Urbanism as a Necessity

You, with a few of your peers, have been at the forefront of rethinking and re-defining the way we understand and engage with infrastructure and its nexus with landscape and civic space. What does ‘Infrastructure’ mean to you?
In its broadest meaning, infrastructure comprises the basic physical and organizational structures of society: it is both the seen and the unseen and is constantly evolving. As designers of the built environment, we have the responsibility to actively develop innovative infrastructure that is economically, socio-culturally and environmentally just. Since the agricultural revolution, humanity has been conceiving and building more complex and interwoven infrastructures. Today, in 2017, global society’s fundamental infrastructure is at a tipping point: it is disturbingly divided and environmentally devastated. Myriad crises linked to climate change, deforestation, energy, water and food security are yielding hard lessons in science and ethics while the growing refugee and immigrant emergency demands the immediate and essential rethinking of infrastructure, settlement and territories.

There is a huge conceptual promise of landscape to structure urbanism, whether it concerns the redevelopment of defunct post-industrial sites or the creation of new territories for occupation.
In either case, design strategies need to evolve from a diachronic and synchronic perspective: an understanding of the longue durée of landscapes and geographies, the logics and site-specificity of contexts, its cultural appropriation, social formation and codification of spaces as well as the messiness and contested realities of the everyday. Landscape can structure the interface between culture and nature to the extent of where to build and where not to build and site phenomena, ecological and natural systems can be the generative devices for new forms and programmes.

Civil engineering structures often acquire a civic quality. Infrastructure can be designed to truly merge the technical with civic, economic and ecological performance, while at the same time very urbanely balance order and spontaneity, regularity and messiness, fixity and openness, regulation and freedom.

Across the globe, public authorities view infrastructure, particularly transport infrastructure, as their primary field of investment. In a world where urbanization is increasingly produced by private capital, infrastructure appears as the backbone onto which building initiatives can be grafted. Therefore, infrastructural design emerges as one of the last resorts that allow public authorities to give structure to haphazard settlement and reclaim the discipline of urbanism. 

Accessibility lies at the root of development and the infrastructure needed to secure it determines the quality of the environment, both at the global level (by giving access to places and making them part of the world economy) and at the local level (by enhancing the dwelling quality of the public realm).

You have consistently advocated, through both your projects and writings, a seamless integration of infrastructure, landscape, built form and planning policy. Could you elaborate on the key ideas behind this?
The proverbial bird’s eye view of history, which examines developments in terms of decades, centuries or even millennia, the rise and fall of ancient civilizations and the link between precedent and experimentation provide invaluable lessons to the contemporary world. In the Anthropocene (relating to or denoting the current geological age, viewed as the period during which human activity has been the dominant influence on climate and the environment), humankind is poised as heir to a triumphant age of apparent mastery over nature, yet the very opposite proves true as stratospheric ozone depletion, ocean acidification and more frequent and severe environmental disasters evince. As social and environmental activist Naomi Klein argues, the myths of international policy, money and innovative technology as saviors must be debunked. Technological progress and economic growth are not inevitable. As humanity is transformed, dependence on nature has been progressively minimalized and simultaneously de-symbolized. We are becoming more aware that consequences can be catastrophic.

The work of the built environment must become a necessity, not a luxury. At the same time, architecture, landscape architecture, civil engineering, urban planning and policy must be integrated in order to go beyond one-off pioneering, ad-hoc projects and become part of an alternative worldview to rival the one at the heart of the ecological crisis. In the Anthropocene, it is understood that man has modified the entirety of the earth’s surface; it has been urbanized to some degree. Urbanism is the unifier of the disciples; it connects the built and the natural environment through context-specificity. Urbanism (the word appearing in France as urbanism in 1910), the undisciplined discipline, according to French historian Daniel Pinson, is both the science of the city, with the challenge of addressing knowledge as an object, and the act of intervening in the city, with the challenge of addressing knowledge as a project. The contemporary environment is a litmus test of so-called progress; social and environmental disturbances should rattle our collective conscience to its very core. The disturbances are a high-volume distress call. Urbanists need to be first responders. Urbanism needs to challenge business as usual and be the game changer.

Much of your professional work deals with a very large scale and scope, like looking at entire regions that go far beyond even an individual city. What are some of the challenges you face, both in its design and its potential implementation?
The scale of the territory, particularly as afforded by aerial photography, reveals an uncensored view of the intensification of human activities: farming, resource extraction, forestry and settlements. It is inextricably linked to landscape. Design at the territorial scale emphasizes the structure of systems: landscape mosaics, ecological processes and infrastructure and settlement morphologies. At this territorial scale, agro-ecological zones can be recognized and accentuated. 

There is an opportunity to re-wild and re-green the earth, while at the same time develop settlement morphologies/typologies that exist more lightly on the land with less detrimental impact on the environment.

Nature can be reclaimed and artificial nature can temper urbanization and infrastructure. Re-structuring of the territory with contextually embedded manipulation of topography, hydrology and vegetation enables green-blue structures to define urbanism. In other words, the structuring of the landscape can be the foundation for a new regional and urban form.

However, the shift to implementation remains problematic. Firstly, every territory has deep-running contestations, primarily between economy and ecology. Multiple users and interests act within territories in the pursuit of particular interests: mega- and minor-players, multi-nationals, non-governmental organizations and inhabitants all compete on the same playing field. The natural landscape, cultural landscape and productive landscape most often co-exist, but are far from harmonious.

Secondly, territorial and regional urbanism do not have a specific governing mandate in most planning systems throughout the globe. There is, everywhere, a lack of harmonized planning between sectors and locales. There is economic competition amongst states, provinces and cities that often contradict the underlying logic of territories. For territorial urbanism to be effective one must capitalize on a region’s competitive advantages and, more importantly, there must be fundamental belief in the idea of a regional vision.

You are a global practitioner. You have done significant work in Europe, Asia, Africa and Latin America, lived on several continents and worked closely as a consultant to various governments. How has the experience of practice varied in different places? Is doing a project in the Mekong Delta different from, say, Belgium?

Political will and commitment is clearly the most important factor for the practice of urbanism; the level of such political will and commitment varies considerably in different contexts. 

In Europe, the urban project (originating in France) and landscape architecture have been brought to the fore as saviors of the professions of the built environment. And timing of the discourse has had the fortune to coincide with a fundamental shift in politics with tangible repercussions for the profession. Throughout Western Europe, ‘green’ environmental agendas have become mainstream while both popular opinion and political will support a series of robust infrastructural programmes and environmental policies. As a result, the once resistive landscape urbanism practices and the projects they produce have recently benefited from investment in public transport systems (particularly the high-speed train networks) coupled with a deep commitment to the design and construction of the public realm (evidenced in the proliferation of well-designed open spaces and public amenities) as well as a focus on intelligent stewardship of the natural environment. Many once marginal and even radical activists have become established players at the highest level of political life.

There are countless European cities that have qualitatively upgraded the environment and substantially reduced social inequalities through optimizing their rich historical conditions, urban form and institutional thickness of its planning apparatus. Besides, (political) ambitions have framed a set of comprehensive policies, operable strategies and projects in both their urban core and suburban periphery. 

Europe’s urban renewal policies and projects successfully draw on possible futures from its history, in a non-nostalgic manner, backed by pragmatic and comprehensive economic policies and stimuli and in a relatively new shift in planning and design that have been spatially framed by landscape (and infrastructure). 

Urbanists have largely been responsible for not only creating a new territorial imagination and vibrant public realm, but also for intelligently integrating various socio-economic plans into an enviable urban renewal model that crosses scales and disciplines.

In parts of Asia, Africa and Latin America, the determined social engineering of politicians assigns a very different role to the contemporary urbanist. Rapid urban development has coincided with the establishment of new ministries at national scales including the Ministry of Cities in Brazil, the Ministry of Human Settlements in South Africa and climate change experts in all of Vietnam’s line ministries.

The work on the Mekong Delta Region Plan 2030, Vision 2050, is ultimately for the Ministry of Construction (in Hanoi) in Vietnam. The great advantage of a communist government is that, once they become convinced of projects, they have significant power to get the job done. The country’s tradition of urbanism has been founded upon an unequivocal belief in planning and a certain power to impose radical spatial configurations on the territory beginning from the country’s first organized development of irrigation systems and spanning the present-day practice of forming new industrial zones and export processing zones on productive paddy land. Work in Belgium, on the other hand, must demonstrate a city/nature balance with strategies with a greater number of recognized stakeholders, more contestations and formalized negotiations.

You are a widely recognized figure in the field of Landscape Urbanism. How would you define and describe the significance of Landscape Urbanism to the common man? How and why did it come about? Why is it important? What gaps does it fill?
To a certain degree, landscape urbanism is not very new and has at least two millennia of history. One is grounded in an intelligence borne of necessity that led ancient civilizations to seek a balance in creating their settlement structures with, by and through the (constructed) landscape. Another stems from the history of both landscape architecture and urbanism. 

The main contribution of the contemporary landscape urbanism discourse has been the widening of the frame of urbanism (with which every adjective precedes or follows it: landscape urbanism, ecological urbanism, infrastructural urbanism, etc.). The simple fact that there is once again a blurring of disciplinary boundaries and the fact that it is in vogue to be studying the territory, reconfiguring the city/nature relationship is significant.

The ‘dynamic’ rhetoric of landscape means that its design is somehow ever changing, temporal and indeterminate. This marks a paradigm shift in urbanism (typically understood as urban planning/master planning, when everything was decided and ‘planned’, or when the illusion was that everything could be planned). Yet, interestingly and importantly, landscapes can also be understood to be in a continual state of slow, predictable evolution. To a certain degree, nature is reliable, a source of continuity, which is able to adapt to different imposed (and temporary) realities. Indeed, landscapes exist as tensions between the dynamic/stable and permanent/impermanent.

Clearly, globalization and modernization are unstoppable and are transforming the built environment. Landscape urbanism, in all its guises, can be seen as a new paradigm to spatially, socially, culturally and ecologically correct the omnipotent forces of world capitalism: with the fundamental mission to protect and enlarge the public realm.

You are heading the Graduate Program of Landscape Architecture + Urbanism at the University of Southern California (USC). You’ve taught all over the world, from Harvard’s GSD to The University of Leuven to Peking University to the Oslo School of Architecture and Design. Your research and writing engage numerous contexts from Estonia to Vietnam to Morocco. As an educator, how do you see research and pedagogy as keys to greater trans-national dialogue?
As Yuval Harari describes in Sapiens, the modern world is in the process of relentlessly moving towards unity, through its merchants, conquerors and prophets, with their markets, empires and religions. Technology has afforded tools for the instantaneous spread of worldwide events, traveling to once remote territories and leading to democratized learning. Students understand that the world is their laboratory and learning is, by default, becoming more and more cross-cultural. In teaching the professions of the built environment, it is increasingly important to emphasize vigorous design research and critical thinking. This is more and more difficult as there is pressure for designers to orient their product towards the market. Projects that students look to as examples are increasingly dislocated from specific geographies and everyday realities, based instead on sellable images and performance metrics.

Design research is an opportunity to transform everyday reality into something more than what it already is, to positively requalify the territory. 

Design itself is an experimental field of knowledge production and design research is strategic, shared and part of a larger cumulative process. It is the way to go beyond the screen, information overload and performance-driven technical sameness and back to what makes territories, landscapes and geographies specific and unique. At the same time, design research need not be perceived as problem solving per se, but as questioning, reformulating problems, forming insights, staging scenarios and spatially intervening to simultaneously accept global forces while producing local values.

Finally, you are an activist, a provocateur. You are constantly engaged in initiating workshops, instigating discussions, planning conferences, bringing people together for greater causes. Are there lines that separate practice, pedagogy and activism, or are they three components of the same thing?
Discussion and debate, interdisciplinary exchange over our most pressing contemporary challenges is as essential as is the fact that professions of the built environment must become a necessity, not a luxury. Ultimately, the framing of intelligent questions in relation to and not alienated from everyday life is essential. The academic world must be continually confronted with the real world, whether through fieldwork, debates or workshops. In this way, we can make ourselves an essential component of society and reestablish the identity and responsibilities within the profession. So, to answer your question, indeed, practice, teaching and activism are all facets of the same goal: to once again make urbanism a necessity.