Nick's Week 4 Response

Recent European landscape projects advocate a reclamation of landscape as a means of introducing urban development. This opposes the traditional method of dozing and erasing a landscape’s identity and returning later to infill with an artificial landscape—green lawns, playgrounds, etc. Other projects such as Andrea Branzi’s “weak urbanism” projects view the landscape as an agricultural, “highly evolved industrial system, capable of adapting to production cycles that change over time and utilize reversible modes of organization” (Shannon 155). Change is loosely planned for in Grether and Desvigne’s Lyon Confluence project: “exterior areas will be born, disappear, shift, according to the evolution of the building and the rhythm of the liberation of land, to make up a sort of moving map, like that of crop rotation” (156). Is the landscape really a figure here, or still the background, a field to be shaped by the architectural and infrastructural forces around it? Is it possible to have a figured landscape at all?

Koolhaas proposes in his Melun-Senart town design that the city’s form is weak and formless, defined by a “system of emptiness” that gives the city its life. Emptiness alone, even landscaped emptiness, does not guarantee use. So how can we design a space to be used by a balanced section of the public realm?

Dijkstra advocates that we must be active in ensuring that we give equal access to all groups at all times. While he admits this is unrealistic, still it is the goal of his idea of urban space. Should we even strive for unity, or should our public institutions plan for flexibility and let the people decide where they want to gather?

Crawford is in favor of James Holston’s “spaces of insurgent citizenship”, where immigrants, people of different economic and cultural background disrupt “normative categories of social life and urban experience”. How can we plan for disruption? What is the best urban fabric to permit user customization without ending up in chaos? Can urban chaos be a good thing, or is that a riot?