{"id":4099,"date":"2010-11-20T05:00:05","date_gmt":"2010-11-20T10:00:05","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/?p=4099"},"modified":"2010-11-19T17:58:25","modified_gmt":"2010-11-19T22:58:25","slug":"territories-of-urbanism","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/2010\/11\/territories-of-urbanism\/","title":{"rendered":"territories of urbanism"},"content":{"rendered":"

On Urban Omnibus<\/em>, Genevieve Sherman recaps<\/a> last Saturday’s afternoon panel from Harvard GSD’s 50th anniversary party for their urban planning program.\u00a0 The panel that Sherman recaps is of particular interest because it featured Andres Duany, whose harsh criticism<\/a> of the GSD’s direction in Metropolis is one of the recent shots fired<\/a> by New Urbanists in the general direction of landscape urbanists, speaking at the school which he described as having been subjected to a successful “coup”.\u00a0 (Two side notes: First, Duany’s description of Charles Waldheim as “circling in” from the “academic hinterland” to launch a “general strike” on the GSD neatly locates the intersection of hilarity and absurdity.\u00a0 Second, the fetish for developing and delineating “_____ urbanisms” is growing tiresome<\/a>.)<\/p>\n

I’m less interested, though, in Duany’s further comments than I am drawn to Sherman’s recounting of Pierre B\u00e9langer<\/a>‘s arguments, which followed Duany’s:<\/p>\n

[B\u00e9langer] stated that the financial and environmental crises in fact exposed a serious weakness in traditional urban forms. Dense, vertical cities formed by Euclidean zoning, he said, were totally dependent on centralized infrastructure \u2013 including water extraction, waste landfilling, oil importing, food processing, and uniform transportation \u2013 that is crumbling, costly to maintain, and environmentally detrimental.<\/p>\n

The future of infrastructure planning, therefore, is paramount, and the project of Ecological Urbanism is to design and integrate infrastructure into the city in a way that is both environmentally sound and economically productive. Civil engineers, B\u00e9langer argued, are the true planners of the modern city<\/em> [italics mine], but landscape architects will play a critical role in mediating how infrastructure meets the urban interface. Trained in constructing ecologies, landscape architects are the only professionals poised to consider how all infrastructure types \u2013 energy, food, waste, communications and transport \u2013 can be synthesized into a living system that covers the entire regional urban footprint.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I’d be interested to read or hear B\u00e9langer’s full comment; though its rough outline should be familiar to readers of B\u00e9langer, it would be interesting to see exactly how he frames it as a response to urban traditionalists.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Urban Omnibus, Genevieve Sherman recaps last Saturday’s afternoon panel from Harvard GSD’s 50th anniversary party for their urban planning program.\u00a0 The panel that Sherman recaps is of particular interest because it featured Andres Duany, whose harsh criticism of the GSD’s direction in Metropolis is one of the recent shots fired by New Urbanists in […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10,5],"tags":[276,19,190,215,269],"class_list":["post-4099","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-asides","category-urbanism","tag-andres-duany","tag-ecological-urbanism-at-gsd","tag-landscape-urbanism","tag-new-urbanism","tag-pierre-belanger"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4099","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4099"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4099\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4101,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4099\/revisions\/4101"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4099"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4099"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/m.ammoth.us\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4099"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}