80
81
The coupling of urbanism with landscape as
an Institute and even as a new way to work
– be it landscape urbanism, ecological urban-
ism, infrastructural urbanism, or any of the
other -isms in the rich multitude of urban-
isms responding to the wide variety of urban
and environmental issues – widens the dis-
course and frame for debate in the 21st cen-
tury. At the same time, it importantly draws
upon the legacies of urbanism and landscape
themselves. Ever since the twin processes of
industrialisation and urbanisation took hold
in the 19th century, urbanists have been strug-
gling to include nature in the city and landscape
architects have envisioned long-lasting ecolog-
ical infrastructures to order growth of urban
metropoli. Consequently, there has been no lack
of concepts and models that have attempted to
restore or re-establish nature/city relations and
scale urban environments in such a way that
(co)presence, or at least nearness, of nature is
guaranteed. Yet, it could be said that the era of
the proliferation of garden cities, green belts,
green fingers, green corridors, park systems,
parkways and so forth was a meager conces-
sion for the much larger operation of massive
and expansive erasure of nature by urbani-
sation [De Meulder and Shannon 2010]. To-
day, the sustainability industry has produced
a never-ending discourse, advocated eternal
monitoring practices and formulated lists of
voluntary goals, targets and criteria – some
more theoretical, others more hypothetical –
but in the end, it is through plans and concrete
realisations that these sustainable (or not so
sustainable) strategies are translated into meas-
ures that can actually be implemented.
Over the past decades, the green agenda has
created legitimacy through a number of con-
vincing and innovative precedents that span
the globe. Newer on the horizon for design is
the enormous challenge of addressing climate
change. Although the climate change alarm
has been sounded by scientists for decades,
it has only recently become a topic for pub-
lic debate and is slowly receiving response by
the professions of the built environment. The
dynamic nature/culture balance has clearly
been disturbed; as much as man has modified
the environment, nature’s force reveals its
wielding power in return. Devastating hurri-
canes, cyclones, tropical storms, landslides,
tsunamis and floods have heightened aware-
ness of humankind’s transformation of the en-
vironment. From the Gulf Coast’s Hurricane
Katrina in 2005, to the Sundarbans’s Cyclone
Sidr in 2007, to Japan’s Sendai Tsunami to the
floods wreaking havoc in and around Bangkok
in 2011, to Sandy in 2012, the world is coming
to terms with the significant humanitarian,
environmental and financial consequences of
natural disasters that seem to increase in num-
ber and intensity. The failures of engineered
levee systems, the destruction of protective
coastal mangrove forest for aquaculture, the
sheer power and unpredictability of events
AHO WORKS StudieS 2011-2012
Institute of Urbanism and Landscape
Legacy, Opportunity, Responsibility
