Supply Side Landscape

Lyster's "Landscapes of Exchange" and Webber's "Joys of Automobility" each seems to point discussion back to the condition of the edge city. Current organizations of labor and capital are clearly less spatial than ever before -- where Thomas Friedman sees a "flat" world in which specific skill sets and specific localities are divorced from one another, Lyster and Webber propose that the market drive for interconnectivity and intermodality already suggests that a rethinking of transportation "landscapes" is overdue. When most people can do their jobs from virtually anywhere, or from their homes, the city and its singular identity are increasingly pulled at the edges. The difficulty of defining "landscape urbanism" surely arises from this constant stretching and reconnection of networks -- what is "urban" and what is "landscape" when everything is being pulled apart and quickly reconstituted?

I would suggest that landscape urbanism describes the kind of practice that would address this perpetual edge condition. The image above, a Bruce McCall cartoon from the New York Times Op-Art column, pokes fun at a recent initiative to introduce congestion pricing in Midtown Manhattan. The implication of the drawing is that such market-driven strategies for the management of traffic flows might sound reasonable, but they would produce an artificial boundary with far-reaching effects on the urban surface. If our goal is to reduce pollution, congestion, and single occupancy vehicles, the measures we take to provoke such reductions will require a new design practice to mitigate negative spatial effects and to take advantage of opportunities.

It is hard to say how this macro-scale version of L.U. relates to the more acupunctural, interventional scale of the shopping cart parking and repair facility. There is the obvious relevance of traffic calming as a kind of urban science, whereby all flows of vehicles can become more regulated and predictable. But the site is also adjacent to an office block parking garage; its anonymity and barrenness are a result of this adjacency. Who would appropriate a small grass square for picnic lunches or other break activities when that square lies beyond the parking lot, its placement a matter of allowing cars to exit the lot without having to confront oncoming traffic. In the center of a relatively lively community, the Bonita Avenue site is incongruous because of its inherent lack of even the suggestion of connectivity, exchange, or place.