Landscape Ecological Urbanism: Origins and Trajectories

Abstract

City design and planning are especially important in what has been called the “first urban century,” with a majority of people on the planet living in cityregions for the first time in history. Since the mid-1990s, two ideas emerged with implications for how we design and plan cities in the twenty-first century: landscape urbanism and urban ecology. Landscape urbanism evolved from design theory within both architecture and landscape architecture. It melds highstyle design and ecology. More traditional ecological design is perceived as messier (some detractors call ecological design practitioners ‘weedies’) and, as a result, less appealing to international design elites. Thus far, landscape urbanism is largely theoretical, with a few, highly visible actual projects.