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A large body of contemporary landscape design thinking tries to understand how designs can be less about making things, and more about stewarding processes that create a 'fit' between the intervention and the context. Landscape Urbanists advancing these techniques draw concepts and vocabulary from complex adaptive systems theory.
“Landscape Urbanism” (LU) is a phrased coined by theorist Charles Waldheim to describe a new sensibility towards space, that emerged in the late 1980s and early 1990s. It's roots trace back to a number of key theorists and practitioners based at the University of Pennsylvania, the Harvard Graduate School of Design, and the University of Illinois, Chicago. Their writings became main-stream in the late 90s and mid 2000s, being circulated in two highly influential texts - Recovering Landscape (1999) and The Landscape Urbanism Reader. These helped disseminate key ideas within the discourse, as well as highlighting seminal projects advancing the movement's ideas in the form of competition entries as well as built works.
These texts and projects positioned LU as a break from traditional landscape interests, which tended to focus on the sceno-graphic or pictorial qualities of space. Instead, Landscape Urbanism attunes to the nature of landscape performance in an unfolding context. LU practitioners and theorists, are thereby less attentive to the physical dimensions of plans (how they look), and more to the performative aspects of plans and how these come to be enacted over time. Here, practitioners acknowledge the limits to their foresight, and instead try to work with Contingency. They accept that History Matters in terms of the specifics of how places will come to emerge.
The movement recognizes that prediction is impossible, allowing for sites that are not so much constructed but performed in space and time, by means of differential forces engaging with the site. This performance takes place within a spatial arena that is structured so as to not only permit but also afford a broad range of site potentials – different manners in which the site might be “played” or from which different variations of performance can be extracted . To prime these mutable settings, LU practitioners speak of ‘seeding’ an area’, ‘irrigating’ a territory, or ‘staging’ the ground - all alluding to an active and catalyzing engagement with the site that anticipates and prepares the ground for possibility - while still maintaining an open-endedness in terms of which future possibilities are enacted (see James Corner). This idea of creating a flexible framework that can be activated in different ways is described as creating Open Scaffolds in landscape, but can be tied back to the idea of setting up Variables that are then activated so as to support different Driving Flows.
Thus, LU does not just leave a space ‘open’, but instead aims to increase a physical environment’s capacity to foster the emergence of contingent events: ones constituted on territories where these flows coalesce. Here, the concept of ‘staging’ or creating Affordances is key. Affordance is the term coined by James Gibson to describe the capacity of designed objects or environments to invite multiple kinds of appropriations that in turn, manifest as different ‘states’, that are in alignment with different kinds of user needs or requirements. The choice of which ‘afforded’ state manifests is contingent upon the kinds of imbricated relationships activated by users. That said, not all sites offer equal affordances to shift into different regimes of behavior - if too specific, territories do not have the plasticity required; if too open-ended, they become neutral - with little capacity to meaningfully afford or support programmatic specificity.
By creating a range of affordances that support programmatic potential, Landscape Urbanists accept the future as non-linear, open-ended and contingent, but still act to curate meaningful material territories that can be appropriated and modified when and where contingent forces coalesce.
This notion of Affordances is closely aligned to that of Phase Space. Both concepts engage the idea (central to both complexity and Assemblage Geography, that material entities have certain capacities that exist within The Virtual and contingent; and that these are activated and manifested only under particular circumstances. That said, material affordances are not completely open-ended – there are still limits, and the way in which the capacities of material form are ‘called forth’ is through practices that integrate the Driving Flows of agency present in a given situation.
This emerging body of work integrates an acceptance of process, evolution, and unknown site dynamics, with the actualization of site features occurring in accordance with non-linear interactions. Strategies involve the creation of multiple enabling sites (or niches) within the territory of the city that permit different kinds of programs to find their best ‘fit’ in response to evolving relationships
For a more-in depth look at Landscape Urbanism approaches, including examples of projects and their relationship to complexity thinking, please watch the tutorial featured in the "In Depth" resources.
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