectural components such as fields, ponds, and the historic Reininghaus Brewery, but is isolated from adjacent residential neighborhoods. Attempts to convert the industrial site into an urban enclave remained speculative until the Asset One real estate firm purchased the property, initiating a number of research projects that involved the consultation of urban theorists and community members. The team concluded that in order to make quick and un-bureaucratic use of future urban development opportunities, the master plan had to be designed to be open, flexible, and refrain from defining too many details. At the same time it had to be stable enough to guarantee the functioning and cohesion of an entire urban district, by defining as little as possible, but as much as necessary. It was decided to develop the area by quarters, allowing the integration of changed social circumstances, technological innovation, or new insights at the time of implementation. The master plan contrasts the densely built and highly regulated historical city by offering much freedom and possibilities for investors and their demands. The building complexes can be developed independently from each other or in a discretionary order. The guiding parameters have been defined in the master plan, but customized project plans are only elaborated once development plans are available. Landscape provides much of the medium for the revitalization efforts. A public open space is central to the community, from which landscaped streets connect to the surrounding community and define the quarters. Each quarter is designated with a percent coverage for landscape, while the final form remains undefined. Research-based companies are being lured to the site by advocacy of the community’s innovative socioenvironmental features. These include amenities such as a day care center that integrates childhood learning with a community gardening facility, a network of green spaces, and stormwater features that recycle rainwater, all of which improve the environmental performance of the site. By specifying the general character of the landscape, but not prescribing it precisely, specifically desired development can be enticed to the site. The creativity of the new residents will continue to shape the landscape toward their needs, while building a strong community through their involvement.

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Enhanced aerial of existing building and landscape structure. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, existing buildings and proposed development parcels, public space, all layers.

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Diagrams depicting master plan flexibility by defining rather than dictating conditions. From left to right and top to bottom: figure/ground, major circulation routes, development nodes, block structure, quarters, parks, development esplanade.

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Sabana Grande Caracas, Venezuela 2007 (competition) Size: 9.7 hectares / 24 acres Project Lead: Enlace Arquitectura Team: n/a Client: PDVSA–La Estancia

The redesign of the deteriorated Sabana Grande Boulevard was an opportunity to renew an entire urban district by updating public space components. The Boulevard is of vital importance to Caracas as its most important public pedestrian space. Left in disrepair, pedestrian urban retail areas are liable to degrade, in turn disintegrating the retail-based community. Simple gestures to renew the public realm can have beneficial transformative effects on an entire district in such a situation. This cultural landscape differs from the rest of the urban fabric of Caracas, which is dominated by 1960s highways. Poor economic conditions and lax public enforcement during the 1990s gave way to the gradual appropriation of Sabana Grande by informal vendors; the boulevard was taken over completely by permanently installed makeshift stands, where crime and corruption was an intrinsic part of the site’s daily activities. In 2007 PDVSA - La Estancia launched a design competition that was intended to revitalize the streetscape and community, funded by profits that were generated by the stateowned petroleum industry. With an unusual approach to awarding commissions, the revitalization strategy was divided into five separate redesign projects of public mobility, landscape, facade regulations, urban furniture, and pavement. Enlace Arquitectura was granted the paving contract and took the challenge of using only the Boulevard’s well-known sinusoidal concrete-unit paver that the metro operation employed 30 years ago. Freed by a policy that removed all vehicular traffic from the Boulevard, the new design reinforced the marquee status of the sinusoidal paver through a combination of black and grey pavers that behave according to a limited number of arrangements, creating a gradation effect from one side of the street to the other. Other operations help resolve details and anomalies, but overall, the application of gradual change in color and rhythm produces a predominant patterned gesture that uniformly transforms the entire street network.

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Sabana Grande’s renewed image has attracted new retail, followed by additional visitors. Pedestrians now meander around tree plantings and benches, adding their movements to the visual patterning of the pavement, while crowds can gather safely to enjoy public performances. The project’s striking clarity, with historical reference, demonstrates that welldesigned public landscape space can renew desired cultural qualities. The use of a single key element also demonstrates that complete community transformation can be as simple as using a single operation such as paving.

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Opposite: Aerial view of the refurbished boulevard, filled with pedestrian activity. Plan components from top: vegetation, circulation with pedestrian boulevard, city blocks, street trees defining pedestrian public space, all layers.

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The regeneration of the pedestrian boulevard, through ingenious use of the ubiquitous paver, has transformed the entire precinct. The varied paving strategy easily accepts the typical interruptions from urban amenities and infrastructure elements, creating a unified streetscape and cohesive district surface.

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The High Line, New York CITY, New York, USA 2004–2009 (section 1) 2006–2011 (section 2)

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The High Line is a linear park and pedestrian system that has opened up opportunities for neighborhoods in Manhattan - the Meatpacking District, Chelsea, and Clinton / Hell’s Kitchen, including the West Side Rail Yards. The elevated landscape project capitalizes on the unused space of derelict infrastructure, transforming its previous industrial context by catalyzing new developments along its route, resulting in a thriving live-work community. The High Line occupies the surface space of what was originally a raised industrial rail corridor, built to afford efficient delivery of livestock cargo to the area’s many food processing plants. The abandonment of rail activity allowed vegetation to occupy the rail corridor through natural succession, resulting in a unique urban ecology. The designers embraced the opportunistic vegetative condition in a sophisticated design scheme to create a park and pedestrian network which supports and develops the concept of natural succession. The incorporation of existing site features, including the rail tracks and ironwork details of the elevated rail line itself, maintains the integrity of the infrastructural artifact, allowing the team to carefully consider the evolving interaction between human activity and the survival of vegetative communities in this extraordinary urban condition. During design development, the landscape architects studied the patterns and processes of the emergent vegetation to devise a solution for sustaining diverse plant communities in relation to the projected volume of site visitors. The existing gravel ballast covering the surface of the High Line was replaced with a growing medium of higher-quality engineered soil to encourage the establishment of over 200 species of new vegetation and also accommodate the growth of larger trees in select locations. The detail design of a unique paving system concurrently supports vegetative development and pedestrian pathways and activities.

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High Line Section 1 illustrative plan. Plan components from top: river edge and site water feature, site and surrounding vegetation, local circulation, historic and recent buildings, primary public spaces, all layers.

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The design of the High Line demonstrates the multiple scales of possibility for intervention in community regeneration. Based solely on its concept, the project induced speculative development prior to its construction. It continues to influence regenerative effects on its context, bringing more people to the High Line to enjoy the unique urban experience and ecology. Building development has soared to take advantage of aerial views of the appealing linear park, while connections to street level at almost every intersection have brought renewed life to the city plane. Space under the High Line has been activated day and night by entrepreneurs through restaurants, cafés, and bars, and by temporary installations such as children’s playgrounds. The High Line fosters easy movement from one neighborhood to the next, away from street level traffic, while art pieces, vendors, and a variety of seating options make the Highline a destination in itself. In this sense, urban form, community, and vegetation are interdependently succeeding. Opposite: Section through Gansevoort Stair, signaling a gradual transition from the busy street below to the quiet, elevated landscape on the High Line. Sample planking plan of the striated system of modular, pre-cast concrete planks that form the walkable surface, and shape of planting beds.

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Opposite: Elements such as water entice interaction of all ages. Lighting, moveable seating, vendors, and installations provide programmatic variety. This page: The verdant sense on the High Line is a unique experience in the context of the city. The High Line has prompted a string of building investment along its edges.

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Tokyo Midtown, Roppongi District Tokyo, Japan, 2001–2007 Size: 10 hectares / 24. 7 acres Project Lead: AECOM (lead landscape architects) Team: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill, Communication Arts, Inc., Fisher Marantz Stone, Buro Happold, Nikken Sekkei, Ltd., Kengo Kuma and Associates, Sakakura Associates Architects & Engineers, Jun Aoki & Associates, Tadao Ando Architect and Associates Client: Mitsui Fudosan Co., Ltd.

In Japan, Tokyo Midtown synthesizes the common experience of shopping with the uncommon experience of open space recreation. It does so in a manner that respects Japanese vernacular form, material, and plant aesthetics, while also understanding the contemporary city. Through this project, a provocation toward a new understanding of the Japanese cultural landscape also benefits the economic terrain, bringing this formerly cordoned military land into vibrant public use. The site holds a rich military legacy, the area having previously served as the location of the Japan Defense Agency headquarters. Situated in the heart of the metropolis, a series of walls had isolated the giant parcel of land from public access. The Tokyo government sought to reimagine the land and its adjacencies by making the real estate available for development through a competitive bidding process. The winning concept outlined a mixed-use land arrangement that consisted of a hotel, offices, luxury retail stores, private residences, and a public park, a plan which in most respects would be considered normative. However, it is in the ratio of solid to void that the development project runs counter to convention.

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The bold gesture of allotting half of the property as park space affords the developer greater building height, thereby simultaneously accomplishing both unconventional public space and very dense building development. Tokyo Midtown alters the definition of urban renewal by placing greater emphasis on the role that landscape plays in shaping and shifting not only built form, but also the cultural behaviors of human interaction. The typically tight spaces that exist between buildings and streets render the city’s hard surfaces the most important place for cultural transactions to occur, where constant movement and congestion define the cultural experience. The success of the design is hinged on attracting visitors to transplant their public interactions to the site’s historic and contemporary landscapes.

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Opposite: Illustrative master plan, with a landscape intended to shift cultural behaviors. Aerial depicting the unprecedented building density and adjacent large public space. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, public spaces, all layers.

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A traditional and revitalized Japanese garden that predates Tokyo Midtown as well as preserved cherry and camphor trees, carefully transplanted from within the site, acknowledge the site’s history. The contemporary addition, and one of the primary features of the landscape design, comes in the form of a sprawling lawn surface that encourages the public to participate in activities such as sunbathing, reading, picnicking, and sport. These are experiences that are uncommon in the traditional use of public space in Japan, where historically the public was denied entry into lush gardens and parks. Previously, these spaces were to be viewed with contemplation and awe. Now, shopping is blended into the new public space network through a galleria that leads into a vast common space. The successful integration of the outmoded site into its context was premised on evolving community behavior. Providing substantial public space and encouraging new uses within has positioned Tokyo Midtown as a contemporary model for prosperous community renewal in dense urban areas.

Opposite: The shopping galleria serves as a conduit into the shopping and public space. This page: Sprawling on the lawn, a formerly uncommon experience in Tokyo, was prompted by the landscape design. Blossoming trees attract visitors: community renewal through public space provision.

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CONSTRUCT

Dockside Green, Victoria, PWL Partnership.

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The construction phase operates first from convention and precedent. Through intelligent creativity, development of construction techniques, and the introduction of innovative materials it also adeptly incorporates new ideas. The preparation of the construction set, and its on-site administration through supervision and approvals, continues to be a process of the overall project that primarily involves the designer and the client, although the start of construction is also an exciting opportunity for the community to observe the project’s emerging physical structure. Construction can reveal unexpected challenges, in which case the design may require revision. Projects requiring remediation are exemplary for a situation where site conditions, particularly related to construction, determine and shape the outcome of the design. Interestingly, the site challenges often result in original and inventive solutions, with the site’s legacy of contamination remaining an important factor in the design of the community, along with consolidating a sense of accomplishment around improving the community’s environmental condition. Process The challenges of this phase often depend on the preconditions of the site, and as construction begins, new conditions requiring design revisions can arise. A major issue, such as discovering unknown or additional site contamination, can put a project on hold indefinitely. A minor issue, such as an unexpected unavailability of a specific plant species, may only pose minor design modifications and associated cost adjustments. The essence of the construction drawings is to act as the communication mechanism between the designer and the contractor, in order to ensure that the design vision for forms and materials is upheld. The construction set, which includes the construction drawings and their written specifications, forms the contract for how the project will be built, and the contractor’s submission of a tender price determines how much the project will cost. The contractual role of these documents, with the design fixed in the construction drawings, means that any changes to the project at this stage become increasingly expensive. Approach – Construction on Contaminated Sites Contaminated sites are perhaps the clearest examples of projects where the construction poses multifaceted challenges. For communities built on these sites, the process of remediation is a factor in the design of the new living environment. Their former contamination becomes an understood and influencing factor of the site’s design, and a positive reminder of its transformation process. In the following precedent-setting examples, the significant transformation of the contaminated sites has garnered these projects international attention. While they all serve as city-wide public leisure spaces, even attracting international tourists, their transformations have all provided benefit to their direct surrounding communities, who are ultimately their most committed constituents. Gas Works Park in Seattle, master-planned by Richard Haag in 1971, is one of the earliest examples of restoration of a contaminated site, where the legibility of the site’s former industrial legacy was the primary concept for its transformation. Containing remnants of the only remaining coal gasification plant in the USA, some industrial artifacts are inaccessible, standing as ruins, while other components have been repurposed, such as the boiler house converted into a picnic shelter, and the exhaust compressor building serving as a children’s play barn. The master plan

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outlined cleaning and greening the park through techniques of phytoremediation, a proposal far ahead of its time and supportive research, and also employed contouring and capping to ensure that contaminated soil remains far below the publicly accessible grade. Today there are no known sources of surface-level pollutants in Gas Works Park, although an occasional leach of tar continues to necessitate removal operations from the site. As an exceedingly popular public park since its opening in 1975, and with its precedent-setting preservation of industrial ruins and innovative remediation techniques, Gas Works Park serves as an international model for industrial site conversions. The continued popularity of the park through everyday visits, significant annual gatherings and events, and a dedicated locally based organization also indicate the park’s success in community renewal. The contemporary transformation of historic industrial ruins is exemplified by Duisburg Nord Landscape Park, where the concept was to integrate and shape the previous industrial use patterns and find a new interpretation of these elements. This transformation occurred from 1990 to 2002, during which Latz+Partner developed strategies of remediation and programmatic renewal to regenerate the former coal, iron, and steel industrial site, while remaining cognizant that site materials would continue to change and decompose. This shift of attitude from preservation to constant change is an important concept for the perception and experience of generations of visitors over time, but also for the strategy of cleaning site contamination. The large scale of the site permits restricting or closing off some heavily contaminated areas from public access, which allows for continued development and testing of techniques. In essence, the fundamental ecological base of the landscape had to be restored, which is an ongoing process at Duisburg Nord. The use of site soils and an understanding of their pH effects on remediation, innovative use of materials in order to prevent further movement of contaminants, the use of vegetation for phytoremediation, and a complete understanding of water movement, all allow the park to be put back into community use now, while ensuring a continual rebuilding of its contaminated state, and of its meaning, for future generations. The former industrial gas works in Amsterdam, opened to the public in 2003 as Cultuurpark Westergasfabriek, designed by Gustafson Porter in 1997 and finished in 2004, resulted from a complicated process that continues to involve adjustment for evolving site and programmatic conditions. During the concept, planning, and construction phases the plan for the park was continually readjusted, based on the morphing relationship between soil-cleaning operations, the building restorations, and site program transformations. The maintenance of soil on the relatively small site was a factor requiring calculated phasing strategies, as soil was remediated and moved within the site to accommodate construction. With a strong directive concept, which set out a vision in broad terms, a course to reach a mutual goal was achieved with great success, and the surrounding community has benefited remarkably from the park and its long but rewarding process. The 2000 Sydney Olympic site master plan by Hargreaves Associates incorporated the venues, and rail and ferry terminal infrastructure, as grounded in an urban landscape of streetscapes, public spaces, and water features. Due to the site’s previous contamination, and the exorbitant environmental and monetary cost of removing toxic soil, a decision was also made to maintain and consolidate the soil on site. A 20-meter-tall sculpted landform contains the soil with a 1-meter clay cap to prevent leaching. An adjacent wetland with native plants filters stormwater and any potential leachate as it moves through a meandering pond system, which is then used for site irrigation, and eventually reintroduced as clean water into the adjacent creek and river

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system. After the Olympics, the strategic plan for the site maintains the public spaces, heritage aspects, protection of ecosystems, and major event capabilities. The former Olympic site was officially designated as a suburb in 2009 and is one of the fastestgrowing communities in Sydney. For Staten Island’s Fresh Kills Landfill, a competition was announced in 2001 calling for a conceptual design and master plan that would phase the end use of the massive landfill infrastructure, eventually converting it to a public park. With their competitionwinning “Lifescape” proposal, James Corner Field Operations is developing diverse and integrated ecosystems for the site through a framework characterized by a pathway network, fields, and clustered groupings of vegetative communities, to promote access and movement for seeds, biota, activities, and people. During the competition, the tragedy of 9/11 necessitated a reopening of the landfill to accept the building debris, for which the designers had to adjust their schemes. The start of any project’s construction inevitably reveals detail site conditions and contextual issues, necessitating further adjustments to the master plan, which at Fresh Kills included a better understanding of specific soil profiles, along with budget restraints due to the global economic situation. James Corner Field Operations is handling these challenges by designing concentrated locations in which to begin park implementation, based around local community and public access points, where the use patterns of the first park visitors will inform the next phases of development for the park. The local community will not only benefit from adjacency to a park rather than a landfill, but is also given priority entry to the park with this phased approach, becoming a prime authority in in determining its future direction. Sited on a similarly complicated industrial site, a former degraded fuel storage and transfer station, Olympic Sculpture Park in Seattle was designed in 2001 by Weiss/Manfredi Architects and completed in 2007. The project negotiated parallel transportation systems, contaminated soil and leaching groundwater, and reshaped ground to construct a new topography with zigzag circulation, reconnecting the city to its coastal edge. The design achieves a range of environmental restoration goals, including brownfield redevelopment, the creation of a salmon habitat and restoration of other marine ecology, extensive use of native plantings, the capture and use of onsite rainwater, and prevention of stormwater migration to subsurface areas too deep for remediation. Project designers and engineers worked with the contaminated site conditions by manipulating the topography with an engineered layer of soil filters to reduce runoff and support native plants. The contouring, matching more closely that of the original shoreline, restored views and access to the waterfront, where layers of fill debris were removed to restore the original tidelands, beach front, and associated habitats. While providing the city with a renewed connection to its waterfront, the park also fostered an inclusive connection to arts and culture for its local community by bringing art to the public in an accessible, non-elitist fashion. Also with the goal of connecting the city back to its waterfront, and operating with a multitude of sites with suspected but yet to be specifically determined contamination levels, West 8 + DTAH are leading the 2006 master plan proposal for the Toronto Central Waterfront. Premised on intelligent urban manipulation of the existing road-heavy infrastructure, by removing barriers to lake access and by proposing a continuous public promenade along the lake with wooden boardwalks and undulating bridges, a clarified pedestrian priority boulevard accompanied by a double row of large native trees will reinforce the edge where the city meets the lake. Key segments of the promenade wave decks have been built as recognizably designed and successfully

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accepted new public elements along the waterfront, introducing small but effectual connective components which act as instigators for the extended developments to come. Less obvious due to their underwater location, but equally encouraging, are ecological interventions aimed to manage stormwater, enhance fish habitat, and improve water quality. At each site, with an amplitude of previous uses and histories, the unknown landfill conditions must be investigated anew, posing a new challenge in each location, but with the overall aim to connect and renew the entire waterfront. The small public space interventions have experienced increased public visitation, sustaining public and political attention on the waterfront for intensifying urban community developments. While during actual construction community involvement is minimal, the ongoing duration of remediation projects are increasingly involving the community through innovative programming as well as process techniques. Participatory processes can help aid in the site’s transformation, even if just perceptually. Even prior to construction, community participation can be seminal in placing derelict lands back into the public sphere through lobbying or even unauthorized use, garnering attention for sites and putting pressure on authorities to assist in the remediation process. The final reward of constructed public space, no longer only a plan, will certainly continue to have transformative effects on its community.

Opposite: Sabana Grande, Caracas, Enlace Arquitectura.

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Arbolera de Vida Albuquerque, New Mexico, USA, 1996 Size: 10.9 hectares / 7 acres Project Lead: Design Workshop Team: Studio E Architects, Ecological Design Institute, Integrated Design and Architecture, Dekker/Perich/Sabatini, Garrett Smith, Bohannan Huston, Chris Vigil, MOCK Associates, Institute for Community Economics, Burlington Associates in Community Development LLC, University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning Client: Sawmill Advisory Council

The project is a precedent for the increasingly important role of forming community partnerships in order to design and manage redevelopment efforts based on a community’s needs. Arbolera demonstrates how a strong-willed grassroots community organization can mobilize their intentions through involvement and fundraising efforts in order to effect positive change to revive the health, homes, and way of life of its citizens. Albuquerque’s sawmill industry once occupied the site of the current Arbolera de Vida affordable housing community. Great effort was undertaken to remediate the toxic site, which contained traces of formaldehyde, benzene, asbestos, and oils. The City, along with a local community action network called the Sawmill Advisory Council, hired the firm Design Workshop to provide professional consultancy to enable the success of the site’s revitalization and development. Upon completion of the remediation efforts, the Sawmill Advisory Council signed an agreement with the City of Albuquerque allowing the council to control the process of master plan development. With the designers and the representative community group working closely together, the master plan’s design vision and implementation process could be directly integrated with the community’s precise social, ecological, and economic principles and needs. The community-led consultation process has resulted in a design that has enlivened land, previously fenced and contaminated, with the initial introduction of 56 homes. The development will expand to 200 residences once completed, consisting of both purchased and rental houses and including duplexes, apartments, lofts, and senior housing. The community layout is organized by a series of planted walkways, allées, and bioswales that continue to remediate the site. The Arbolera de Vida community maintains its initial grassroots development efforts through ongoing community-led design projects, such as the construction of a playground that required the help of local volunteers for its construction. The project demonstrates how organized and committed community involvement can add momentum to remediation efforts, transforming inaccessible and unusable land into a community asset.

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A community-led consultation process prompted remediation of a toxic industrial site to provide affordable housing. Bioswales ensure continual remediation of the site. The public landscape encourages community events and gatherings. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, open spaces, all layers.

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Belval-Ouest Belval-Ouest, Luxembourg, 2001 Size: 120 hectares / 297 acres Project Lead: Buro Lubbers (landscape), Jo Coenen & Co (urban planning) Team: n/a Client: Agora Development Group

Located at a former iron and steel production site in the heart of Luxembourg, Belval-Ouest is an urban brownfield redevelopment project that has actively engaged the site’s industrial landscape to promote a strategy premised upon the reuse of its structural and vegetation features. In particular, the master plan bears witness of the interest and understanding of the natural succession of vegetation that has occurred during the post-industrial state of this site. Critical to the project’s objective of recalibrating the site’s industrial landscape is the careful articulation of its phasing strategy. In order to encourage density while preserving the core of the site’s vegetative character, the master plan prioritizes the implementation of public space and infrastructure, including parking space, using these open areas to strategically guide built form and phase its development. The vast emptiness of the site is emphasized by minimal additional constructions; for instance, seating areas serve as focal points within the large empty areas, with detailing that will allow a new patina to mark the site. In terms of the site’s overall development policy, design interventions in public space will be minimal during times of low building development, allowing for natural succession to continue, and will be maximized during times of intense urban development, keeping the available public space aligned with current community requirements. The master plan focuses on the reuse of the site’s industrial buildings, which have been repurposed as institutional buildings, business incubators, cultural facilities, and housing units. The intentional mixing of research, economic, and cultural facilities, and the provision of a variety of housing for people native to Luxembourg as well as new international residents, aims to promote innovation that will help further remediate and develop the site. Five districts compose the site: these include the Blast Furnace Terrace that now consists of science, research, and university facilities; the Square Mile, which concentrates housing and retail development in close proximity; Park Belval as the site’s public open space armature with varied ecological communities, including dry and wet meadows, as well as prairie grasses; Belval-Sud, which consists of institutional buildings that connect to Park Belval; and Belval-Nord, which is a pasture meadow comprised of courtyard buildings that face the open space.

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The preservation of the industrial buildings as well as the natural successive meadows and grasses is achieved with revenues generated from the real estate development, which also pay for the cost of the public spaces and planting of new vegetation. The site fits into the larger industrial region regeneration strategy, reformed as an ecological, cultural, and economic circuit. A rich textural palette of materials, forms, and vegetative communities reimagines this cultural landscape as a historic site. Heritage in the case of Belval-Ouest is not relegated to relic objects, but rather builds upon the character of the industrial landscape through incremental growth that will guide the site’s regeneration and the development of its community.

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Opposite: The brownfield redevelopment site. The master plan prioritizes public space to guide its development. Perspective of industrial remnant reuse. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, existing and proposed buildings, public space, all layers.

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A temporary landscape to encourage development. Buildings and industrial remnants become icons in the public realm.

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Vegetation gives a sense of evolving succession. A long allee helps define the site and provides a sense of scale. Detail plan of first development phase.

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Bo01, Malmö, Sweden 1996–2001 (first phase) 2011 (completion) Size: 25 hectares / 62 acres Project Lead: Klas Tham, Architect and Planner Team: City of Malmö, National Board of Housing, Building and Planning, The Ministry of the Environment Client: Bo01 Ltd., affiliated company to Svensk Bomässa (Swedish Housing Fair), in collaboration with the City of Malmö Bo01, pronounced bo-noll-ett and meaning “to dwell” and “2001,” is an urban community development project located in the Western Harbor district of Malmö. The harbor front was once a contaminated brownfield site, which in the late 1970s was producing more tonnage than any other shipyard in the world. In the 1990s, it was named as the site for the 2001 European Housing Exhibition. The exhibition’s goal was to use these lands to experiment with landscape remediation strategies and sustainable infrastructural development, to act as catalysts for the creation of public spaces. The project’s first permanent phase included a mixed neighborhood of workplaces, commercial and social services, and 350 homes. In an accompanying temporary visionary exhibition, the experiments of the first phase could be used for benchmarking and to inspire authorities and garner funds and sponsors for additional community development phases. The cleansing of the brownfield site’s polluted soils prepared for the establishment of biological beds to treat polluted water and for the creation of the best conditions for planting. The issue of water management is a primary design and planning concern of this project. Urban drainage is made visible and accessible by meandering pedestrian pathways that aim to bring aesthetic and environmental values to citizens, and consists of open drainage street canals, water features combined with art, a saltwater canal, wetlands, and estuaries. The landscape weaves between buildings, where it is formed as small plazas, parks, and courtyards appropriated for individual needs, and an oceanside promenade, which includes green roofs, vegetated walls, and wetlands. These ecological features detain surface runoff and increase biodiversity of both animals and plants. The 54-storey Turning Torso tower, designed by Santiago Calatrava, acts as a landmark icon that contributes to a strong sense of identity for the community. Several other architects were involved in the design of the site’s 800 dwellings, forming a mixture of different styles and materials.

Urban drainage is visible and functional. The water flows through a series of wetlands and water features, cleansed on the way to the ocean.

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The project strives for complete local and renewable energy production, the minimization of energy consumption, a balance between production and consumption with 100 percent reuse of waste, and aims to create a high level of individual comfort. The community continues to evolve through several often unaccounted for, but easily accommodated needs and transformations, bringing depth of character to the project and imprinting a stakeholder aspect on the community.

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Aerial view of the community development, authored by many architects. The landscape is a contiguous element, transforming to suit its local needs while programmatically adaptable. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, public spaces, all layers.

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Green Square Town Centre Sydney, Australia, 2007 Size: 13.7 hectares / 33.9 acres Project Lead: McGregor Coxall Team: Choi Ropiha Fighera Client: Landcom, City of Sydney

Situated within Australia’s oldest and largest industrial corridor, Green Square Town Centre is a large-scale economic and environmental restoration project that has been initiated by the State Government of New South Wales. Green Square is located between the city’s central business district and the international airport, and is comprised of amalgamated contaminated industrial lands that are now controlled by Landcom, the State Government Developer. As one of the largest urban renewal initiatives in Australia, the project’s mandate is to elevate the economic and cultural prominence of Sydney. Central to the site’s environmental restoration is the resurrection of a previously existing creek with a new urban stream and a stormwater biofiltration system that collects and processes polluted stormwater from a large upstream catchment area. Currently the stormwater flows directly beneath the site in a concrete pipe following the route of the previous creek, along with the area’s rainwater. This water is now diverted to the surface via green engineering mechanisms powered by renewable energy, where it is cleaned through biofiltration for nonpotable water uses. The naturally filtered water provides 90 percent of the water needs of the entire project, including the residential and commercial uses. Exposure of the water course reveals the site’s former open-water channels, now designed as cascades, canals, and streams, forming a resilient and functional urban ecological network. The water network also functions as an important visual connector of Green Square’s three major public spaces, which are surrounded by public buildings that incorporate bars, restaurants, cinemas, commercial and retail facilities, and incorporated residential units. The landscape plays a vital role in generating community activity. Community gardens and a productive orchard park promote community cohesion and environmental stewardship. Members of the local community can take an active role in the upkeep of the public landscape and experience the flora and fauna that existed at the site prior to its industrial period. Indigenous plants, prior to European arrival, have been carefully selected from local vegetative communities that will encourage the reintegration of native plant and animal species.

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The design team’s effort to restore the character of the native landscape demonstrates that reintegration of ecological systems is not only possible in the urban context, but that resilient design of ecologically grounded public space can actually serve as the central motivation for urban renewal.

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Opposite: Stormwater is cleaned at the surface through biofiltration and used for non-potable purposes. This page: Section outlining creek resurrection as landscape infrastructure. Indigenous plants to encourage community stewardship. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, primary public spaces, all layers.

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Opposite: The public landscape as ecological engine. This page: Plan of three distinct landscapes forming the primary public space spine. Community members are encouraged to take an active role in the upkeep of the public landscape.

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Lower Don Lands Toronto, Ontario, Canada 2007 (competition) Size: 125 hectares / 309 acres Project Lead: Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates Team: Greenberg Consultants, Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg, Behnisch Architekten, Limno-Tech, Applied Ecological Services, Great Eastern Ecology, Transsolar, RFR Engineering, Arup, TSH Client: Waterfront Toronto The Lower Don Lands master plan will resurrect a prime piece of urban real estate in Toronto, by providing stormwater infrastructure improvements that can be used as dynamic public spaces. An extensive ongoing transformation will witness this underutilized metropolitan portside transform into a series of cohesive waterfront parks and mixed-use communities. A large new meandering riverfront park becomes the centerpiece of a new mixed-use neighborhood. A project of this magnitude and scale, one that involves various community stakeholders, design teams, and construction phases, is an excellent example of how understanding the preconditions of a site can foster innovative design strategies. The plan includes an understanding of how the street layout and topographic origins of Toronto influenced its two dominant park typologies – rectilinear parks shaped by the urban grid, and irregular parks shaped by the topography of the extensive ravines – and how these might be used as precedents for establishing the urban/park relationship in the Lower Don Lands neighborhood. The area has suffered from neglect due to the decline of shipping-based industries and has also experienced considerable flooding, which is a result of its natural location along a major floodplain. Instead of creating naturalized banks along the straight course of the existing channel that connects the Don River with the lake, the design keeps the Keating Channel as an urban artifact and neighborhood amenity, and creates a new mouth for the river that flows from the upstream source through an urban estuary configuration, in addition to the abrupt right turn outlet created by the constructed concrete channel. In the vision for the park at the heart of this urban estuary, the social program was recognized as being just as important as the ecological one. As designed, the landscape will teem with sports and leisure activities. Within each neighborhood there are multiple opportunities for social interaction on broad tree-lined sidewalks, in cafés, in the squares, and during games on the play fields that are tucked in throughout the park. Rock climbing, markets, and restaurants will energize the impressive colonnade under an elevated expressway that had previously cut the site off from the city, providing a memorable backdrop for a new expression of urban life.

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Located adjacent to one of the world’s largest freshwater lakes, Toronto has yet to fully capitalize on this resource. Years of planning attempts are finally coming to fruition to foster this connection. The Lower Don Lands community will certainly serve as a catalytic precedent not only for Toronto, but also for the many former industrial cities encircling the Great Lakes, demonstrating how a communitybased connection can be provided to these vital water sources through the public landscape.

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Opposite: Aerial perspective, reconfiguring a river. Model with original channel as artifact and new urban estuary. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, public spaces, all layers.

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Lower Don Lands park meadow perspective. Playing field.

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Winter activities. Establishment of an urban estuary to increase ecological diversity.

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Nanhu New Country Village, Jiaxing, China, 2011 Size: 1,143 hectares / 2,824 acres Project Lead: Skidmore, Owings & Merrill (urban design) Team: SWA Group, Sherwood Engineers, AECOM Economics Client: Jiaxing Alliance Development Corporation The Nanhu site is currently a tapestry of small farms and canals in the Yangtze delta. With the completion of the high-speed rail to Shanghai and Hangzhou, the new community is designed as an alternative to the prevailing intense urbanity, by retaining and enhancing the existing farmland and its historic and cultural significance. The design addresses the site’s existing polluted and degraded environmental conditions by maintaining and treating its extensive canal network, and by improving farming practices and farmland productivity through the introduction of economies of scale, moves that will position the community as an agricultural center of organic food production for the surrounding mega cities. Years of untreated agricultural and stormwater runoff have left the canal system extremely polluted. This project utilizes a substantial network of 45 hectares of constructed wetland as a biofilter to extract nutrients and heavy metals from the water and absorb and break down contaminants. The current canal network includes many dead-end and disconnected segments, causing poor and stagnant water quality. Reconnecting the system allows for better flow and also permits the canals to be used for boat transport, with pedestrian and bicycle pathways at the banks. The canals are integral to the community’s ecological stormwater drainage and treatment. Stormwater runoff begins treatment through biofiltration infrastructure, which continues once it enters the canals. Rainwater from rooftops is collected for irrigation of agricultural land, while greywater is reused for toilets and non-agricultural irrigation. This project brings a contemporary approach to development within agricultural landscapes for China’s rapid urbanization. Family farms in the area currently operate by hand, without any available machinery or technology. To retain traditions, agricultural reorganization will maintain a range of 1 to 3-hectare family farms, while also introducing larger production areas as well as a 100-hectare organic farm. Seventy percent of the land will be preserved as working farms, maintaining agricultural history through production of organic herbs, vegetables, fruits, rice, and flowers, while the introduction of new farming technologies and various scales of land use increases quantity and product quality.

Perspectives of organic farming, village market, wetlands with recreation, agricultural surrounds.

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In addition to farmland, three major parklands with distinct characters draw regional and local visitors, providing both formal terraced gardens and wilder natural habitats. The landscape will be further layered by the prominence of the existing grand, columnar Metasequoia trees, augmented in densely planted linear hedgerows for their visual effect, to give privacy to individual farms and, planted along road corridors, to link together the farmland and the village. The trees also channel the prevailing breezes through the area, helping to cool the village during the warm summer months. With its rapid development and urbanization, the future quality of life and environment in China depends heavily on the outcome of its rural-to-urban land conversion. As farmland is quickly eaten up for urban growth, China needs a model to inform housing options, while at the same time increasing the productivity of the land and improving environmental quality. Nanhu New Country Village provides such an approach, premised on the productive operation of the landscape.

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Section demonstrating remediation through wetlands of the polluted environment. Restructured urban form encourages a contemporary approach to agriculture that preserves cultural significance. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, public spaces and farmland, all layers.

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Southworks Lakeside Chicago, Illinois, USA 1998 (start of consultation), 2010–2030 (construction) Size: 243 hectares / 600 acres Project Lead: Sasaki Associates, Skidmore, Owings & Merrill Team: n/a Client: McCaffery Interests Located along Chicago’s waterfront in an area that was once a major industrial manufacturing district, Southworks Lakeside is a comprehensive master plan project that will create new public open space, provide connections to Chicago’s historic waterfront trail network, and create a new mixed-use community. In a public-and-private real estate partnership, the planning and design efforts for this former steelworks site are closely coordinated in order to improve public infrastructure and revive neglected urban areas. Approaching the urban development from the perspective of infrastructural improvement has made the ongoing planning and design efforts at Southworks a positive example of brownfield remediation as a means to create an exemplary community. The development includes the half-mile-long Ore Wall Park, which will highlight the site’s industrial past. The enormous North Slip waterway, previously used to accommodate large barges offloading materials for the steelmaking process, is maintained and activated through commercial, residential, and water transport uses. Finger parks serve as large bioswales and infiltration basins, eventually connecting the downtown to this neglected but prime waterfront location while providing neighborhood-scaled spaces planted with native vegetation. To allow the site’s tree canopy structure to grow over time, the design team has proposed a strategy of early-phase, pre-development mass tree plantings to amend the soil, to cleanse the air through carbon sequestration, and as a means to establish tree stock on site for future use as the network of public spaces at Southworks grows. The careful study and understanding of the surface and subsurface conditions at Southworks Lakeside has been pivotal to the performance and design of the site’s built form and programming. The distribution of density and building types have been calibrated to the underground foundations that remain from the steelmaking era. To create an improved public realm, clean dredge material will be transferred to the site to enrich its soil profile. The condition of the ground plane continues to define the project’s design, with a strategy for 91 percent infiltration of stormwater in order to alleviate the pressure that is placed on Chicago’s aging combined sewer system, and also to ensure that urban runoff and its constituent pollutants do not discharge into Lake Michigan.

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The remediation strategy includes early-phase mass tree planting. Aerial of the site at full development. Early development phase with trees planted to amend the soil. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, public spaces, all layers.

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Not only does the water management system capture and treat water on-site to improve water quality, but details such as the implementation of pervious paving, rain water gardens, rooftop water catchment basins, and bioswales in all alleys and parking lots strengthen the vegetative quality of the site while creating ample multi-tasking public space. Linear parks act as biofilters and connect the city to the lake edge. Two detail plans of natural area and ore wall park.

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Following pages: The ore wall is preserved as an industrial relic, providing a sense of history for the community.

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EVOLVE

Evolve refers to a phase that positions the design process as a small but crucial investment in the overall existence of the project, recognizing that a design truly comes to life through use and operation. The process of ongoing maintenance, management, and design adaptation, through the design of landscape as an infrastructural framework, allows projects to be flexible, resilient, and adaptable, aligning this work more closely to the functioning of ecological systems, and less to the ultimate control of design aesthetics. Recognizing that all living systems thrive on change and adaptation, the application of this approach to produce viable and truly sustainable communities can only gain new relevance in our era of complex and expanding urban conditions. The importance of cultural legibility and the knowledge-provoking value of the landscape is paramount to engaging an invested community. Design, in both the traditional, formal sense and in technically innovative operations, will envision communities premised on public space frameworks that will indisputably serve as models for sustainable global development. Process The involvement of the designer of a landscape project typically ends after construction, with ongoing maintenance and management of the site left to the owner. However, with complex landscape projects, where the continual evolution of the landscape is critical to the functioning of the community, increasingly designers remain involved with the project, setting an outline for this phase. This involvement may occur in the form of a document outlining the ongoing maintenance requirements of the site, or by dissemination of this knowledge to the client, community, and authorities involved in the upkeep of the public space, or through continued consultation of the designer, or ideally through the resilient design of the landscape framework itself. While traditional infrastructure requires periodic reconstruction or replacement, the self-reparative nature of landscape allows landscape infrastructure, if designed properly, to serve an ongoing infrastructural function, increasing in effectiveness over time. As the landscape system gains its balance over time and develops biodiverse complexity to ensure durability, this approach allows a movement away from conventional engineering techniques, to context and environment-inspired design. This approach necessitates a multidisciplinary team of landscape architects, architects, urban designers, ecologists, engineers, and community members, placing the community back in a position to work with the processes of their landscapes – rather than relying on strict engineering responses to constantly ward off landscapes that want and need to adapt to human enterprises and to evolving environmental conditions. Approach – From Maintenance to Regeneration Projects that are designed to allow further evolution are often conceived with landscape as infrastructure, exhibiting performative value to support the architecture and the community. The process-based design of the landscape must anticipate development over time, as the hydrology and the ecological systems are established and sustained. This continual evolution often employs renewable energy sources, reduces pollution, accepts additional open space programming, provides educational and nutritional nourishment, and works with waste streams, the landscape playing a critical role in supporting these functions.

Opposite: Monnikenhuizen, Arnhem, Buro Lubbers.

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Notable parks offer examples of operative, process-based designs in the postrealization phase. Amsterdamse Bos is one such exemplary work. From the beginning of the project in 1929 the designers, Cornelis Van Eesteren and Jacopa Mulder, conceived of the park as a process, where water and vegetative growth could act in the park’s production. Water management and industrial forest succession practices, inherently necessitating time, formed the techniques for processual development. The spatial framework was based on an even matrix of intermingled woodlands, lawns, roads, and water. The systematic construction of the park allows an interpretation of evolving conditions, rather than of objects, and to this day provides a structure for the park to continually adapt, based on use and environmental influences. With a similar development strategy, the site of Parc du Sausset, between Aulnaysous-Bois and Villepinte on the former wheat plains north of Paris, prior to the 1978 design competition had become overrun by chaotic suburbanization and was dissected by highways, traffic routes, and railroads. The designers, Michel and Claire Corajoud, approached the design of the park to serve as a meshing point between its suburban communities, while using the infrastructure elements as formal and organizing features of the design. The starting point was the site’s rich soil, dictating that grading work, especially with heavy machinery, was kept to a minimum such that a varied vegetative framework and integrated stormwater system could be fostered on the large site over time. The landscape-rich framework has indeed developed into several successful and evolving ecologies, and has provided the formerly disparate communities with a public and participatory focal point. Ian McHarg’s The Woodlands community development in Texas, founded in 1974, is exemplary for its management of water through the use of landscape infrastructure rather than traditional engineered sewer infrastructure. The community design was based on empirical ecological requirements, as determined through McHarg’s system of overlays, where information regarding the natural environment could be quantified by assigning values, resulting in a spatial map of areas where construction could or should not occur. Buildings were sited to minimally disrupt existing water functions, allowing much of the forest system to remain intact and saving millions of dollars in sewer infrastructure. Since the first community members moved to The Woodlands, landscape as critical infrastructure has continued to expand its scope through direct involvement of community members. Environmental ethics are espoused through the schools, which make direct use of the surrounding landscape for observation and as laboratories. Lifelong learning lectures and landscape walks promote environmental preservation in addition to events and workshops on habitat and water-wise landscapes, including tips on lawn maintenance for resiliency and water conservation. Private companies such as biomedical and pharmaceutical companies hold a stake in the landscape with direct research interests in the community’s forests. Community programming has also extended the environmental theme with emphasis on outdoor concerts, recycling bazaars, Earth Day clean-ups, Arbor Day, and an annual wildflower festival. As environmental ethics and practices expand, the framework of The Woodlands is able to accommodate the evolving interests of its community members, while maintaining focus on its original mandate. Anne Whiston Spirn applied a similar understanding of landscape as infrastructure to a buried river in Philadelphia, which was the root cause for neighborhood degradation, due to flooded basements and uninsurable homes serviced by antiquated infrastructure. Commencing with this ongoing project in 1987, a framework plan was devised that identified opportunities for the neighborhood’s improvement, advocating

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a grassroots approach to revive Mill Creek’s story. Various options for abandoned house lots were drawn up to inspire local residents to take claim of the lots for community activities. A computer database provided various cultural and hydrological layers of information to empower the neighborhood with this forgotten knowledge. The aim was to prevent flooding and improve the quality of the water, while educating the community and promoting its development through a planning approach on one hand and a neighborhood response on the other. The project reached an impressive level of community participation between 1995 to 2001, when Spirn involved a local community school in her research, with the assistance of her university students. Over the years, the local schoolchildren were guided to discover hidden community issues, make proposals, and participate in the building of community gardens, resulting in a generation educated through primary research on their community and sure to serve as the next generation of informed advocates of just community planning. Kristine Jensens Tegnestue’s 2004 design for Prags Boulevard in Copenhagen aimed to regenerate a run-down area of the city by transforming a divisive road into a connective boulevard for community activities. The consistency of trees, grass, and the iconic green moveable boulevard chair provide continuity along the entire length of the project. Special nodes along the boulevard focus relevant community activities such as sports courts and cafés, while still remaining open to interpretation and adaptation. A small community theatre group can take over a platform for performance, or a chair can simply be moved into the sun. The elderly can have a place to join the community in the public realm and watch everyday activities, while children use the patterned markings on asphalt to invent creative games. This strong but minimally designed public space creates connection between communities that were formerly divided, and allows them to continually imprint their unique needs and uses within the space. Implementing landscape as infrastructure at the urban scale can also result in massive operative transformation. Redeveloping since 1971, the Brazilian town of Curitiba has been transforming its urban core and periphery from one overrun by the automobile and its infrastructure, toward a model based on varied public transportation and pedestrian-oriented public space. The progression to integrated transport has resulted in a city with increased accessibility and improved social and economic conditions through the emphasis on pedestrian and bicycle culture. For bus transport, simple strategies such as express routes, and routes with stops every 500 meters, have proportionally dispersed previously overcrowded communities, creating livable neighborhoods, while transportation discounts of 40 percent on Sundays encourage additional ridership. The rethinking of the city from an automobile-reliant infrastructure to a multi-modal transport infrastructure has brought layers of richness to the city in the form of public space, and has allowed the city to function increasingly sustainably as a whole. Communities have completely transformed from automobile-reliant to pedestrian-focused, bringing life and continual interaction and improvement to the public sphere and safety of the street. Having worked in Issoudun, France, in 1993 on La Théols Park, beautifully integrating a group of neglected family gardens back into the urban public space structure, Michel Desvigne has applied this strategy to the entire urbanized district of Issoudun with his 2005 master plan. The landscape-premised master plan for the urban zone and its future developments aims to make sense of a previously agricultural landscape where the city’s periphery has grown without plan or logic. Using fragments, fallow land, and unused parcels, the plan aims to bring back a reading of the agricultural

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lands by keeping everything in place, but incrementally changing its nature. With the transposition, the landscape can again serve as the public medium in which urban functions are linked and a sense of community and purpose is regained. The reconceptualization of the landscape through the lens of a cohesive concept and strategy is the mechanism that will promote its continual conversion toward a desired and designed trajectory. The individual pieces that compose the landscape – a park, its streets, ecological processes, abandoned spaces, dysfunctional areas, beloved spaces, community facilities – can be improved, abandoned, rebuilt, or transformed by various community members or constituencies. The designed landscape framework remains the mechanism able to accommodate this change, coalescing all community members as understanding participants on a mutual track. In this sense the landscape architect crafts the logic that will successively strengthen a community – not unlike the development of complex ecological systems that develop efficiency over time. These projects for highly designed and managed urban spaces use landscape as the medium to repair their degraded shores and mediate urban pressures. They build stronger connections for ecologies and their human participants, while also prompting the renewal and continual improvement of the urban fabric. They form the ultimate operative landscape projects, using their designed legibility to educate and pull together community involvement and participation, while drawing on the most innovative landscape technologies to create systems based on principles of ecological relationships, and therefore resiliency. This promising model places communities, with their inherently ample landscape frameworks, as critical operators in the flexible and adaptable functioning of urban centers.

Opposite: Dockside Green, Victoria, PWL Partnership.

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Dockside Green Victoria, British Columbia, Canada 1989 (concept plan) 2005–2009 (design and construction) Size: 6 hectares / 15 acres Project Lead: PWL Partnership (lead landscape architects) Team: Busby Perkins + Will, RJC Engineers, Quantum Environmental Group, SNC-Lavalin, Morrow Environmental, Stantec, Canem, WorleyParsons, Corix Utilities, Aqua-Tex Scientific Consulting, Morrison Hershfield, Boulevard Transportation Group, Nexterra Client: Vancity Enterprises, Windmill Developments, City of Victoria Located next to Victoria Harbour, Dockside Green is an adaptive reuse of an industrial site that required brownfield remediation in order to make the site an appropriate context for urban development. Today, environmental advocates and designers refer to Dockside Green as Canada’s premier environmentally responsible community. Dockside Green represents the intelligent reuse of a visually spectacular site that effectively incorporates environmental and economic strategies into the community’s design. The project blends the best of the harbor’s old industrial fabric with innovative practices in landscape technology. The site and strategies for development also form an important identity for the community, which supports its maturation and which in turn further attracts desired programs and activities. The development has been planned around principles of green building technologies and sustainable urban design. It represents a development project that includes an intricate matrix of players such as land ownership trustees, planners, designers, and community consultation groups, which has allowed the project to come to fruition. The innovative master plan is made evident in the closed-loop strategies of the community, which include visible on-site wastewater treatment and reuse, a biomass plant and central heating system, and an alternative transportation strategy. Small businesses are supported and encouraged to provide local goods, and the development aims to be accessible to a diverse mix of people. The community development is integrated with wildlife habitats and green spaces, which are traversed by walking trails, and wetlands and waterways that function to filter greywater. Green roofs assist in providing some of this habitat, collecting and recycling rainwater, insulating the interior membrane of the buildings, and connecting the upper units to planted areas. The outdoor areas of the grade level residential units cantilever over the freshwater demonstration wetland, providing physically distinct yet visually shared public-private space.

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Active and healthful lifestyles are encouraged through the transportation plan that limits the availability of onsite parking and places parking below grade in order to reduce the effects of surface runoff. The plan includes a vehicle-sharing program, a mini-transit system, a boat launch and dock facilities, and pedestrian and bike trails. A strong sense of community is promoted through the shared interaction of the residents, employees, neighboring businesses, and the broader city. The design intent is to encourage the community to further evolve the site toward desired goals. The visible wastewater treatment encourages thoughtful water consumption; automatic window blinds remind residents of simple climatic adjustments to save energy; pedestrian and bicycle paths that are well linked are made easier to access than cars, while over time an increased number of shops will provide local goods, further closing the materials loop. The strong sense of community that already exists will also evolve as the community’s closed-loop focus and identity is further supported and solidified.

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Green infrastructure, including green roofs and wetlands. Walkways to individual units over wetlands that filter greywater. Plan components from top: water and shoreline, vegetation, circulation, buildings, public spaces, all layers. Following page: Master plan, representing all phases of development.

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The master plan for Dockside Green employs closed-loop strategies; community programs and economic activities are part of this agenda.

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Eco-Viikki, Viikki, Finland 1989–2010 Size: 231 hectares / 571 acres Project Lead: Heikki Rinne, City of Helsinki Ministry of the Environment Team: Petri Laaksonen, Pirjo Pekkarinen-Kanerva, Finnish Association of Architects, National Technology Agency of Finland, City of Helsinki Planning Department Client: City of Helsinki Planning Department

Located seven kilometers outside of Helsinki, Eco-Viikki is a sustainable ecological development project of 1,800 residents that aims to reduce carbon dioxide emissions by cutting outside source energy consumption, as based on figures that have been outlined in the Rio Climate Change Conference and Kyoto Agreement. The project offers a fresh perspective as to how local governments can initiate and implement climate change at the scale of a community. Prior to development, the site was historically significant agricultural lands, to which were added the bioscience campus component of the University of Helsinki. The campus serves as the hub from which the community expands and as its thematic focus. Although the campus and community are high-density, a verdant sense is provided by experimental farming areas and by a project boundary that opens out to the evolving, culturally important agricultural landscape. The master plan is based on a finger-like structure with alternating buildings and green open spaces. The intention is for the layout to permit easy combination of functions. Housing options are diverse, with owner-occupied, rent-based, and right-of-occupancy homes allowing planners to construct future homes in response to housing demands. Commercial and social needs are met within walking distance. A wide range of landscape types and spaces promote these multiple functions, while also accepting community transformations and the progression of natural processes. The ecologically premised solution provides the area with a positive identity, increases the initiative of the residents, and increases opportunities for outdoor life. Eco-Viikki strives for aspects that have become synonymous with sustainability, including solar energy, recycling, and conscious water consumption. Reducing the community’s carbon emissions is made possible by providing on-site infrastructure to deal with waste that is normally transported off site. Allocated spaces for community composting transforms nutrients from household waste into fertile soil for community garden allotments with edible plants, and areas of farmland related to the university are cultivated by community members, with vegetation selected to increase biodiversity. Community facilities, from daycares to teacher training schools, make use of the landscape for educational and research purposes. Stormwater runoff is contained and treated on site through a series of natural collection ponds that lead to a wetland reserve and form part of an extensive green belt network.

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Top: Eco-Viikki as a component of the campus landscape, and inspired by its historically significant agricultural landscape. The master plan alternates buildings with green space. Bottom: Aerial view of the community. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, public spaces, all layers.

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An important aspect of the future success of this evolving sustainable community is the plan’s forethought in monitoring and analyzing site data. The experiences from Eco-Viikki reveal that ecological criteria alone will not create the desired community without sufficient feedback systems. Although Eco-Viikki has struggled with very little comparison material and complex calculation programs, it intends to move forward by combining simple calculation procedures that are being planned today with intensive investment committed toward this monitoring. By investing in design, including the ability to evaluate, understand, and then redesign, Eco-Viikki is advancing a community model for progressive process-based urban design.

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A variety of landscape types promotes multifunctionality, including nature appreciation. The safe access and circulation routes encourage community interaction. Opposite: Gardening is an important programmatic focus and activity. Opportunities for outdoor life increase community initiatives.

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Ecobay Tallinn, Estonia 2008 (competition) Size: 41.8 hectares / 103 acres Project Lead: Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects Team: Møller & Grønborg, Buro Happold Consulting Engineers Client: Ecobay OÜ

The community, set on the Paljassaare Peninsula in Estonia adjacent to a nature reserve, is envisaged as a new, independent, mixed-usage district for 6,000 people, with green strategies for infrastructure development. The designers intend to provide a multifunctional structure for a diverse and vibrant community, allowing Ecobay to develop an organic self-organizing capacity – a city left to grow of its own accord. Ecobay is serenely situated overlooking the Baltic Sea, on land formed by raised seabed and landfill. The master plan, almost romantic in form, is entirely functional in its use of orientation and massing to respond to the prevailing wind conditions and the seasonal trajectory of the sun. Instead of adopting a rigid grid, the scheme introduces a system of “dunes” spreading across the entire site. Structures are laid out to maximize solar gain while minimizing overshadowing. The morphed grid and “dune” structure will significantly reduce wind speeds along the exposed coastal edge, with all buildings shaped to avoid wind turbulence. Housing, local shops, nursery schools, primary and secondary schools, as well as commercial developments will all be equipped with automated and centralized waste collection and recycling systems. The harbor front will be extensively redeveloped, creating a harbor promenade, marina, restaurants, and cafés. The public space system will seamlessly integrate the variety of districts and will minimize the need for transportation, with public amenities located within a ten-minute walk from all homes. The public landscape will be combined with biodiversity corridors, connecting the site’s green areas and the existing nature reserve, to establish a new ecosystem on what is currently a brownfield site. All buildings are being designed with greywater systems and with a system to filter stormwater, while reed beds will filter and clean water. The cleaned effluent from the nearby waste water treatment works will be used to irrigate all public landscapes and a golf course. An extensive planting program of suitably hardy trees and bushes will create additional shelter for areas of public realm. The relationship of architecture and landscape will set a framework for the site to continually develop its own organization.

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Diagram of block layout and circulation, designed to minimize the need for auto transportation. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, landscape network, all layers.

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The city’s energy needs are accounted for via a variety of clean sources including wind farms, geothermal energy, and hydroelectricity. All heating for the development will be supplied from excess heat derived from the water treatment works. Sea water will be utilized for cooling for office buildings, while wind turbines will generate electricity for street lighting. The orientation and massing of the buildings, together with improved construction techniques, is supposed to save up to 70 percent of the energy used in a comparable conventional building.

Perspectives depicting landscape and architecture designed to encourage a self-organizing capacity. Opposite: Three-dimensional rendering of building masses intertwined with public spaces in response to the sea’s winds.

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Expo-Settlement Kronsberg Hannover, Germany, 1999 Size: 1,200 hectares / 2,965 acres Project Lead: City of Hannover, Karin Rumming, Environmental Protection Team: Hannover City Divisions of Environment and City Greenspace, Planning and Urban Development, Youth and Social Services Directorate, Region Hannover Waste Management Services, and The Kronsberg Environmental Liaison Agency Client: City of Hannover

The Kronsberg development project was conceived as an environmentally responsible planned community and hastened by EXPO 2000. The Kronsberg countryside is part of a green ring surrounding Hannover, which aims to secure and enhance landscape spaces on the margins of the city. The design in this case was derived from the interweaving of the community and surrounding countryside, promoting close-to-home recreation, nature conservation, and organic agricultural uses. During construction 700,000 cubic meters of soil had to be moved, however transporting this away from the site would have been prohibitive from both monetary and carbon dioxide emissions perspectives. Instead, the soil was reused around the site for viewpoint hills, a noise buffer along a motorway, several landscape features, and for sealing an old adjacent landfill. Considering construction factors from an environmental perspective, as early on in a project as the first excavation of soil, is indicative of the overall planning and continual evolution of the 3,000 dwelling Kronsberg suburban community project. Critical to the success of this innovative, livable, and socially vibrant community are many of the increasingly common smart-growth principles, including compact low-energy housing structures that maximize density without compromising surface space, an efficient public transit system that creates essential linkages to adjacent urban nodes and hubs, renewable energy produced through cogeneration, solar and wind power, waste avoidance, reuse, and recycling, a variety of rainwater infiltration techniques to match the pre-development situation, and a social strategy that has resulted in the creation of vibrant mixed-demographic neighborhoods. It is the existing built site and surrounding rural landscape, and its environmentally premised evolution and management, that grants Kronsberg a strong sense of place and, therefore, a united community.

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With a very young population, environmental awareness and stewardship starts in kindergarten. Since almost every aspect of the community revolves around environmental issues, Kronsberg has its own environment agency as the first point of contact to consult and direct such matters. Much of this educational component takes place in the landscape where around half the area has been redesigned as varied public space, including an urban district interspersed with a variety of parks, woodland, and grassland conservation areas, rural recreation space, and organic farmland, with some of this grazed by a small flock of sheep, all of it connected by an intricate network of paths and lanes. Field workers are employed to acquaint residents with the landscape and promote the peaceful coexistence of nature, conservation, recreation, and farming. Above all, the well-balanced social demographic has created a strong community network of residents who are conscious and proud of their environmental efforts, as played out and shared primarily in the public landscape.

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Through the public landscape the community participates in nature conservation and local recreation. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, primary public spaces, all layers.

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Mentougou Eco Valley Mentougou, China 2010 (conceptual master plan) Size: 2,800 hectares / 6,919 acres Project Lead: Eriksson Architects Team: Eero Paloheimo EcoCity Client: Municipality of Mentougou

Located near Beijing, nestled in the valleys of the Miaofeng Mountains, this proposal envisions a community focused on environmental research. While development pressures might be moving into land formerly thought undevelopable, the opportunities that the Miaofeng Mountains present have resulted in a creative master plan where the landscape has dictated forward-thinking building solutions that respond to the challenging topography. The relatively intact abundance of the landscape has necessitated a multidisciplinary design response, inventive and technically informed. The plan outlines a diverse assortment of contemporary and futuristic building structures informed by the narrow mountain canyon river valley landscape, employing new forms, materials, and technologies which, in turn, support and enhance the landscape. The focus is on research, services, and housing, as premised around nine environmental research institutes, commerce, and a major city center. The employment generated by the development is projected to be matched with housing, which would take the form of residential villages, producing an overall urban area of approximately 50,000 inhabitants. The landscape played a major conceptual role in the master plan. As the mountain valley runs north to south, the ecological research institutes and all the commercial and administrative functions were located on the west side of the river, obtaining solar energy from the east in the morning and from the south throughout the whole day. The residential areas climb up the eastern hill slopes, giving afternoon and evening sun to the houses, with views opening beautifully toward the institutes on the other side of the valley, and vice versa. All parks and other leisure areas are placed in-between, along the green and fertile riverbed, where these functions are equally reachable from the residential areas as well as from the workplaces. Aiming for a good work-life balance, this arrangement allows workers to meet at lunchtime and play with their children in the middle of the day. Traditional Chinese cultural and fitness functions can also be performed in the river park areas, such as Tai Chi in more secluded areas, or larger activities, gatherings, functions, and services in open fields.

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The long-term goal is to ensure a selfreliant community as well as to reduce its environmental footprint to one-third that of a typical similarly sized city. Mentougou is planned to achieve carbon neutrality by employing renewable energy and energy conservation measures, running an efficient public transportation system, producing and recycling all of its own water, returning biological nutrients back into natural circulation, and enhancing local agriculture to supply produce for all of its inhabitants. The plan is open to evolution by leaving reserve areas further up the mountain for future urban density. Following the precedent of old Southern European steep shore cities, the housing can continue to climb up the slope in a carefully planned manner, allowing Mentougou to grow over the decades while remaining livable.

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Opposite: The mountainous landscape encourages innovative building solutions. The community can evolve over time, by developing sensitively with its landscape. Plan components from top: water, circulation, development parcels, significant public spaces, all layers.

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Monnikenhuizen Arnhem, The Netherlands 1998 (design), 2000 (implementation) Size: 6.5 hectares / 16 acres Project Lead: Buro Lubbers Team: S.V. Khandekar, Atelier Z, Meyer en Van Schoten Architecten, Van de Looi en Jacobs Architecten, Vera Yanovshtchinsky Architecten Client: Johan Matser Projectonwikkeling and the Municipality of Arnhem

Monnikenhuizen is a community housing project that has capitalized on the landscape to enhance the community’s infrastructural performance capabilities. The project’s conceptual design was inspired by the adjacent forested areas, which produce a range of spatial and visual perspectives, assisting the development in taking a dramatic departure from the site’s former use as a series of football fields. Inspired by the visual opportunities afforded by the undulating heights of the existing forest canopy, the design creates a spatial effect of the houses being arranged within outdoor rooms, further enhanced by an extensive tree-planting scheme: a heavy mixture of oak and birch species helps to establish dominant perspectives and allow the houses to feel as if they were nestled within the topography. The substantially maintained topography is structurally supported by gabion walls that add texture to the site and create interplay between the ground plane and the vertical structures of the houses. The respectful siting of homes within the landscape is further dramatized by the project’s prime feature of an open rainwater collection system, which not only serves the purpose of collecting, containing, and recycling rain water in ponds that vary in design based on topography, but also creates a spectacular effect during rain events.

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Opposite: Topography, surface run-off and ecological connections, and vegetation typologies diagrams. An important feature of the plan is the collection and recycling of rainwater. Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, buildings, public spaces, all layers.

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The system of water collection, transportation, and storage is made visible through grooves alongside the houses that collect rainwater and funnel it into a network of troughs and subtle grading down the center of the roadways, which eventually ends up in a storage pond and is used for various site functions. Harnessing the beauty of the forest and terrain, Monnikenhuizen formulates a spatial planning strategy that shares a close interaction with its natural features, made further evident through the use of landscape as infrastructure.

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Specific use of tree species connects the site to the surrounding forest, creating a variety of spaces and adaptable uses. Ponds and wetlands serve as landscape infrastructure. Precise grading allows the architecture to be appropriately sited, creating a sense of community that is grounded to its site and context.

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Whitehill Bordon Whitehill Bordon, United Kingdom 2009 (master plan) Size: 230 hectares / 568 acres Project Lead: AECOM Team: Alan Baxter & Associates, Kevin Murray Associates, ZEDfactory Client: Whitehill Bordon Opportunity Executive

The town of Whitehill Bordon grew piecemeal around a military facility, and lacked a traditional town center or civic focus. When the public release of this land presented a major opportunity for growth, this coincided with the British Government’s Eco-town initiative of creating sustainable settlements seen as models for biodiversity, water neutrality, carbon neutrality, and transportation. With an existing drafted plan in line with the Eco-town mandate, Whitehill Bordon was selected as one of four projects in the United Kingdom to pilot the Eco-town approach, and was therefore supported by significant funding. The next phase of planning required a strategy for the development of the vast and diverse parcels of military land, a development premised on population growth as a guide for a flexible, phased approach to stimulate economic diversity and improve and extend the conservation of natural environments. This was accomplished through a framework master plan acting as a broad strategic plan, setting out growth and change over a 25year time span. The master plan proposes a spatial network that enables people and wildlife to connect to the countryside. It identifies locations for new housing, schools, employment, and a new town center, where the existing green spaces are connected and enhanced to form a distinctive character for the town that is rooted in the landscape. Green infrastructure, the prime strategy for developing a strong sense of community, comprises networks of outdoor spaces which provide fresh air, drainage, food, wildlife habitat, and places for leisure. Quality green infrastructure is likely to become increasingly important due to climate change, with soil and vegetation playing an important role in flood alleviation and providing a cooler microclimate during heat waves. At Whitehill Bordon, green infrastructure includes parks and gardens, natural sites, green corridors, bicycle ways, outdoor sports and recreation facilities and fields, amenity spaces including areas around housing, play areas, allotments, cemeteries and churchyards, green roofs and walls, and watercourses and wetlands. These spaces are designed to be multifunctional; for example, a bicycle path can also be a footpath, while a utility corridor can be combined with a drainage ditch, and may constitute an important connection in an ecological network.

Big Ideas diagrams: a central heart, excellent public transport, wildlife corridors, making it easy to go green, one green town, the green loop, a strong community with a mixed economy and a variety of housing options, a place for people (no through traffic).

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Plan components from top: water, vegetation, circulation, existing and proposed buildings, public spaces and landscape corridors, all layers.

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The master plan indicates the importance of providing community amenities strategically and concurrently with the phasing of the development, such that their delivery matches balanced growth of all components as a key performance indicator to measure the success of the development.

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Top: Diagram of green infrastructure strategies, rooting the community to the landscape. Bottom: The master plan is designed to allow development in phases, where the economic development and green infrastructure are mutually enhancing. Opposite: Perspectives depicting street life in a mediumdensity district and landscape in a low-density area.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Alissa North is an Assistant Professor in the Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Toronto’s John H. Daniels Faculty of Architecture, Landscape, and Design, where she teaches graduate design studio, visual communication, and theory courses on contemporary landscape architecture. Her research investigates the development of proposed and built landscape architecture projects to reveal key principles of a process-based approach to design. This work has been published in books and journals, including Landscape Journal and Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA). Alissa graduated with Honours from the Bachelor of Landscape Architecture Program at the University of Toronto in 1998. She received the Master in Landscape Architecture degree with Distinction from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design in 2003, where she was awarded the Jacob Weidenman Prize for outstanding design ability. Alissa is a partner with Pete North in North Design Office, which has received recognition for entries in several design competitions, many of which have been published internationally. North Design Office is committed to the idea that welldesigned urban environments and open spaces create vibrant ecologies and communities.

194

ILLUSTRATION CREDITS

AECOM 14, 130, 190, 191, 192, 193

John Gollings 108, 109

Norman Kondy 68, 69

Eric Sempé 76

Atelier Christian de Portzamparc 71, 73

Gilbert Gorski 66

David Lloyd / AECOM 18, 130, 132, 133

Serero Architectes 29, 110, 111, 112, 113

atelier le balto 34, 36, 37

Gregotti Associati International 92, 93

LTL Architects 44, 46, 47

SOM 67, 157, 159

Nicolas Borel 77

Roger Grisiger 23, 32, 33

McGregor Coxall 148, 149, 150, 151

SWA Group 157

Buro Lubbers cover image, 142, 144, 146, 164, 186, 187, 188, 189

Christopher Grubbs 156

Mirvac Design 42, 43

GuerrillaGardening.org / Richard Reynolds 38, 39, 40, 41

Greg Newington 54, 55

Waterfront Toronto / Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates 20, 152, 154, 155

Karin Rumming / City of Hannover 182, 183 Harri Hakaste / Markku Siiskonen /  Heikki Rinne / Jussi Tiainen / City of Helsinki Ministry of the Environment 175, 176, 177 Klas Tham / City of Malmö 147 © James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, courtesy the City of New York 126, 127, 124: This map was produced by Friends of the High Line. All images created by James Corner Field Operations and Diller Scofidio + Renfro, Courtesy the City of New York. Map design: Patrick Hazari. First edition © 2009 Friends of the High Line. Christian de Portzamparc 24, 72 Enlace Arquitectura 120, 122, 123, 139 Eriksson Architects 184 © Foster + Partners 20, 88, 89, 90

Hargreaves Associates 106 HCMA Victoria 172, 173 D. A. Horchner / Design Workshop 141 Hashem  Hosseini-Mousavi 31, 45, 49, 53, 62, 66, 83, 87, 92, 95, 98, 107, 111, 115, 117, 121, 131, 143, 147, 149, 157, 159, 171, 185 Hashem Hosseini-Mousavi and Sally Kassar 43, 70, 78, 141, 153, 175, 183, 187 Hashem Hosseini-Mousavi and Kiana Keyvani 191 Hashem Hosseini-Mousavi and Alissa North 35, 39, 125, 179 Kleboth Lindinger Partners 116, 118, 119 Klötzli Friedli Landschaftsarchitekten 30

Alissa North 8, 9, 128, 129, 146 Pete North 146 North Design Office 10, 14 OKRA Landscape Architects 10, 50, 51, 61, 79, 80, 81

West 8 14, 82, 84, 85, 114, 115 X-Architects / SMAQ 99, 100, 101 © Nigel Young / Foster + Partners 20, 86, 89, 90, 91 ZEDfactory 6, 64, 65

Palmbout Urban Landscapes 48, 49, 50 PWL Partnership Landscape Architects 134, 169, 170 Reed Hilderbrand 52, 53 Daniel Rousselot 74, 75, 76, 77 Sasaki Associates 56, 94, 95, 96, 97, 159, 160, 161, 162, 163 Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects 102, 179, 180, 181

195

INDEX OF PERSONS, FIRMS, INSTITUTIONS, PROJECTS, LOCATIONS, AND SUBJECTS

abandoned site 35, 167, 168 adapt, adaptation, adaptive design 11-13, 15, 21, 27, 31, 35, 42, 57, 59, 70, 93, 101, 105, 165-171 AECOM 66, 130, 156, 190 affordable housing 140 Agence Ter 116 agriculture 52, 54, 58, 59, 66, 93, 156, 167, 168, 174, 182, 185 agriculture, organic 63, 66, 156, 182, 183 airfield, airport 27, 110, 111, 148 Alan Baxter & Associates 190 Albuquerque, New Mexico 140, 141 allee 106, 140 amenity, amenities 12, 47, 62, 103, 114, 117, 152, 178, 190-193 Amsterdam 59, 82-85, 136, 166 Amsterdam Bos Park 166 Applied Ecological Services 152 Aqua-Tex Scientific Consulting 170 aquatic habitat 137, 138 Arbolera de Vida 140, 141 Arnhem 186-189 Arup 62, 66, 92, 152 AT Osborne 82 Atelier Christian de Portzamparc 70 atelier le balto 34, 35 Atelier Thomas Pucher 116 Atelier Z 186 Athens 110-113 Barcelona 104, 105 barrier 17, 112 beauty 12, 22, 58, 188 BedZED 62-65 Behnisch Architekten 152 Belval-Ouest 142, 143 Berlin 26, 34-37 bicycle, bicycle path, bicycle network 22, 28, 62, 89, 93, 156, 171, 190, Biel 30-33 Big Dig 104 Biodiversity 25, 146, 174, 178,

190 Biofiltration 148, 156 biomass 12, 16, 114, 170 biomass energy 114, 170 BioRegional Development Group 62 Bioswale 16, 114, 140, 158-161 Bo01 146, 147 Bohannan Huston, Chris Vigil 140 Bois de Boulogne 104 Borneo-Sporenburg 21, 59 Boskalis 82 Boston, Massachusetts 104 Boulevard Transportation Group 170 Bramberger Architects 116 Brisbane 42, 43 Brisbane Powerhouse 42, 43 Broadacre City 21 Brooklyn Bridge Park 105 brownfield remediation, brownfield redevelopment 137, 142, 146, 158, 170, 178 Burlington Associates in Community Development LLC 140 Buro Happold 98, 124, 130, 178 Buro Lubbers 142, 186 Busby Perkins + Will 170 Caldwell, Alfred 58 canal, canal system 82-85, 93, 94-97, 146, 148, 156 Canem 170 Cannetta, Alberto 92 Caracas 120-123 carbon 12, 17, 59, 62, 63, 86, 101, 158, 174, 182, 185, 190 carbon emission 12, 17, 101, 174, 182 carbon neutrality 59, 62, 86, 185, 190 carbon reduction 17, 63, 101, 174 carbon sequestration 158 Central Park 21, 104 Centro Studi Traffico 92 channel 12, 83, 98, 148, 152, 157 Charrette 19, 93

Chattahoochee Hills, Georgia 52-55 Chattahoochee Hill Country Alliance 52 Chicago, Illinois 158-161 children 19, 127, 167, 184 children’s daycare 174 children’s participation 19, 167 children’s playground 19, 22, 26, 127, 140 children’s schoolyard 19 Choi Ropiha Fighera 148 Chongming Island 66-69 civic 12, 15, 16, 38, 40, 42, 59, 103, 105, 106, 190 civic infrastructure 15, 42, 106 civic ownership 38 civic renewal 40 civic space 12, 15, 16, 42, 59, 103, 105 client 11, 15, 25, 103, 107, 135, 165 climate 35, 59, 86-89, 89, 98-101, 174, 190 climate change 174, 190 climate, micro- 35, 59, 89, 190 climate-responsive development 35, 59, 86-89, 98-101, 174, 190 closed-loop system 170-173 cohesion 13, 78, 116, 117, 148 collaboration 11, 19 commercial 46, 70, 82, 96, 106, 114, 146, 148, 158, 174, 178, 184 commercial infrastructure 46, 82, 96, 106, 114, 148, 158, 178, 184 commercial space 70, 146, 174 Communication Arts, Inc. 130 community 11, 12, 13, 15-22, 25-27, 30, 31, 38-41, 42-43, 44-47, 48-51, 52, 54, 57-60, 62-65, 67, 70-73, 78-81, 82-85, 86-89, 92-93, 94-97, 98-101, 103, 105, 107, 114, 117, 120-123, 124-127, 133, 135-138, 140, 142-145, 146, 147, 148-151, 152-155, 156, 158-161, 165-168, 170-173, 174-177, 178-181, 182,

183, 184, 185, 186-189, 190, 192 community building, community development 13, 15-22, 25, 26, 27, 38-41, 42-43, 44-47, 48-51, 54, 57-60, 62-65, 67, 70-73, 78-81, 82-85, 86-89, 92-93, 94-97, 98-101, 105, 114, 117, 120-123, 124-127, 133, 135-138, 140, 142-145, 146, 147, 148-151, 152-155, 158-161, 165-168, 170-173, 174-177, 182, 183, 190, 192 community design 13, 15-22, 25, 26, 27, 31, 38-41, 42-43, 44-47, 54, 57-60, 70-73, 78-81, 82-85, 86-89, 92-93, 94-97, 98-101, 103, 105, 107, 114, 117, 120-123, 140, 146, 147, 152-155, 156, 158-161, 165-168, 170-173, 174-177, 178-181, 182, 183, 184, 185, 186-189 community facilities, community services 16, 17-19, 42-43, 44-47, 48-51, 54, 62-65, 82-85, 92-93, 105, 114, 117, 120-123, 135-138, 140, 158-161, 165-168, 170-173, 174-177, 182, 183, 190, 192 community gardens 13, 16, 38-41, 54, 78-81, 117, 148-151, 156, 174-177 community input, community involvement, community participation 13, 15-22, 31, 38-41, 42-43, 44-47, 57-60, 62-65, 103, 105, 107, 117, 135-138, 140, 146, 147, 148-151, 152-155, 165-168, 182, 183 competition 11, 30, 66, 82, 86, 94, 105, 110, 114, 120, 137, 152, 166, 178 concept 11, 25-28, 60, 70, 71, 125, 127, 130, 136, 168 conceptual design 25, 27, 42, 45, 57, 184, 186 conceptualize 13, 16, 25-28, 58, 168 concrete 27, 111, 120, 148, 152 confluence 25

connective landscape 93 conservation 52, 93, 98, 101, 166, 182, 183, 185, 190 construct 13, 15, 17, 28, 48, 63, 70, 103, 134-138, 174 construction 13, 15, 57, 59, 67, 89, 96, 104, 105, 111, 127, 135-138, 140, 142, 152, 156, 165, 166, 180, 182 construction drawings 13, 103, 135 contamination, contaminated site 25, 135-137, 140, 146, 148 context 11, 12, 15, 17, 25, 27, 42, 62, 82, 84, 86, 98, 103-105, 106, 110, 112, 125, 127, 133, 137, 148, 165, 170 cooling 86-89, 98-101, 180 Corajoud, Michel and Claire 166 core, urban 16, 70, 93, 142, 167 Corix Utilities 170 corridor 12, 17, 67, 70, 87, 98, 106, 111, 114, 125, 148, 157, 178, 190 Cristal Park 30-33 Cultuurpark Westergasfabriek 136 Curitiba 17, 22, 167 Czerniak, Julia 11, 22 Dan Euser Waterarchitecture 106 Daouti, Stella 110 Dekker/Perich/Sabatini 140 Delft 48-51 demographic 12, 25, 42, 60, 94, 105, 107, 182, 183 density 17, 21, 27, 44-47, 48-51, 52, 66, 83, 103, 104, 142, 158, 174, 182, 185 Design Workshop 140 DeSo Defrain-Souquet Architectes 94 Desvigne, Michel 22, 167 detail 12, 13, 15, 42, 59, 103-105, 117, 120, 125, 137, 142, 160 develop 11, 13, 16, 17, 53, 57, 59, 66, 89, 102-105, 114, 117, 142, 178 developer 21, 45, 71, 105, 131, 148 DTAH 137 digital, digital technology 15, 17, 22, 25, 60, 103 digital visualization 15, 17, 25, 60, 103 Diller Scofidio + Renfro 124 D.I.R.T. Studio 27 Discovery Green 106-109 Dockside Green 170-173 Don Mills 21 Don River 152 Doug Hollis & Margo Sawyer Artists 106 drainage 53, 146, 156, 190

Dromos 110 Dubai 59, 98-101 Duisburg Nord Landscape Park 136 dune 83, 98, 178 Eckbo, Garrett 58 Ecobay 178-181 Ecological Design Institute 140 ecology 11, 15, 22, 60, 101, 125, 127, 152 ecological corridor, ecological network 67, 143, 148, 190 ecological design 22, 59, 83, 84, 98, 110, 116, 136, 138, 140, 142, 145, 149, 152, 156, 165, 166, 168, 174, 176, 184, ecological urbanism 22 economy 17, 60, 66 economic development 25, 96, 104 economic recession 15, 107 economic sustainability 107 ecosystem 21, 105, 111, 137, 178 Eco-town 59, 190 Eco-Viikki 174-177 Eero Paloheimo Ecocity 184 embankment 111 Emerald Necklace 21 emergence 11, 103 engineering 11, 15, 21, 124, 137, 148, 165, 166, Enlace Arquitectura 120 environment 10-12, 17, 19, 21, 28, 45, 48, 59, 62, 63, 67, 70, 78, 82, 89, 96, 98, 101, 114, 117, 135-137, 146, 148, 156, 157, 165, 166, 170, 182, 183, 184, 185, 190 environment, urban 10, 11, 28, 70 environmental ethics 146, 166, 182, 183 environmental impact, environmental degradation 17, 45, 62 environmental report 19 environmental restoration, environmental stewardship 12, 67, 89, 96, 98, 114, 117, 135-137, 148, 156, 157, 165, 166, 170, 182, 183, 185, 190 Eriksson Architects 184 ethnicity 15 European Commission 17, 22 European Housing Exhibition 146 evolution 13, 21, 22, 27, 116, 165, 182, 185 evolve 13, 15, 19, 31, 35, 53, 101, 147, 165- 168, 171, 183 Expo-Settlement Kronsberg 182, 183 façade 70, 120 Finnish Association of Architects 174

Fisher Marantz Stone 130 FKP Property Group 42 flexible design 15, 19, 25, 48, 57, 71, 87, 94, 105, 117, 190 flood protection 94, 152, 167, 190 floodplain 152 forest 58, 93, 166, 186, 188 Foster + Partners 86 Fresh Kills Landfill 137 Garden Cities 21, 57, 58 Garten Duett 35 Gas Works Park 135, 136 gentrification 104, 105 GPS 19 Granville Island, Vancouver 26 grasses 31, 142, 143 grassland 124, 183 Graz-Reininghaus 116-119 Great Eastern Ecology 152 greenbelt 174 Greenberg Consultants 152 green corridor 190 green infrastructure 16, 148, 170, 178, 190 green roof 62, 146, 170, 190 Green Square Town Centre 148-151 green wall 146, 190 Gregotti Associati International 92 greywater 98, 156, 170, 178 Grünewald-Kirchberg 78-81 guerrilla gardeners 38-41 guerrilla gardens 38-41 Gustafson Porter 136 Haag, Richard 135 habitat, ecological 137, 157, 170, 190 habitat, human 59, 101 Halprin, Lawrence 21, 58 Hamburg 114, 115 Hamburg Wasser 114, 115 Hamburg Water Cycle® 114, 115 Hampstead Heath 26 Hannover 182 Hannover City Divisions of Environment and City Greenspace 182 Hannover Environmental Protection 182 Hannover Planning and Urban Development 182 Hannover Waste Management Services 182 Hannover Youth and Social Services Directorate 182 Hargreaves Associates 26 Hauptallee 26 health, ecological 13 health, human 12, 15, 19, 140, 171 heating 170, 180 height 59, 70, 93, 131, 186

Helsinki 174-177 Helsinki Ministry of the Environment 174 Helsinki Planning Department 174 High Line 124-127 Ho Chi Minh City 94-97 Hollin Hills 48 housing 16, 21, 27, 42, 45, 46, 52, 58, 59, 62, 70, 82, 83, 110, 114, 140, 142, 146, 157, 174, 178, 182, 184, 185, 186, 190 Houston, Texas 106-109 Hyde Park 104 hydrology 21, 27, 53 Ian McHarg 166 identity 42, 53, 78, 104, 114, 146, 170, 171, 174 Ijmeer-Markermeer 82-85 industrial heritage 27, 42, 135-137, 143, 158 industrial site 17, 27, 42, 93, 105, 116, 117, 125, 135-137, 142, 143, 148, 152, 158, 170 industrialization 21 industry 42, 120, 140 infiltration basin 158 infrastructure 11-13, 16, 19, 45, 53, 63, 93, 94, 96, 101, 104, 110, 114, 117, 125, 136, 137, 142, 152, 156, 158, 165-167, 174, 178, 188, 190 infrastructure, landscape as 188 Institute for Community Economics 140 institution 21 institutional infrastructure 82, 83, 142 institutional space 70 Integrated Design and Architecture 140 interior space 48, 58, 87, 93, 170 inventory 13, 25 investment 12, 15-17, 21, 67, 103, 104, 105, 107, 165, 176 irrigation 62, 98, 111, 137, 156 Issoudun 157 James Corner Field Operations 11, 22, 124, 137 Jenfelder Au 114, 115 Jiaxing 156, 157 Jo Coenen & Co 142 Jun Aoki & Associates 130 Keating Channel 152 Kengo Kuma and Associates 130 Kevin Murray Associates 190 Kiley, Dan 58 Klas Tham, Architect and Planner 146 Kleboth Lindinger Partners 116 Klötzli Friedli Landscape Architects 30 Kristine Jensens Tegnestue 167

Kronsberg 182, 183 Kronsberg Environmental Liaison Agency, 182 Kyoto Agreement 174 La Théols Park 167 Lafayette Park 58 lake 16, 67, 84, 114, 152, 153, 158 Lake Michigan 158 landfill 137, 138, 178, 182 landscape urbanism 12, 22 Landschaftspark Riem 27 Las Ramblas 104 Latitude Nord 27 Latz+Partner 136 Lauren Griffith Associates 106 layer, layering 16, 25-28, 30, 35, 40, 42, 46, 47, 82, 103, 137, 157, 167, 170 Le Corbusier 21 legibility 28, 70, 165, 168 leisure 93, 110, 135, 152, 184, 190 Letchworth 21, 58 Lifescape 137 light, lighting 21, 31, 35, 38, 70, 98, 180 Limno-Tech 152 Lister, Nina-Marie 22 L’Observatoire International 124 London 26, 38-41, 104 London Lavender Field 40 Los Angeles, California 58 Lower Don Lands 152-155 LTL Architects 44 Lyon 104, 105 Mack Scogin Merrill Elam Architects 52, 53 Macklin Hancock 21 Madrid 104 maintenance 13, 38, 40, 63, 67, 98, 105, 111, 136, 165, 166 Malmö 146, 147 Manzanares River 104 mapping 59, 104 Markeroog 82-85 marsh 83 Masdar City 21, 86-91 Masséna-Grands Moulins District 70-77 master plan 13, 27, 42, 57-60, 62, 66, 67, 78, 84, 93, 94, 96, 98, 103, 105, 117, 135-137, 140, 142, 152, 158, 167, 170, 174, 178, 184, 190, 192 McGregor Coxall 148 meadow 27, 31, 54, 142, 143 Mentougou Eco-Valley 184, 185 metropolis, metropolitan 66, 70, 93, 130, 152 Meyer, David 27 Meyer, Elizabeth 12, 22 Meyer en Van Schoten Architecten 186

Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates 152 Mill Creek 167 mine site 17 Mirvac Design 42 mixed-use 27, 62, 93, 98, 130, 152, 158 mobility 17, 22, 120 MOCK Associates 140 modeling 103 Moll de la Fusta 105 Møller & Grønborg 178 monitoring 12, 89, 176 Monnikenhuizen 186-189 Monsberger 116 Morrison Hershfield 170 Morrow Environmental 170 Mulder, Jacopa 166 multifunctional space 15, 25, 190 Munich 22, 27 Munich Airport 27 MVRDV 59 Nanhu 156, 157 narrative 25-28, 42, 78 National Technology Agency of Finland 174 neighborhood 12, 16, 19, 21, 27, 51, 104, 105, 106, 114, 127, 146, 152, 158, 166, 167 Netherlands 48-51, 82-85, 93, 186-189 New Farm 42, 43 New Suburbanism 44-47 New York City New York 124-127 Nexterra 170 Nikken Sekkei, Ltd. 130 Office of Landscape Morphology 110 Ogden, Michael 54 OKRA Landscape Architects 48, 78 Olmsted, Frederick Law 58 Olympic Sculpture Park 137 OMA 105 operation 62, 63, 120, 121, 157 operative landscape, operative landscapes 6, 7, 11, 13, 168 Orange County Great Park 27 orchard 78, 148 Ore Wall Park 158 Oudolf, Piet 124 ownership 13, 38, 40, 170 PageSoutherlandPage Architects 106 palimpsest 25 Palmbout Urban Landscapes 21, 48. 59 Parc André Citroën 104 Parc de Bercy 104 Parc de la Villette 104 Parc Downsview Park 105 Parc du Sausset 166

Paris 70-77, 166 parking lot 19, 28, 46, 106 participation 15, 16, 19, 57, 59, 138, 167 Parque del Clot 105 pavement, paving 120, 121, 125, 160 pedestrian, pedestrian circulation 17, 26, 62, 89, 93, 94, 96, 98, 101, 106, 111, 114, 120, 121 125, 137, 146, 156, 167, 171 Pekkarinen-Kanerva, Pirjo 174 performance 11, 13, 22, 35, 89, 117, 121, 158, 167, 187, 192 periphery 27, 28, 31, 93, 104, 167 Personal Rapid Transport 89 Laaksonen, Petri 174 phase, phasing 11, 13 ,15, 17, 21, 22, 25, 45, 57-59, 62, 89, 94, 103, 131, 135-138, 142, 146, 152, 158, 165-167, 190, 192 Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 27, 166 Phillips Farevaag Smallenberg 152 phytoremediation 136 plan 13-19, 25, 27, 42, 48, 51, 53, 57-60, 66, 67, 71, 78, 84, 93, 94, 96, 98, 103-105, 117, 135-138, 140, 142, 152, 158, 166-168, 170, 174, 178, 184, 185, 190, 192 planner, planning 11, 13-17, 21, 22, 42, 45, 54, 57-60, 62, 63, 66, 84, 85, 86, 89, 93, 94, 116, 136, 146, 153, 158, 167, 170, 174, 176, 182, 188, 190 plaza 19, 42, 48, 94, 104, 105, 146 Plaza de los Países Catalanes 105 pollution 26, 83, 146, 148, 156, 165 Poptahof 48-51 post-industrial site 142 Prags Boulevard 167 preservation 21, 42, 52, 103, 136, 143, 166 process 11-22, 25-28, 42, 51, 57-60, 62, 82, 84, 103-105, 116, 125, 130, 135-138, 140, 148, 158, 165-168, 174, 176 programming 11, 16, 25, 28, 31, 42, 45-47, 48, 52, 53, 70, 78, 105, 106, 107, 110, 111, 136, 138, 152, 158, 165, 166, 170, 176, 178 public infrastructure 17, 35, 57, 62, 67, 84, 93, 101, 106, 114, 120, 121, 142, 148, 158, 167, 178, 182, 185 public space 12-22, 26-28, 31, 35, 38-41, 42, 45, 48, 51, 57-60, 62, 70, 78, 86, 87, 89, 93, 94, 103-105, 110, 112, 114, 117, 120,

130-133, 135-138, 142, 143, 146, 148, 152, 153, 158, 160, 165-168, 170, 178, 183 Pujian New Town 93 PWL Partnership 170 Quantum Environmental Group 170 rail 70, 125, 156 rail corridor 125 rail yard 125 rainwater harvesting 62, 114, 117, 137, 148, 156, 170, 182, 188 Rapp+Rapp 59 ravine 152 reclamation 11, 22, 26, 45, 82 recreation 45, 47, 48, 59, 111, 114, 130, 182, 183, 190 recycling 62, 98, 114, 117, 166, 170, 174, 178, 182, 185, 186 Redl, Erwin 110 Reed Hilderbrand 52, 53 regeneration 27, 42, 104, 105, 107, 110, 127, 136, 143, 165-168 rehabilitation 17 Reininghaus Brewery 116-119 remediation 11, 17, 83, 96, 135-138, 140, 142, 146, 158, 170 renewable energy 147, 148, 165, 182, 185 resident 21, 26, 27, 30, 35, 38, 52, 57, 62, 83, 84, 98, 107, 112, 116, 117, 140, 142, 167, 171, 174, 183 residential infrastructure 46, 48, 51, 62, 83, 96, 107, 148, 158, 170, 184 residential space 46, 51, 58, 62, 70, 83,114, 117, 184 resilience 11, 12, 15, 19, 25, 84, 116, 148, 165, 166, 168 retaining wall 111 Reynolds, Richard 38 Rinne, Heikki 174 Rio Climate Change Conference 174 river 12, 26, 42, 52, 66-69, 70, 93, 94-97, 104, 112, 114, 152-155, 184 Riverside 58 RFR Engineering 152 RJC Engineers 170 Robert Silman Associates 124 rural 157, 182, 183 Saarinen, Eero 110 Sabana Grande Boulevard 120 Sakakura Associates 130 Sammer & Partner Consulting 116 Sasaki Associates 94, 158 satellite city 16 Sawmill Advisory Council 140 Schatten-Garten 35

Schmidt Hammer Lassen Architects 178 Schwartz, Martha 27 sculpture 59 Sea Ranch 21, 58 Seattle, Washington 137 Serero Architectes 110 Sherwood Engineers 156 shipyard 27, 146 Skidmore, Owings & Merrill 66, 130, 156, 158 SMAQ 98 Smith, Garrett 140 Smith, Ken 27 SNC-Lavalin 170 Spirn, Anne Whiston 166 social capital 11 social interaction 101, 114, 152 social networks 13 soil 98, 125, 136, 137, 146, 158, 174, 182, 190 solar energy 98-101, 114, 174, 184 Southworks Lakeside 158-163 sports 17, 110, 152, 190 Stadtland 116 stakeholder 15, 57, 103, 147, 152 Stantec 170 strategy 11-17, 26, 27, 42, 45, 48, 52, 58, 59, 62, 67, 71, 83, 86-89, 93, 94, 96, 98, 104, 105, 110, 111, 114, 120, 136, 142, 143, 146, 152, 158, 166, 168, 170, 178, 182, 188, 190, 192 street 26, 35, 38, 48, 53, 58, 59, 70, 84, 87, 104, 114, 117, 120, 127, 131, 146, 152, 168, 180 streetscape 19, 59, 62, 114, 120, 136 Studio E Architects 140 stormwater 16, 62, 117, 136, 137, 148, 152, 156, 158, 166, 174, 178 suburban 42, 44-47, 58, 114, 137, 166, 182 succession 125, 142, 166 Sunflowers of Parliament 40 Sutton 62-65 S.V. Khandekar 186 SWA Group 156 Sweden Ministry of the Environment 146, 147 Sweden National Board of Housing, Building and Planning 146, 147 Sydney 136, 148-151 systems thinking 21 Tadao Ando Architect and Associates 130 tax revenue 25 technical drawing 13, 103, 135 technology 11, 19, 59, 60, 86, 103, 117, 156, 168, 170, 184 terrace 70, 111, 142, 157

territory 11, 38 Terzic, Mario 116 THAPE 92 The Hague 59 The Woodlands 21, 166 theory, theoretical 11, 12, 15, 21, 25, 45, 117 Thu Thiem New Urban Area 94-94 Tiergarten 26 Tokyo 130-133 Tokyo Midtown Roppongi District 130-133 topography 58, 84, 98, 111, 137, 152, 184, 186 Toronto 27, 105, 137, 152-155 Toronto Central Waterfront 137 traffic 21, 38, 40, 48, 120, 127, 166 transform, transformation 11-20, 26, 35, 38, 40, 42, 45, 54, 93, 96, 103, 106, 107, 110, 120, 121, 125, 135-138, 140, 147, 152 transportation 12, 17, 22, 59, 62, 63, 67, 84, 89, 101, 114, 137, 156, 158, 167, 170, 171, 174, 178, 182, 185, 188, 190 Transsolar 152 tree, street tree, tree planting 25-27, 31, 38, 48, 58, 63, 70, 78, 93, 114, 121, 125, 133, 137, 152, 157, 158, 167, 178, 186 TSH 152 United Kingdom Post-Mining Alliance 17, 22 United States Environmental Protection Agency 16 University of New Mexico School of Architecture and Planning 140 urban design, urban designer 21, 46, 48, 51, 59, 66, 82-85, 94-97, 98-101, 105, 110-113, 116, 117, 158-161, 165, 174-176 urban fabric 98-10, 104, 107, 120 urban form 15, 17, 46, 70-77, 84, 86, 94-97, 98-101, 103, 104, 110-113, 124-127 urban grid 27, 106, 152-155 urban heat island 16 Urban Outfitters Navy Yard Headquarters 27 urban renewal, urban redevelopment 26, 38, 46, 66, 104, 105, 110-113, 116, 117, 124-127, 130-133, 137, 138, 142-145, 146, 148, 152-155, 158-161, 170-173 urban vegetation 21, 78, 124-127 urbanism 11, 12, 22, 59 Van de Looi en Jacobs Architecten 186 Van Eesteren, Cornelis 166 Vancouver, British Columbia 26

vegetation 12, 16, 19, 21, 27, 35, 48, 58, 66, 70, 78, 87, 93, 104, 111, 125, 127, 136, 137, 142, 143, 146, 148, 158, 160, 166, 174, 190 vegetation, urban 21, 78, 124-127 Vera Yanovshtchinsky Architecten 186 vernacular 114, 130 Vienna Prater 26 views, view corridor 35, 58, 93, 106, 111, 127, 133, 137, 182, 184 Ville Contemporaine 21 Ville Radieuse 21 visualization 15, 17, 25, 60, 103 World’s End, Massachusetts 58 Waldheim, Charles 12, 22 waste 30, 54, 58, 174 waste management 62-65, 114, 147, 170-173, 174, 178, 182 water 16, 19, 45, 48, 52-55, 62, 67, 82-85, 87, 93, 96, 98, 111, 114, 117, 136-138, 146, 148, 152-155, 156, 158-161, 166, 170-173, 174, 178-181, 182, 185, 186-189, 190 water management 45, 62, 67, 96, 98, 111, 114, 117, 136-138, 146, 148, 152-155, 156, 158-161, 166, 170-173, 178-181, 182, 185, 186-189, 190 waterfront 59, 93, 94-97, 105, 137, 138, 152-155, 158-161 Weiss/Manfredi Architects 137 Welwyn 21, 58 West 8 21, 59, 82-85, 114, 115, 137 wetland 59, 82-85, 136, 146, 156, 170, 174, 190 Whitehill Bordon 190-193 wildlife 19, 170, 190 wind energy 63, 67, 86-89, 98, 178-181, 182 Witteveen + Bos Raadgevende Ingenieurs 82 Wonderland Park 58 woodland 27, 52-55, 166, 183 WorleyParsons 170 Wright, Frank Lloyd 58 X-Architects 98 Xeritown 98-101 Yangtze River 66-69 Yorkville Park 27 Ypenburg 21, 59 ZEDfactory 62, 190 ZIS+P Transport Planning 116 zoning 25, 52, 93, 105

The author and the publisher would like to thank the Landscape Architecture Canada Foundation (LACF) for the generous support of this publication. Layout, cover design and typography: Anita Matusevics Wonder incorporated, Toronto A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the Library of Congress, Washington, D.C., USA. Bibliographic information published by the German National Library The German National Library lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliografie; detailed bibliographic data are available on the Internet at http://dnb.d-nb.de. This work is subject to copyright. All rights are reserved, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, re-use of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in other ways, and storage in databases. For any kind of use, permission of the copyright owner must be obtained. © 2013 Birkhäuser Verlag GmbH, Basel P.O. Box 44, 4009 Basel, Switzerland Part of De Gruyter

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