"x" Urbanism

New and past readings suggest this course could accurately be called: Landscape Urbanism, Hyper Urbanism, New Hybrid Urbanism, Post Urbanism, Pluralism Urbanism, Site/Non-Site Urbanism, SCAPE Urbanism ... Fill in the _____ Urbanism.

These terms not only reference the various perspectives and multiple fields of study that contribute to the practice of (Landscape) Urbanism, but they also highlight the vast and rich scope, scale, and nature of the work itself. Modes of representation and processes of design hail from architecture, infrastructural, and landscape. As a planner, I would argue that this hybrid phenomenon cannot exist without the policy and implementation from that field/department as well.

In Corner's "Representation and Landscape," there was a real connection, even overlapping, between architecture and landscape representations. As an architect, "The built landscape must be determined in advance and exist after the drawing," spatially, it is all-enveloping," and "bound into geographical places and topographies" are phrases synonomous to architectural representation.

One question I wanted to pose to the group from our discussion last week related to sucess/failure and informalities of a place. Is it possible to measure the sucess or failure of a place that caters to "many publics"? What determines success or failure? Many of these cases we are studying aim at producing urban moments where, at least in the Koolhaas and Zaha projects, the results are unexpected or unknown. We spoke about homeless people in a park and an informal market in Hong Kong. Aren't these informalities part of the nature or essence of ______ Urbanism?

PS. Blogger.com thinks "Urbanism" is not a word!