In modern times, when Israel was being pioneered by European immigrants, they brought with them an image of the land of their dreams. This image, like the Renaissance paintings of the Holy Land, seemed to be a verdant copy of central Europe. They laboured in the dry heat of the desert, but this image never wavered. They cleared the stones, ploughed the land, planted and watered their newly marked fields, and in many places pushed through a revolution which did begin to approach their dreams. However, there is a natural limitation to dreams: with time, the physical reality of the earth, climate and water in the area in which they laboured led to a new understanding of what is possible, and even of what is desirable in such an area. That deeper understanding is leading to a change, of course, a redefinition of the vision of an “ideal” landscape for lsrael.
Many countries in arid and semi-arid climates are now facing the harsh reality of burgeoning populations that place enormous stress on the environment. The ability of technology to meet every need still has its limits, however. There may be plenty of light and stone, and one day a technological solution that will provide unlimited power and water to people in arid lands may well appear. But perhaps there is not enough time to develop these remedies before scarcity and habitat destruction result in even more serious problems. It is currently debatable which is growing faster, our needs or our capabilities. An imbalance between these two things might bring about severe social and political struggle.
One of the things that I have been deeply involved in over the past few years is the promotion of craftivism, which is the point where crafts and activism meet. By taking two seemingly disparate words that are negatively stereotyped in their own ways (craft can be seen as dull or old-fashioned, activism as violent or radical) and combining them to create a new word, craftivism strikes out into new territory. In 2003, I started using the term after a friend came up with it during a knitting circle. I soon discovered that others had also come up with the concept,pointing to a shared frustration about issues like consumerism, materialism, anti-green living, a lack of personal expression, and overconsumption. (…) Theorist Nicole Burisch sees craftivism as ‘emerging out of the renewed interest in social justice/activist issues that came in response to global trade issues/ antiglobalization politics of the early 2000s (and increased media attention for the WTO protests in Seattle, take-back-the streets parties, etc., at that time). Alongside those, it seems there was a lot of interest in using alternative strategies for protest and action: often those that employ a degree of humour, accessibility and play (costuming, street theatre, raging grannies, radical cheerleaders, etc.). (…) Knit to express the need for change by knitting a protest banner to hang, share or wear; have a knit-in at a protest; share your cultural/political feelings in a piece you create; or talk to other people in your community about using their creative gifts toward the greater good.
Hypernature: the recognition of art The recognition of art is fundamental to, and a precondition of landscape design. This is not a new idea; nineteenth-century landscape design theorists J.C. Loudon, A.J. Downing and Frederick Law Olmsted advocated as much when making the case for the inclusion of landscape design or landscape architecture as one of the Fine Arts. More recently, Michael Van Valkenburgh and his partners, Laura Solano and Matthew Urbanksi, expressed their interest in exaggerated, concentrated hypernature – an exaggerated version of constructed nature. Creating hypernature was prompted by pragmatic acknowledgements of the constrictions of building on tough urban sites and the recognition that designed landscapes are usually experienced while distracted, in the course of everyday urban life. Attenuation of forms, densification of elements, juxtaposition of materials, intentional discontinuities, formal incongruities -tactics associated with montage or collage- are deployed for several reasons: to make a courtyard, a park, a campus more capable of appearing, of being noticed, and of performing more robustly, more resiliently. Sustainable landscape design should be form-full, evident and palpable, so that it draws the attention of an urban audience distracted by daily concerns ofwork and family, or the over-stimulation of the digital world. This requires a keen understanding of the medium of landscape, and the deployment of design tactics such as exaggeration, amplification, distillation, condensation, juxtaposition, or transposition/displacement.
The two meanings inherent in the diaphor of landscape are well expressed in the definition of landscape in Dr. Johnson’s classic 1755 dictionary: (1) “A region; the prospect of a country”; (2) “A picture, representing an extent of space, with the various objects in it.” At first glance, it might seem that definition one refers to the object of representation, whereas the second refers to the pictorial representation of that object. But this is not the case. In the second definition, what is represented pictorially is not a region or a country, but first and foremost “space,” the “objects” being secondary to the space. It may seem counterintuitive that an artist is more interested in space than the objects in that space, but the fact is that space itself, as a form of nature, is an important object of artistic representation. When the various objects in a painting representing an extent of space happen to be objects identifiable with those normally found in a region or country, it is easy to think of landscape 2 as being the pictorial representation of landscape 1, and thereby forget the predominant importance of the space being represented. This is especially the case because space does not appear to be as “visible” as the various objects represented, even though it could be argued that all one sees in this sort of painting is space!
Many design critics and theorists, including me, have commented on the shift from spatial to temporal preoccupations in landscape theory and practice since the late 1980’s. More recently, more premiated entries in large parks competitions, from Landshaftpark Duisburg-Nord, to Freshkills, to Downsview Park, have employed design strategies that exploited the temporal qualities of the landscape as a dynamic, performative, open-ended process medium.
A generation ago, humans eluded nuclear annihilation; with luck, we’ll continue to dodge that and other mass terrors. But now we often find ourselves asking whether inadvertently we’ve poisoned or parboiled the planet, ourselves included. We’ve also used and abused water and soil so that there’s a lot less of each, and trampled thousands of species that probably aren’t coming back. Our world, some respected voices warn, could one day degenerate into something resembling a vacant lot, where crows and rats scuttle among weeds, preying on each other. If it comes to that, at what point would things have gone so far that, for all our vaunted superior intelligence, we’re not among the hardy survivors?
The truth is, we don’t know. Any conjecture gets muddled by our obstinate reluctance to accept that the worst might actually occur. We may be undermined by our survival instincts, honed over eons to help us deny, defy, or ignore catastrophic portents lest they paralyze us with fright.
If those instincts dupe us into waiting until it’s too late, that’s bad. If they fortify our resistance in the face of mounting omens, that’s good. More than once, crazy, stubborn hope has inspired creative strokes that snatched people from ruin. So, let us try a creative experiment: Suppose that the worst has happened. Human extinction is a fait accompli. Not by nuclear calamity, asteroid collision, or anything ruinous enough to also wipe out most everything else, leaving whatever remained in some radically altered, reduced state. Nor by some grim eco-scenario in which we agonizingly fade, dragging many more species with us in the process.
Instead, picture a world from which we all suddenly vanished. Tomorrow.
Some Korean environmental associations have criticized the operation for its high costs. They condemn it as a purely symbolic project, one that will have no real consequences inaffecting the environmental health of the city. It is true that the orientation of the people promoting the plan was not towards ecological recovery. What has been created is not the re-naturalisation of an existing water course; nor is it appropriate to speak of a historical restoration, because the original character of the site was irremediably lost long ago: old Seoul was a city of little wooden houses, while the modern capital is a forest of skyscrapers.
To understand the entire operation, it is more useful to look elsewhere.
The colourful and fairly informative website devoted by the Seoul Metropolitan Government to the Cheonggyecheon Project, opens with the slogan: “With the restoration of the Cheonggyecheon, Seoul will change, and Korea will change”. What does it mean? In which sense is this project seen as an operation capable of bringing dramatic renewal not only to the capital city of the Republic of South Korea but also to the whole nation? That slogan emphasizes that the project is derived from a radical action – the destruction of an urban highway – which is considered as the first stage of the great change for the city of Seoul. One association might be the fall of the Berlin Wall; pieces of the dismantled highway are sold as souvenirs, just like fragments of the Wall in the capital of Germany. They are tangible signs of an epochal event, which justifies the level of self-celebration in the whole intervention.
A little further in the abovementioned website, the goals of the project are clearly laid out: according to a scheme dated 2002 – i.e., before it was implemented – the Cheonggyecheon project was to foster the “development of Seoul’s capital identity”, the “building-up of a new paradigm in city management” and the “enhancement of Seoul’s industrial competitiveness”. The objectives listed in the scheme sound like marketing goals: reconstruction of the Cheonggyecheon might be seen as an operation in ‘branding’. According to the Oxford Dictionary, branding is that technique organized for the ‘promotion of a particular product or company by means of advertising and distinctive design’. The product, in our case, is the metropolis of Seoul. (…)
One of the main aims connected with the Cheonggyecheon river and urban park was linked to the idea that it would foster massive potential for economic regeneration and city development. Another goal of the Seoul city administration with this project was to create a recognisable and powerful landmark, a distinct symbol to represent the city of Seoul – and, by implication, South Korea as a whole – with its own unique identity to the entire world. The reconstruction of Cheonggyecheon, through which the city is promoting a specific identity for a downtown area otherwise indistinguishable from that of so many modern Asian cities, is a feat of territorial branding. This is a new frontier for landscape architecture.
Large Parks on disturbed sites should be recognized as landscapes of consumption as well as production. It is tempting for designers of large parks built on abandoned industrial sites to heroicize the buildings and machines that remain. Such strategies, however, privilege the histories of production over the histories of consumption that are also embedded in such sites. This allows visitors to distance themselves from the histories of human, material, and chemical flows on and off the site, and to limit their own culpability in and responsability for such histories.(…)
Toxic discourse is an expression of a collectivity of consumer-citizens who perceive their environment through the lens of uncertainty and risk. Disturbed sites are byproducts of economic policies that viewed nature as a resource and that accepted environmental degradation as the inevitable consequence of technological progress. The experience of designed landscapes on and in disturbed sites can render visible the consequences of the economic, political, and social decisions that led to those risks.
Many landscape architects understand their task in parallel fashion. They manipulate landscape forms to induce ordered spatial and visual experiences of significance. For them, this process is an assumed aspect of their profession, and manipulation of the eye is taken for granted. Yet landscapes are often regarded by both scholars and the general public as transparent or even “invisible.”The designed landscape seems common enough to go virtually unnoticed in everyday life. For example, on a typical architect’s plan drawing, the buildings are figural while the landscape is “ground”; the architecture emerges as solid, material, and substantive, while landscape, if it appears as anything other than a white void, seems soft, formless.
Our tendency to regard landscape as neutral ground may be enhanced through architectural means to make the viewer adopt a preferred view. The result is what might be called “spaces of constructed visibility,” in which forms are masked or revealed so as to render “things seeable in a specific way.” If design can enhance vision, it can also hinder it, making spaces of constructed invisibility. In the Islamic world, such invisibility historically maintained the divide between the sexes and between public and private space. In antebellum America, rows of trees separated the plantation manor from the slave quarters, hiding from view slaves whose sweat and toil produced the wealth that supported the owners.
If landscape is less frequently noticed and harder to discern than architecture, it is by that very fact more persuasive. Landscape is “always already there” and thus seems not to have been created but simply to be, not a constructed form but rather a preexisting or even primordial one. It appears above all “natural” because it is composed of plants, soil, geological formations, sunlight, and water and because it seems to exist in the absence of human management or design. Even human interventions such as topographical leveling, deforestation, and drainage appear natural when landscape and nature are thus conflated. From an analytical perspective, this associationis deeply problematic. Hiding human agency naturalizes cultural processes that areby no means spontaneous or innate. Even more importantly, ideologies and social constructs are rendered invisible, or at the very least, made to appear equally inherent. Scholars of the English landscape and its textual and visual representations have demonstrated that the rural and garden scenery of the eighteenth century masked the political, economic, and social hegemony of an elite landed class. With verdant rolling hills, shade trees, serpentine waterways, and distant vistas, the so-called picturesque landscape gave the appearance par excellence of a benign Arcadia, justly given in disproportionate amounts to a powerful landed minority. The distribution thus seemed morally right, an inherent characteristic of the land itself, ordained by heavenly powers. The frequent presumption that landscapes are God-given and natural has led with equal frequency to the notion that what we believe we see in the landscape must be so. When one combines this premise with scientific assumptions the physiology of vision (“seeing is believing”), it becomes easy to imagine nature, landscape, and vision as a powerful trio for conveying ideology.
Herein lies one of the perplexing ironies of landscape: it is regarded as natural and eternally present, and yet it is also ignored as if it did not matter. How then can the study of landscape and vision illuminate cultural discourses that are essentially spatial, yet normalized to the point of invisibility? How does one study such an elusive, unstable object? One strategy entails focusing on mechanisms that are not easily seen, such as the frame, the controlling perspective, illusionism, the lens or screen through which we are induced to look, and the wall or landform that intentionally conceals. Spatially determined, vision can support the construction of “difference” through what is revealed and what remains concealed- marking class, race, and gender. What we see, and the manner in which the built world directs our gaze, contributes to our daily instruction about insiders and outsiders, privilege and denial, domination, submission, and, in some cases, resistance.
Landscape urbanism is often heralded as the saviour of the built professions, as the new –ism with concerns that are congruent with the politically correct, ecological biases and priorities of the developed, Western world. Much of the contemporary discourse on landscape urbanism – and the projects aligned with this emerging field – focus upon the challenges posed by post-industrial urban voids. The recovery of brownfield sites and the reintroduction of natural processes and habitats are key issues linked to landscape urbanism. At the same time, it is arguable that such projects are more landscape architecture – as opposed to landscape urbanism. Often, the urbanism component is lacking.
This paper will develop an argument that landscape urbanism – understood as structuring landscapes to guide their occupation, use and urbanization – is not new, but has indeed been in practice for several millennia. It argues that there is an ancient, indigenous landscape urbanism whereby an integral system of urbanization is tied to the logics of landscapes. More specifically, it investigates territories structured by water resource management and the relationship of such landscapes to urbanization.
landscape theory 
