A map is a context. This project is about contextualization. This process has helped me understand where landscape architecture currently sits as a discipline and offers hints as to where it might go in the future. The function of this mapping is as much about re-shaping an understanding of landscape architecture as it is about understanding landscape urbanism. Like architecture and city planning, landscape architecture is a discipline in constant flux, redefining its role with and relationship to parallel fields of thought and within broader disciplinary contexts. Over the last few decades it has become apparent that landscape architecture has emerged as a discipline strongly capable of reshaping urban space. Ideas regarding landscapes as active, dynamic, operational systems have paralleled the discipline’s growing relevance within an urban context. In this time landscape urbanism has emerged as a reaction to landscape architecture’s role within our changing world. For landscape urbanism to contribute anything of value to the future of urbanism, or to the design disciplines, it needs to be contextualized within the larger framework of which it is part, without this context landscape urbanism has no relevance. Where it has come from must be critically assessed as a way to understand its intentions and potential future. Landscape urbanism may expand architecture’s boundaries to include elements of landscape thinking, but it does not expand the boundaries of landscape design. Its attempt to generate a new approach for urbanism is innovative as architecture, in its effort to expand the discipline’s understanding of site, but as a design discipline, or a strategic approach to thinking, landscape urbanism is not innovative.

No description available.

No description available.

Master of Landscape Architecture / Department of Landscape Architecture/Regional and Community Planning / Melanie F. Klein / The trend of urbanization is escalating on a global scale, in many cases sprawling outward at the expense of decaying urban centers, post industrial infrastructure, and other neglected landscapes. There is a critical need for intelligent, responsive, and resilient urban planning and design. The Smoky Hill River’s neglected cutoff channel running through the heart of Salina, Kansas, is exemplary of these phenomena. Although the historic channel operates as an important landscape infrastructural system for stormwater conveyance, it remains largely inactive in terms of its connections to adjacent neighborhoods, cultural significance, and economic driving potential. Landscape Urbanism, a relatively new realignment in urbanism theory, involves the concept of engaging dynamic urban processes and facilitating or enhancing relationships through design, providing potential remediation to many urban dilemmas. While still speculative and experimental, its application in metropolitan environments has garnered acknowledgment in the design community. Landscape Urbanism’s relevance toward micropolitan and small metropolitan cities, however, remains largely unexplored. The relationship between the revitalization of the historic Smoky Hill cutoff and Salina, facilitated by local advocates the Friends of the River, explores the application of Landscape Urbanism theory in smaller urban environs. Through the analysis of precedents exhibiting Landscape Urbanism strategies, the careful inventory of characteristics unique to specific sites along the historic channel, and synthesizing the Friends of the River goals and objectives, applicable strategies that influence design methodology by engaging key urban systems are found and applied. The design of these sites act to “catalyze” adjacent areas through connectivity and enhancing the cultural, environmental, and economic health of the district. Design implementation at a strategic site catalyzes immediately adjacent districts, followed by the catalysis of the entire channel. In its final state, the historic channel becomes re-integrated into the City of Salina as a vital system, engaging and enhancing the urban field as a whole.

L’ « urbanisme paysager » fait référence à une « vieille » pratique de projet spatial qui accompagne, depuis leurs débuts, l'exercice de la planification urbaine et l’art des plans de ville en France. Elle retrouve aujourd'hui une raison d'être dans un contexte de passage d'une planification urbaine à une planification dite « territoriale », entre ville et campagne, où l’urbanisme ne peut plus seulement se concevoir comme une série d’actes techniques, mais doit s’accompagner d’une pédagogie pour transmettre et partager la prise en charge de ses objectifs environnementaux avec les acteurs socio-économiques locaux. En Italie, les chercheurs de l’école territorialiste proposent une approche de projet territorial susceptible de renouveler les savoir-faire de l’urbanisme paysager face aux nouveaux défis posés dans le contexte français. Sur la base d'une analyse réflexive d'expériences pratiques construites entre recherche, action et enseignement, cette thèse a pour objectif d’éclairer l’apport territorialiste à l’urbanisme paysager. / “L’urbanisme paysager” is a French design practice which accompanies urban planning since its inception. In context of transition from urban planning to territorial planning, this practice finds its significance while urbanism today can't be thought as a series of technical acts but could be included as a pedagogy intended to share its goals and their management with socioeconomics actors. However, this practice proven thought the exercise of urban project should be reassessed on the new basis of a territorial project. In Italy, the researchers of the “Territorialist School” develop a territorial project method which mays renew the pedagogical know-how of “urbanisme paysager”. The thesis aims to enlighten the territorialists. The thesis aims to enlighten the territorialist contribution to the French “urbanisme paysager”.

Emerging trends in the re-inhabitation of central cities and government funding of numerous financial incentives have succeeded in making brownfield redevelopment a far more lucrative opportunity for developers over the past decade. However, the redevelopment process itself remains virtually unchanged, maintaining a narrow focus on environmental remediation, site engineering, and short-term market demand. Land use, instead of design, drives the entire process. This approach fails to sustain development and recognize larger redevelopment opportunities based on local and regional context. Despite an increasing amount of public money used to fund incentives, development continues to overlook potential positive externalities presumably to avert risk and increase feasibility. The purpose of this thesis is to re-examine brownfield redevelopment from the perspective of urban design in order to define ways in which design might offer solutions to these shortcomings and play a more critical role in future redevelopments. Using case studies of past redevelopments of former auto plant sites, Landscape Urbanism in brownfield redevelopment, and design proposals for auto plant sites from the GM and Ford closings of 2005-2006, the thesis investigates three primary questions. First, what is the conventional brownfield redevelopment process, to what extent has urban design been involved, and what are the major issues and lessons that can be learned? Secondly, what examples of brownfield redevelopment have integrated urban design to addresses these issues and what are the specific principles that inform design? Finally, how can urban design strategies, based on principles of Landscape Urbanism, lead the redevelopment of brownfield sites?

Everyone wants to live in a healthy environment, an idea that has always been closely associated with the healthy landscape. Pretoria CBD is no longer a place that offers such a landscape; it is congested, fragmented and placeless. People move far and wide to get away from its hostile environments, chasing after the high gloss images of nature displayed on the billboards and posters of suburbia. They race to find a patch of land within the security complexes and estates of the east, all the while being savagely pursued by the evils of urban sprawl and decentralization. Surely there must be a way of addressing mans need and desire for landscape without perpetuating urban problems and destroying the very nature they strive for? In order to ensure a sustainable future for Pretoria needs to investigate new ways to deal with the urban problems of sprawl and decay. This thesis explores the potential of using landscape as the basis with which one can reorder and reconstruct the urban form in a way that will offer people the ideals they search within a sustainable urban environment. The investigation starts at a regional scale in order to holistically address urban issues and identify opportunities and then works its way across a range of scales down to detail design and place making. It looks new methods of constructing contemporary landscapes not by mere superimposition but by working with the current and historic urban fabric as well as the social, historical and environmental processes that have shaped it over time. It looks to the far from idyllic, yet brutally honest, post-industrial landscape of Pretoria West to construct hybrid landscapes. Arguing that if one were to genuinely offer people a healthy landscape, one they can experience and relate to, the might actually want to live in the city, in return awakening spontaneous urban renewal. / Dissertation (ML(Prof))--University of Pretoria, 2011. / Architecture / unrestricted

This diploma thesis is focused on the urban design of the selected area in the village Strachotín and the architectural design of the building in the given locality. The aim of the proposal is to connect the building with regard to the surrounding landscape and to make the locality more attractive to tourists around the northern shore of Nové Mlýny reservoirs. The design concept is based on the modular arrangement of the individual parts of the object. Functional layout is represented by a hotel, wellness, restaurant and cosmetics production.

Applying complex ecosystems theory, this thesis maps and analyzes the codependency of ecological and manufacturing flows affecting cities, the landscape, and the environment. Learning from this analysis, a prototype for a hybrid eco-manufacturing and urban park is proposed on degraded industrial lands. Its design is influenced by eco-industrial parks including Kalundborg and contemporary urban parks including La Villette, Downsview, and Fresh Kills. The prototype’s design is motivated by the mutating spatiality caused by contemporary trends in North American manufacturing and the degrading environmental state of the Great Lakes. The horizontal expansion of post-Fordist industrial areas on the urban periphery of North American cities has helped lead decentralization of core urban areas. This organization is becoming vulnerable to future energy and environmental concerns. In Hamilton, this trend has resulted in approximately 3,400 acres of underutilized contaminated land in its historical bayfront industrial areas. The hybrid park prototype will incubate reuse of a 576 acre site within this land by creating a network of eco-operations and public spaces. As part of North America’s Great Lakes, Hamilton Harbour drains into the head of Lake Ontario. The Port of Hamilton’s manufacturing activity strains the ecological systems of these lakes. Some of the most problematic discharge into Hamilton Harbour occurs at Windermere Basin. The basin is surrounded by a twilight industrial area that contaminates its water, soil, and air. This will be the location of the hybrid park prototype. Light manufacturing spaces that treat industrial contamination will be designed. Their organization will hypothesize a new form of urbanization based on environmentally benign uses of energy and materials.

This thesis is set in St. Catharines Ontario, a mid-sized city of 132,000 people, situated in the heart of the Niagara Region. Once a thriving manufacturing centre, St. Catharines has experienced two decades of traumatic economic contraction due to the collapse of the local automotive industry. Like other cities that have experienced the loss of their predominant industry, St. Catharines is struggling not only with unemployment, economic uncertainty and environmental degradation, but also with issues concerning the city’s very identity. As industrial activity played a critical role in shaping the form and character of the city, its steady disappearance has left both a functional and symbolic void in the community. The challenges associated with deindustrialization and decentralized urbanization have had a devastating impact on St. Catharines. The city’s historic core has not only lost its role as the symbolic centre of the community, unrelenting suburban expansion has also led to the destruction of some of Canada’s most productive agricultural terrain in the surrounding vicinity. This thesis argues that the current economic crisis offers a unique opportunity to radically reconsider St. Catharines’ urban environment. The thesis looks to the earth – the terroir – as the basis for the development of a robust vision to transform the city’s underappreciated historic core into a hub for the Niagara Region’s expanding wine industry. Essential to this vision is the extensive cultivation of urban vineyards and the planning of key pieces of urban armature around which future development will occur. The design aims to improve the overall quality-of-life offered in St. Catharines, and build a broader sense of community by enhancing the unique experience of the place and engaging citizens in the local wine enterprise.