WOW! I have seen a lot of debate triggered by this article on New Urbanism versus Landscape Urbanism on many websites the past few days which is very exciting for the dialogue it is sparking. I agree with many who have already said that both are right and both are wrong but neither really has “it”.
We desperately need a paradigm shift in society that values both nature and civilization equally – not one at the expense of the other. And that includes true collaboration with multidiscipline teams that can harness each other’s knowledge to innovate and design our future cities and neighborhoods without posturing or selling out – the typical scenario unfortunately by most teams.
Can we envision a time in the future when everyone from the people who create development codes to developers themselves will value the real integration of ecosystem processes and design processes? Will we ever have a culture that values designing for interconnectedness on all levels of a project? Both camps use major intellectual mumbo jumbo, have projects that marginalize the ecological aspects of their projects, and fail to truly address true sustainability which needs to include social justice and address the damage we are continuing to do to our planet on a daily basis. And, neither camp has built places that represent a vital understanding of what it means to really integrate ecological processes with cultural ones and economic ones in the urban environment.
We need to design our cities and neighborhoods with an understanding of the true essence of a place and to reconnect ourselves with life giving processes if we are to go beyond mere talk of ecology and urbanism. We need to get beyond the trite fights of one camp versus the other and get to a real revolution of new ideas that bridge understanding and lead us to a higher level of design and placemaking not yet seen or valued on this planet.
