Green building: Are cities the best place to live? Are suburbs OK? A fight grows in urban planning, with Harvard at the center
January 31, 2011
A little over two months ago, some two dozen influential architects, urban planners, and academics from around the country gathered at a New Orleans cottage to spend a long weekend discussing strategy. The house belonged to 61-year-old Andres Duany, a leader in the movement known as New Urbanism, which originated in the late 1970s and has enjoyed decades as the dominant force in American city planning, urging Americans to reject suburban subdivisions in favor of denser, more diverse neighborhoods
The purpose of the summit was to talk about an enemy. A rival faction of urban theorists had begun to publicly challenge them, and declare their approach to city-making obsolete. Calling themselves landscape urbanists, these upstarts were promoting themselves as environmentally conscious, ecologically sophisticated, and uniquely suited to bring sustainability to America’s suburbs. Instead of talking about buildings, street grids, and parks, they spoke seductively about “living processes,” “flows,” and the importance of respecting “ecological infrastructure.” Their ideas were being embraced in the architecture world as radical and new. Most disconcertingly, they were rising to power at one of the most influential architecture academies in the country: the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University.
At one point during the huddle in New Orleans, Duany projected a video onto the dining room wall of a lecture delivered by Charles Waldheim, the intensely confident, spiky-haired leader of the landscape urbanism movement. Waldheim, 47 years old, had recently been appointed chair of Harvard’s landscape architecture department and was now filling it with his allies. The video, in which Waldheim, dressed in all black, spoke to students at the University of North Carolina, played for just over an hour.
“We criticized it and called out all the contradictions, and we laughed and we made fun of him,” Duany recalled by phone recently. “And then when we were done, I said, ‘OK, but is there one kid in that room who isn’t leaving a convert?’ ”
At the heart of the landscape urbanist agenda is the notion that the most important part of city planning is not the arrangement of buildings, but the natural landscape upon which those buildings stand. Proponents envision weaving nature and city together into a new hybrid that functions like a living ecosystem. And instead of pushing people closer together in service of achieving density, as New Urbanism advocates, landscape urbanism allows for the possibility of an environmentally friendly future that includes spacious suburbs, and doesn’t demand that Americans stop driving their convenient cars. Americans have decided how they want to live, they argue, and the job of urban designers is to intelligently accommodate them while finding ways to protect the environment.
The movement has rapidly been gaining traction: Its proponents are ascending to prominent positions at architecture schools, its practitioners have won significant commissions around the world, and respected publications like ArchitectureBoston and the European journal Topos have recently devoted nearly entire issues to their ideas. MIT has launched a program called Landscape+Urbanism; Northeastern University will soon offer an undergraduate degree in urban landscape. “This whole thing is hot stuff at the moment,” said Phyllis Andersen, a landscape historian at the Landscape Institute of the Boston Architectural College…
