Introduction: Indelible Social Marks Recent decades have seen a burgeoning of innovation in landscape architecture. Designers have explored material possibilities, from reused site materials at the low end to technologically sophisticated components at the high end. Hybrid projects have synthesized multiple disciplines, including architecture and art, engineering and ecology. Designers have expanded their vocabulary of forms, translating practices from different fields into landscape process and pattern. And there have been new design processes, including new modes of community-based design, self-funding projects, and projects that generate their own materials over time. In no small part, these innovations arise from opportunities inherent in the kinds of sites landscape architects are being asked to design on and for. This book provides a framework for understanding and critiquing contemporary landscape practice, a framework based in the material, ecological, and social sites of projects, and in the tactics designers use when defining and expressing those sites. Some of the changing context of landscape architectural design is internal to the profession, as designers increasingly explore material processes, seek a theoretical basis internal to the discipline, embrace a landscape praxis of (in the words of Paulo Freire) "reflection and action upon the world in order to transform it," and engage the challenges and opportunities of complex, multidisciplinary projects. But much of the changed context is external to the profession, as social, economic, and climatic conditions, values, and perceptions shift. Many factors are currently influencing design: urban growth in some regions (more than half the world's population lived in an urban center in 2008, for the first time in human history) and urban decay in others (Detroit being a notable example), population growth that is stressing natural resources, and the global reorganization of industry. These forces have left urban sites open for redevelopment at a time when cities are demanding parks, streets, and plazas that perform environmental and ecological as well as social functions. At the same time, undeniable changes in global weather patterns have led to an increased demand for landscapes that are resilient in the face of storms, flooding, or drought. Urban populations have demanded new forms of open space and new connections to natural amenities. At the same time, changes in infrastructure and industry have opened new types of sites for parks and other open space. Industry has largely left our downtowns; residents have demanded that roads and rail lines connect instead of divide cities, or even serve as amenities; environmental function has become a priority; and city residents are calling for local food options. These factors have led to the rediscovery and reinvention of urban sites as complex hybrids that perform ecological, social, and economic functions. Landscape architectural scholars and practitioners have grappled with explaining and responding to this shifting context and its resultant designs. In recent decades, we have seen a slew of urbanisms--new, landscape, infrastructural, ecological, combinatory, weak, opportunistic, deep, tactical. We have also seen more broadly defined design theories--post-Fordist, postindustrial, postmodern. This semantic difficulty highlights how significantly the context of design has shifted in recent years, and how landscape theory has yet to catch up to the dynamic and thrilling innovations in practice. Yet many of the innovative tactics that landscape architects are employing hearken back to the roots of the profession and to deeply placeful design. The anonymous development of cities such as Venice and New Orleans took advantage of the ecological and systemic site. Venice sits at the confluence of riparian and marine systems; historically, the interwoven stream channels were used as transportation and sewage infrastructure, and sites for collecting potable rainwater were an urban design tactic, generating neighborhood piazzas where residents met daily. Similarly, New Orleans sits at the meeting point of two key transportation infrastructures: the Mississippi River and the Gulf of Mexico. The historic long lots of the city provided each landowner with transportation connections and an ecological transect of the region, from raised river to sunken bayou. This mode of design continued through the nineteenth century, with the technological and infrastructural designs of Alphand and Olmsted. Our contemporary infrastructure projects use similar creativity with different technology. Every work of landscape architecture simultaneously is somewhere and is about something. Landscape architects define these two sites--the physical and the discursive--in their design process. After a century of increased specialization, landscape architects are returning to the site itself as a source of material, technological, and infrastructural innovation. Elizabeth Meyer has said, "Defining the site is a creative act, undertaken by an architect or landscape architect during the early process of design." This book limns the categories of sites that landscape architects are defining for themselves in contemporary practice. It examines the role that new sites--both physical and conceptual--have in design innovation. Infrastructure, postindustrial sites, vegetated architecture, urban ecology, and urban agriculture have each been discussed individually and extensively as movements in the profession or society, but not as expressions of a common situation. This book provides a critical and theoretical framework for understanding these recent trends in landscape architecture as branch expressions from a common root. The book is structured by sites and tactics. The five categories of sites explored here are renewed areas of exploration for landscape architects and divide into physical and conceptual sites. Infrastructure, postindustrial sites, and vegetated buildings are all actual places--physical forms or histories of sites. Agriculture is a conceptual site: while agricultural practices certainly have physical forms, patterns, and alignments, agriculture isn't a physical aspect or pre-occupation of a site per se but instead a way of conceiving a site, of integrating food, soil, and habitat production into design thinking. Ecology is a hybrid--part physical site, part conceptual. The composition, structure, and function of environmental and ecological systems pre-occupy sites, through geomorphology, surficial and subsurficial water movement, and habitat structure, among other systems. But while one cannot ignore the physical nature of designing on infrastructure, on a factory site, or on a building, ecological structure can be, and often is, ignored. There is, therefore, a conceptual aspect to the ecological site, a need for the designer to want to engage with ecosystem function. With the exception of postindustrial sites, all of these kinds of sites are more a recovery of the synthetic nature of landscape architecture than an ex novo innovation in the field. Ecology pertains to first nature--wild nature, untouched by human activity; agriculture and infrastructure are forms of second nature--human-cultivated land made culturally productive. And vegetated architecture has roots in the hanging gardens of Babylon and the turf houses of medieval Scandinavia. In many ways, the innovation we see is a return to sources, a recovery of the processes of landscapes themselves, and a reinvestigation of the depth of sites--both physically and culturally. By peeling up and digging down, designers are recovering the thick agency of landscapes. The projects--twenty-five designs in twelve countries--were selected to represent the breadth of tactics used in perceiving, critiquing, and designing with the opportunities and constraints that the five categories of sites provide. Many of the projects that follow exploit more than one kind of site in their designs. Queens Plaza, for instance, engages both infrastructure and ecology; Péage Sauvage explores both ecology and postindustrial conditions. And a sixth, invisible kind of site flows through the book: the material site. Nearly all of the projects that follow explore the production, disposal, and reuse of materials as an aspect of their design. Materials are reused on-site, as in the concrete at Queens Plaza and the asphalt at the Kroc Center. They are used site-to-site, with demolition and reclamation materials both imported, at Northala Fields, or exported, at Jaffa Landfill Park. At the Marco Polo Airport car park, trees are moved and removed in a movable nursery, with time--that primary material of landscape architecture--conceived as a resource. The projects within each chapter were selected to provide an overlapping view of the kind of site being analyzed. Some of the projects are very well known, others are more obscure; together they provide a robust range of design responses to and interventions into that kind of site. Because this book explores the precondition of the site as a design generator, each project is described through its site history. The narratives describe the projects as interventions into already existing sets of physical, material, ecological, and cultural processes. While many of the innovations are in the designs, for several projects the innovations are in the process of design (Beacon Food Forest, Prinzessinnengarten) or construction (Northala Fields), or in the growth and mutability of the project after construction (Marco Polo Airport car park). Art critic Miwon Kwon has argued that digging into sites, metaphorically, conceptually, allows us to connect to places with "relational specificity." She says, "Only those cultural practices that have this relational sensibility can turn local encounters into long-term commitments and transform passing intimacies into indelible, unretractable social marks." The projects presented here are indicative of that trend in landscape architecture, a movement away from passing intimacies, quick engagements with distant sites, and toward local, specific, contingent, and enduring designs--indelible social marks. Excerpted from Landscapes of Change: Innovative Designs and Reinvented Sites by Roxi Thoren All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
