hierarchy or not

I agree that this thing we are investigating is really _______ urbanism. (Could it not be infrarchiscape urbanism as well?) I think the value of the juxtaposition of landscape and urbanism is that we reverse the traditional view of the city, as something built on top of a landscape to a re-landscaping of the city. But from that point on, the usefulness of the term drowns out in the noise produced by the very 'definition' of what it is.

Landscape/urbanism resists any nomenclature; it wishes to remain as continuous with other disciplines as possible. However, I find myself cringing when I see the words "hyper urbanism" and "hybrid morphology" and "fluid spatial continuum"--I understand that what is being described lacks form, but we are at risk of being consumed by an endless repetition of something that lacks direction, hierarchy. Possibly by giving a hierarchy, we can begin to see what landscape urbanism actually is (even though some examples without hierarchy may be praised, such as the lack of "compositional order which might prioritize architecture" in Koolhaas' "Dolphins" project). Sometimes an architectural object deserves to stand alone as a figure, a monument--think of orientation devices in cities, or even on our campus--the campanile. Without it our ability to navigate other, less familiar sides of the campus would be severely compromised. By extension, a city fabric without hierarchy is a confounding, sometimes terrifying place to inhabit.

Establishing a hierarchy among design objectives is not about regressing back to traditional roles of the architect, the planner, the landscape architect, etc. I think we all recognize that those boundaries have dissolved. But what happens when you try to re-scribe new boundaries after the melee (or during the melee, if you will)? Are there now new ideas about what is a shelter, new ideas about what is a recreational landscape, and new ideas about what is a gathering space?