1. William H. TeBrake, ‘Taming the Waterwolf: Hydraulic Engineering and Water Managementin the Netherlands during the Middle Ages’ in Technology and Culture, Volume 43, Number 3,July 2002, p. 475.

Prologue: The Water Wolf & Engineered NatureThe water wolf is an allegorical destructive figure in Dutch history, literature and folklore known for the devouring action of wind-driven water on soft shorelines. Throughout time, the water wolf has stalked the land and, according to historian of medieval Europe William TeBrake, by 1300 AD necessitated the building of dikes, dams, sluices and drainage canals for human occupation (until that time, settlement and agricultural use of the lowlands was possible by straightforward and simple drainage techniques1 and by occupying only the higher grounds, not under influence of the sea). The development of hydraulic engineering and water management to perpetuate drainage while protecting against inundation led to the conundrum of engineered nature—a vicious cycle of the occupation of lowlands, subsidence, hydraulic measures for deeper drainage, further subsidence, newer and more effective hydraulic engineering, further subsidence, etc. In 1641, poet Joost van den Vondel penned Aenden Leevw van Hollant (‘to the Lion of Holland’) on the Nieuwe Caerte Provisioneel concept ontwerp ende voorslach dienende tot de bedyckinge vande groote water meeren (From the ‘New Map’ of the ‘Provisional draft plan and proposal for the dyking of the large lakes’, published in 1641. [figure 1] The plate was part of the ‘Haarlemmermeer-boek’ which planned to reclaim

Kelly Shannon

Dancing with the Water Wolf & Choreographing Urban Ecologies

the Haarlemmermeer (Haarlemmer Lake) north of Amsterdam, masterminded by architect, mill builder and hydraulic engineer Jan Adriaanszoon Leeghwater (1575-1650).The land lion versus the water wolf. The tale is emblematic of the thorny relationship of technology and culture in the lowlands. Since the middle ages, civil engineering and the never-ending building of infrastructure is what has enabled the nation to prevail in its enduring struggle between land and sea, to literally create new landscapes and subsequently to continue to urbanize. The contemporary notions of natural/artificial, land/water and landscape/city in The Netherlands are so deeply intertwined they are often impossible to clearly distinguish. The ordering and use of space is inexticably bound to a social-territorial order and the constructed landscape is a result of administrative, socio-cultural and economic processes as much as it is of deliberate design. All the while, the water wolf has been tamed but never vanquished.

Choreographed Urban Ecologies in Five ScenesStrootman Landscape Architects are a rare type of practitioners, particularly one could dare say in The Netherlands. They are evidently deeply entrenched in the long and unavoidable traditions of water management, and engineered nature but, at the same

4. In 1999, Stan Allen wrote of an ‘infrastructural urbanism’ in which he developed seven propositions: infrastructure working to construct the site; infrastructure as flexible and open tochange; infrastructure as a collective endeavor; infrastructure accommodating local contingency while maintaining overall continuity; infrastructure produces field conditions; infrastructures work as artificial ecologies; infrastructure is performative. See Stan Allen Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City. New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 1999 (pp. 54-57). ‘Ecological Urbanism’ was the main title of an Alternative and Sustainable Cities of the Future Conference, 3-5 April 2009 organized at the GSD of Harvard University. The conference was organized around the premise that an ecological approach is urgently needed both as a remedial device for the contemporary city and an organizing principle for new cities.

2. See Charles Waldheim, ‘Landscape as Urbanism’ in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, C. Waldheim (ed.) New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006, pp. 35-53; also Charles Waldheim ‘Introduction: A Reference Mainfesto’, in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, C. Waldheim (ed.) New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006, pp. 15-19.3. Charles Waldheim, ‘Preface’ in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, C. Waldheim (ed.) New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006, p. 11.

time, thrive in poetically narrating sites and precisely choreographing habitats, public space and above all else beauty. The office combines a deep historical reading and interpretation of tangible and intangible sites’ pasts (such as geological conditions and legends) with the creation of rich new cartographies, of new lands, with carefully calibrated geometries and an uncanny degree of ecological precision. The story-telling/ mythology angle and scientific vigor make a potent combination of inputs for design elements. This essay frames a selection of the office’s work through the contemporary lens of landscape/ ecological urbanism. The titles of five ‘scenes’ are encapsulated from essays of The Landscape Urbansim Reader, edited by Charles Waldheim, the architect who coined the term in 1996. Each scene opens with a number of theoretical underpinnings and aspirations of the cross-disciplinary field and is thereafter animated by a project from Strootman Landschapsarchitecten and others by international practitioners.

Scene 1: Landscape as Urbanism2 It must be remembered that Charles Waldheim derived ‘landscape urbanism’ from the North American urban context at the end of the 20th century—an environment of decreased urban densities (and increased suburban environments), post-Fordist and post-industrial

landscapes, convenient accommodation of the automobile and public realms of extensive vegetation. ‘Landscape urbanism describes a disciplinary realignment currently underway in which landscape replaces architecture as the basic building block of contemporary urbanism. For many, across a range of disciplines, landscape has become both the lens through which the contemporary city is represented and the medium through which it is constructed.’ 3

Since the late 1990s, landscape urbanism has clearly captivated the professions of urbanism, landscape architecture and even architecture. Despite the fact that the term has already mutated to infrastructural urbanism or ecological urbanism by a number of proponents4, landscape urbanism persists in Europe and elsewhere as the 21st century savior of the professions of the built environment—when individual disciplines are seemingly incapable of spatially dealing with the pace and uncertainties of socio-political, economic and ecological development challenges of our times. However, like all –isms, landscape urbanism and ecological urbanism are part of epochs (just as were/are modernism, post modernism, deconstructivism, critical regionalism, new urbanism, etc.) that follow a larger Zeitgeist. At the same time, it could be argued that landscape urbanism is a bit different—that it has become a clever marketing ploy, the labeling of a pre-exiting phenomenon rather than being genuinely novel (perhaps like critical regionalism), since,

Aenden Leevw van HollantUyt-heemse vyanden te sitten inde veerenTe slingeren den staart Grootmoedich over Zee,Is Ydel, als uw longh geslagen aen het Teeren,Inwendich vast vergaet en gy met herte weeSoo deerlyck Sucht en Kucht en Loost by Heele BrockenHet rottende Ingewant te Keel uyt, inde GolffWat Baet het met uw Klauw al t’Oost en West te PlockenNa dien u Byt int Hart dees Wrede Water WolffNu uyt om over u Eerlangh te TriomferenO: lant Leeuw Waeck eens op, en Weck met eenen SchreeuAlt veen de Kennemaers, en Rynlants oude HeerenMet d’Amsterlanders, tot noothulp van hun LeeuwMen Sluyte met een Dyck dit dier, dat u Comt PlagenDe Wintvorst Vlieger met syn Moole wieken toeDe snelle Wintvorst weet den Water Wolff te IagenIn Zee, van waer hy u quam Knabblen nimmer MoeDe Veen Boer sit en wenst dees Water-jacht te SpoeienEn tveen Wyff roept: hy Ruymt de Lant Leeuw weyt op truym,En suyght syn Longh gesont aen d’uiers vande KoeienZoo wint de Lant Leeuw Lant, soo puurt hy Gout uyt Schuym

figure 1. To the Lion of Holland.The poem was part of the ‘New Map’ of the ‘Provisional draft plan and proposal for the diking of the large lakes’, published in1641(©Bijzondere Collecties, Universiteit van Amsterdam)

To the Lion of HollandTo battle with a foreign foe,To nobly swish your tail o’er the sea,’Tis in vain, if your lungs be wasting,Your innards ever failing, as with great labourYou sigh and cough so pitifully to bring upYour rotting guts in lumps.What avails it to plunder East and West with your claw,Now that the Cruel Water Wolf bites you in the heart,Bent on defeating you ere long?O Lion Land, awake, and with a roarArouse all the peat bog dwellers of Kennemerland, the lords of RhinelandAnd the Amsterlanders to succour their Lion.Enclose this perilous beast with a dyke.Let the Lord of the Winds with his fine millsEmpty the Water Wolf into the seaWhence he came to assail you tirelessly.The peat farmer urges on the water huntAnd the peat woman calls: He flees the Land Lion through the open land.The cow’s udder restores ailing lungsAnd land is won for the Lion by spinning gold from foam.

5. Bruno De Meulder, Kelly Shannon, ‘Traditions of Landscape Urbanism’ in 5. Topos #71, 2010, p. 70.6. Adriaan Geuze and Edzo Bindels, Colonizing the Void (Venice Biennale Catalogue), 1996, p. 24.

in fact, landscape urbanism existed long before it was ‘branded’ as such. According to Waldheim, landscape urbanism benefits from the long-standing lineage of regional environmental planning, from Patrick Geddes through Lewis Mumford to Ian McHarg, yet remains distinct from that tradition. However, it could also well be argued that landscape urbanism is not so new at all and has centuries old roots grounded in an intelligence borne of necessity that led civilizations around the globe to seek a balance in creating their settlement structures with, by and through the (constructed) landscape: ‘… collectively they bear witness to a continuum of human effort to productively transform and socio-culturally appropriate nature and the landscape in order to effectively guide their use, occupation and urbanization. In general terms, they inscribed themselves within landscapes where the slightest difference of topography and relation to hydrology was all-important—both pragmatically and symbolically. The built and unbuilt environments worked as an eco-system. Man adapted to the environment, through patient, pragmatic adjustment to circumstances with sophisticated means and logics that worked with nature. Indigenous landscape urbanism created marvelous civilizations—whereby the landscape was the strategic asset for development.’5

It could equally be argued that a number of both landscape architecture and urbanism practices in The Netherlands have been engaged in landscape urbanism

since the onset of the struggle of man’s conquering of the forces of nature. In fact, in his manifesto, ‘Colonizing the Void,’ Dutch landscape architect Adriaan Geuze of West 8 likens colonization (or the creation of land) to the ultimate expression of human culture; man identifies with nature, occupies it and transforms it into landscape. He claims the cultivation of nature is a necessary act of survival, demanding and generating creativity in its opportunity for cultural expansion. At the same time, he recognizes the taboo of contemporary colonization, fuelled by a public debate which focuses on environmental issues and the presumed cultural heritage of the European Arcadian landscape. The statistical needs of contemporary mass culture seem to face the limits of physical expansion. The alps are trampled, the coastlines are drowned and arcadia is absorbed in a sprawl of commercial suburban development. Colonization has become a taboo, forwarding the end of culture.6 Geuze draws on the peculiarity of the Dutch landscape—a 100% artificial space, where each generation adds its own layer of colonization to the existing layer—and reveals how continuous colonization is inevitable. Geuze concludes by proposing a paradoxical condition wherein the void is the guide and source of inspiration for continuing urbanization. He claims that the promise of city planning lies in simultaneously allowing urban congestion and creating

Figure 2

7. See James Corner ‘Terra Fluxus’, in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, C. Waldheim (ed.) New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006, pp. 21-33.

Corner. Corner has written insightfully and intelligently on landscape urbanism, stressing its capacity to embody multiple scales, emphasize process, invent operative strategies for design, remain nested in a larger matrix and field, perhaps most importantly to create projective projects re-inspire the recent past’s ‘bureaucratic and uninspired failings’ of the planning profession.7 A project that is becoming increasing influential is one developed for the 890 hectares Fresh Kills Landfill site of Staten Island, New York. It is emblematic of a huge 21st century reclamation project—where healing the Earth and reconstituted ecologies are to result from an interaction between human, natural and technological systems. Field Operations, Corner’s office, abandoned the idea of a complete and determined design for the site in lieu of an intricate layering of multiple flows in which their clues come from larger territorial modes of production and result in continual change of the large territory. The 50-year working history of the site, its consequential pollution and recovery and reprogramming as a public landscape was the challenge. Fresh Kills opened in 1947 as a temporary landfill; it officially closed in mid-2001 but was reopened months later to receive the ruins of the World Trade Center catastrophe. The four large mounds (25–70m high) of landfill (primarily household waste) leach toxic chemicals and heavy metals into the soil and methane

voids. Excavating urban voids in contrast to urban congestion, providing individual voids for ultimate personal expression and creating large-scale voids that challenge colonization are amongst the design strategies he has tested in various research and built projects. Geuze stresses the fact that voids are the products of social and political forces and that the ‘texture of voids,’ the morphology of the landscape, can become the principle of urbanization. Geuze—with his manifestly Dutch perspective whereby landscape and urbanism are inseparable from civil engineering—aims to direct landscape’s evolution rather than control it. Geuze’s contribution to the landscape urbanism discourse resides in his simultaneous ecological and civil engineering orchestration of large territories where a non-pastoral image of nature prevails and structures development. In an unrealized West 8 project, Buckthorn City (Duindoornstad), Hoek van Holland, the site’s natural silting process is accelerated and consolidated using hydraulic engineering techniques. The existing coastline, canal routes and a large sand dune are the landscape features around which a spill-over town of 400,000 for Rotterdam/ Den Hague is colonized. Urbanization is provoked by a newly defined series of urban ecologies which link new landfill with the existing coastline. Landscape guides the city’s development [figure 2]. Another founding father of landscape urbanism is James

figure 2. Buckthorn City, Hoek van Holland, West8 Urban Design and Landscape Architecture.Created nature guides future urbanization in anear utopian plan along the Dutch coast withboldness and a strong project narrative.(©West 8 Urban Design and LandscapeArchitecture)

figure 3. Fresh Kills Park, Staten Island, FieldOperations.The reclamation is viewed as a reserve of socialand environmental possibilities, all of which canpotentially induce social and ecologicalproductivity to manufacture a new recreationallandscape. (©James Corner Field Operations,courtesy of the City of New York) figure 3

8. See Frits Palmboom, Jaap van den Bout, Jeroen Ruitenbeek, Aaron Betsky, Drawing the Ground – Landscape Urbanism Today: The Work of Palmbout Urban Landscapes, Basel: Birkhäuser, 2010.9. See Linda Pollak, ‘Constructed Ground: Questions of Scale’ in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, C. Waldheim (ed.) New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006, pp. 125-139.10. Ibid, p.127.

lies hidden in the landscape. The project is premised on a pre-investment in the landscape and infrastructure of the shrinking economic condition of North Holland to anticipate eventual new housing development. Strootman’s deep understanding of ecological processes and the management of nature led to the development of a ‘tool-box’ for design, whereby water ecologies of slow gradients and shallow foreshores create ‘soft worlds of reeds’ to mediate land and water, ‘boomerangs of forests’ to hold urban areas, and a 4km bar of lightly-polluted sludge as one of the financial bases of the project (working on the principle of cut-and-fill logics).

Scene 2: Constructed Ground9

According to academic and practitioner Linda Pollak, landscape urbanism’s strength lies in its acknowledgement of temporality (stemming from cultural, historical, ecological and natural processes) and the notion of nested scales of space (as interpreted from Henri Lefebvre). ‘Constructed ground represents a hybrid framework that crosses between architecture, landscape architecture, and urban design, to engage the complexity of contemporary urban landscape. This framework invests in the ground itself as a material for design, using landscape as both a structuring element and a medium for rethinking urban conditions, to produce everyday urban spaces that do not exclude nature.’10

gas into the air. Yet, as part of New York City’s largest drive to create parks since the 1930s, the site is to become a recreational area and undisturbed natural habitat —three times the size of Central Park. The four mounds are to be capped and transformed into different landscapes and the site will host a broad range of activities not typically available in NYC parks [figure 3]. Corner’s designed landscapes are of a ‘precise openness’—where spatial configuration of the landscape is precisely designed, however there remains flexibility in the possible programs that may appropriate the determined form. Field Operations embraces change vis-à-vis strategically framed rules of organization and variables for the recolonization of sites. The Wieringen Passage of Strootman Landschapsarchitecten (together with Palmbout Urban Landscapes) is an exemplary landscape urbanism project and shares affinities with Geuze and Corner’s notions of ‘colonization.’ [figure 4 a, 4b]. In the recent office monograph of Palmbout Urban Landscapes8, the project is categorized in the ‘preparing the landscape’ section, along with other regional scale projects and the introductory essay’s vocabulary includes ‘catalysts for processes of change,’ ‘a robust spatial structure that asserts its authority apart from programmatic uncertainity,’ while exploiting the ‘latent talent’ of the landscape to make use of the ‘temporal dynamic that

figure 4bfigure 4a

figure 4a+4b. Wieringen Passage, StrootmanLandschapsarchitectenIn an iteration of ecological urbanism,‘boomerangs’ of steep and hard-edged forestshold and protect, in concave curve geometry, asofter ecological gradient of reeds, bushes andurban areas. (Image 4b© Palmbout - UrbanLandscapes)

figure 5. Parc de Trapèze, Boulogne, Agence Ter.The floodable park works creates and artificialtopography that makes for a lively public realmand a robust ecology in dry and wet conditions.(©Agence Ter)

11. See Elizabeth Mossup, ‘Landscape of Infrastructure’ in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, C. Waldheim (ed.) New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006, pp. 163-177.

facilities in the Parisian suburb of Boulgne-Billancourt. [figure 5] In both projects, water is the primary medium of design—as an infrastructure for flood control, storm water and as a foil to (sub)urbanization. Its double function as recreational space and as a carefully hydraulically engineered landscape is an intelligent solution to address critical water management issues and provide creatively programmed public space. In the Dutch project, east of Amsterdam, a triangular site contained by the Vecht River, the doubled and newly placed A1 highway and the railway is centered on a newly created 60 hectare lake that is fringed by carefully studied and planned ecologies of woodlands, reedlands and settlement ribbons. In France, a meander of the Seine River has been reframed with a 700 x 90 meter basin that appears as an artificial arm of the river that can serve as an outlet for the waters as it floods. However, the water is actually storm water coming from roofs from privately owned plots, public pedestrian areas and asphalt roads. In both projects, an artificial topography is a richly constructed ground that appears as both an urban balcony and as a submersible garden. In Bloemendalerpolder, 330 hectare of new nature is developed in conjunction with the lake and various contemporary urban tissue types (to total 2800 new units of housing) to create ecological functions of a water-based land mosaic while at the same time

Pollak’s position echoes that of Kenneth Frampton and Vittorio Gregotti, both who vehemently oppose rendering buildings as free-standing objects; conversely they regard architecture as the primary agent capable of contributing to the ever-evolving character of land form and land use. In an introduction to a book of his collected writings, Frampton has applauded the efforts of Gregotti and interprets his ‘going to the ground’ as a cultural and ecological necessity. Frampton quotes a 1983 lecture by Gregotti when he claimed:‘The origins of architecture do not reside in the primitive hut, but rather in a primordial marking of the ground in order to delineate a human world against the unformed, chaotic indifference of the cosmos; in short, in the act of culture in the void of nature.’11

The constructed site, the preparing of the ground and the literal creation of new landscapes is part-and-parcel of the Dutch tradition that delicately balances civil engineering, landscape architecture, urban planning and land management. Strootman Landschapsarchitecten’s skill in choreographing a contemporary urban ecology upon a medieval parcellation peat meadow and the water structure of the Bloemendalerpolder (500ha) may be compared to a smaller scale operation by France’s Agence Ter to focus a new residential quarter (50ha) around a floodable Parc de Trapèze as part the redevelopment of the massive Renault production

figure 5

0 100 500

figure 6. Bloemendalerpolder, StrootmanLandschapsarchitectenThe structuring lines of the new urban area andnew nature are derived from the geological andcultural history of the site’s past. Medievalparcellation and the nature/culture contrasts oftimes gone by are poetically reinterpreted in thedesign of the new hybrid territory.

figure 7. Stadtlandschaft Lichterfelde Süd, Berlin,ARU.The (re)design of the infrastructure of the site(and the ground – the ‘design of the carpets’)was the premise of the unbuilt competitionproject that faced programmatic uncertainity.(©ARU - Architecture Research Unit, London)

figure 8. Twente Airport, StrootmanLandschapsarchitecten.The ‘layout of voids’ articulates the formerinfrastructure as various vegetal materials,thereby creating vast swaths of colors, texturesand identity across the territory.figure 6

12. Kenneth Frampton, ‘Foreword’ in Vittorio Gregotti, Inside Architecture, Cambridge: MIT Press, p.17.13. Stan Allen (1999), Points + Lines: Diagrams and Projects for the City; New York: Princeton Architectural Press, pp. 54-57.

itself through the division, allocation and construction of surfaces, provision of services to support future programs and establishment of networks for movement, communication and exchange.13 Today, particularly in The Netherlands, the creation of infrastructure is no longer simply considered as the accumulation of large technical objects in isolation from their surroundings. More and more, landscape and infrastructure merge; civil engineering feats and landscape architecture collaborate to create new wonders as movement corridors and water management systems are (re)worked as new vessels of collective life. An entirely new spectrum of the public realm has become a fascinating terrain for investigation. In order to function, fit and be acceptable, infrastructure enhances the quality of the landscape. Hence, conceiving infrastructure blends with generating architecture, building landscapes, and producing urban settings and living environments. It engages social and imaginative dimensions as much as engineering. At the same time, in the landscape urbanism discourse, there has been a focus on infrastructure, as Elisabeth Mossup has stated.‘Explorations in landscape urbanism have focused on infrastructure as the most important generative public landscape…. Such a reexamination of infrastructural space involves the recognition that all types of space are valuable, not

maintaining cultural links to the territory’s geographical history. [figure 6]. In Parc de Trapèze, the basin forms ponds and marshy areas around ‘islands’ with various environments—flower-covered prairies, peat bogs and orchards—which shrink or grow in size depending on the level of the water table; the constantly moving geography hosts a rich biodiversity and at times of peak flooding, becomes a harbor. In both projects, the constructed ground, from the precise manipulation of topography, is the primary urban design tool. In the Bloemendalerpolder project, the new city is intentionally planned as a juxtaposition of centers with different characters and scales, resulting from the specific interplays they orchestrate through the infrastructural net and the natural (green and blue) systems, topographical differences and related soil conditions and finally with the programmatic destinations allocated to them.

Scene 3: Landscapes of Infrastructure12 Infrastructure, by its very nature, is similar to landscape in that it is continually evolving, simultaneously precise and indeterminate and works strategically. It allows multiple authors and accommodates existing conditions and local contingency while maintaining overall functional continuity. Infrastructure constructs the site

14. Ibid, p.171.15. Chris Reed, ‘Public Works Practice’ in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, C. Waldheim (ed.) New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006, p. 282.16. See http://aru.londonmet.ac.uk/

programme and the other as a civilian airport—shares affinities with the project of Stadtlandschaft Lichterfelde Süd, in Berlin by the Architecture Research Unit (ARU) of Florian Beigel and Philip Christou. The latter’s regeneration of a former military training ground (115 ha) on the southern boundary of Berlin was intended to become a housing area with 3200 dwellings. However, full-fledged development was rather uncertain and the designers worked with the notion of an arrangement of landscape fields and field boundaries similar to a horticultural or an agricultural structure; they laid out the site as a series of ‘landscape carpets’ that become the generators in time for a variety of building patterns. According to Beigel and Christou ‘one could say we design the rug and not necessarily the picnic.’ 16 [figure 7, 8]The two projects result from a sophisticated and selective reading of the history of the site. Large fields are recognized as identifying qualities of the respective sites’ and as welcomed contrasts to the adjacent fragmented landscapes. Both projects investigate conditions of uncertainty and change on former military sites and develop landscapes of infrastructure—or, more precisely, reuse existing infrastructures as catalysts for new development and new economies.

just the privileged spaces of more tradition parks and squares, and they must therefore be inhabitable in a meaningful way…. Landscape urbanism also suggests that this happens by an instrumental engagement with ecological processes as well as with the functions of infrastructure and the social and cultural needs of the community.’14

As well, amongst others, landscape architect Chris Reed promotes a revised reading, wherein infrastructure becomes landscape, full of diverse terrains, habitats, destinations, paths, conduits, nodes, gardens and fields. While conceived as rational, absolute and utilitarian, infrastructure has the capacity to be appropriated and transformed toward social, cultural, ecological and artistic ends. Architectural accretions, layerings of program and use, existing infrastructures made useful – herein lays the basis for a new civic realm, one created by appendage and insertion. Conversely, architecture and landscape can appropriate the utility and serviceability of infrastructure. One could imagine landscape/architectural projects conceived as functional infrastructures, ecological machines that process and perform, public spaces that literally ‘work’. 15

The reuse of infrastructure, interstitial terrain vague and the reprogramming of brownfield sites have become popular testing grounds for landscape urbanism projects. Strootman’s project for Twente Airport and the development of scenarios—one for a care and cure

Heathwith �owering currant 4 bushes/ha

wild plant border

Dry grasslandalong landing strip

Flowery grasslandalong stream

Meadows for horseswith white fences+ one horse-chestnut or beech per meadow

Glider �eldon grassland

Floral carpetas front garden of airport

figure 8figure 7

17. See Richard Weller, ‘An Art of Instrumentality: Thinking Through Landscape Urbanism’ in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, C. Waldheim (ed.) New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006, pp. 69-85. 18. Ibid, p. 71.19. Ecological infrastructure is that which seeks to secure the integrity and identity of the landscape working with essential natural, biological, and cultural processes .

the over-heated market and world’s fastest urbanizing nation, China, there are a number of exemplary landscape urbanism projects that focus on post-industrial sites and specifically on de-cannelizing rivers, preserving/conserving natural habitats and creating enlargened public realms. Kongjian Yu and his office Turenscape are creating an astonishing number of projects (in keeping with the pace of development) that combine ‘ecological infrastructure’ and ‘municipal infrastructure’19 as an evolutionary paradigm—as the next step in a long and rich heritage of Chinese traditions of land and water management methods that are at the same time bold, vibrant, artful and playful. The planned, engineering aspect and the science of ecology are skillfully wed to the sensual and the designed [figure 9a, 9b].The same could be said of a number of Strootman Landschapsarchitecten projects. Highlighted here is the Westflank Haarlemmermeer, also done in collaboration with Palmbout Urban Landscapes, which had the inevitable engineering challenges of designing 4000ha of housing, new nature (water storage, forest and open landscapes) and infrastructure in a polder 5 meters below sea level. The ‘art of instrumentality’ in such a project is the balance the technical expertise with qualitative spatial environments and magical living environments that embed themselves to the specificity

Scene 4: An Art of Instrumentality 17

‘For its focus on intentional meaning, design sacrifices the scale and instrumentality of its agency, whereas that which planning gains in scale and efficacy it inversely loses in artful intent. Although this is not always the case, and perhaps too diagrammatic this axiom of landscape architecture’s bilateral crisis is the crux of the problem…. Landscape urbanism warrants serious discussion because it alone seems theoretically prepared and practically capable of collapsing the divide between planning and design.’18

The ever-provocative words of the Australian academic and practitioner Richard Weller could not be better stated. He refers to the idealism of landscape architecture and definition of its being a holistic enterprise, embracing art and science which is weakened by breakdown into landscape planning which concerns infrastructure which usually bears a low semantic load and landscape design (‘of highly wrought objects or specific sites’) that bear a high semantic load. Clearly, there are very few built landscape urbanism projects to date—very few projects that maintain the art of landscape and the agency of urbanism. Weller sees in landscape urbanism a collapse in the divide between planning and design and a merging of the boundaries between architecture and landscape, between fields and objects, and between instrumentality and art. Perhaps in a place where one would least expect it, in

figure 9a figure 9b

figure 9a+9b. Red Ribbon, Tanghe River Park,Qinhuangdao City & Houtan Park, Shanghai,Turenscape.The ecological engineering of floodplains iscombined with an artful and playful articulationof riverfronts that reinstates local and culturalnotions of water. (© Kongjian Yu, Turenscape)

figure 10a+10b. Westflank Haarlemmermeer,Strootman Landschapsarchitecten.Ecological engineering and choreographing ofthe landscape combine to create a new hybridfigure 9a figure 9b territory.

20. See James Corner, ‘Terra Fluxus’ in The Landscape Urbanism Reader, C. Waldheim (ed.) New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006, pp. 21-33.21. Ibid, p. 33.

Landscape urbanism is a field of open speculations. A field of built landscapes and unbuilt landscapes, of urban landscapes and rural landscapes, of realized projects and unrealized projects.The final projects to be discussed are as similar as they are dissimilar. Similar in that they are developed as landscape urbanism strategies in the context of peripheral shrinking economies with impulses to find new economies, in that they are developed around the notion of a ‘park’ to structure the territory, and in that they seek alternative and inventive ways to mix programs and create synergies between energy and environmental policies. They are dissimilar in that the project of Strootman Landschapsarchitecten is for 1600 hectares in Meerstad, northeast of Groningen while the project of Paola Viganò is for 1800 square kilometers in Salento, Italy. The Meerstad park-like setting was to be constructed by one-third ‘nature,’ one third water and one third built; when the Dutch economy was still enjoying a boom, 600 houses were envisioned to be developed a year to eventually reach 10,000 houses. Since the economy imploded, the designers are now busy with the clients to literally re-imagine new configurations of land(scape) and to see which land might not need to be constructed at all and how perhaps energy plantations could be developed besides housing and/or recreational programs. They also investigated how housing could

of the site over time. New bold geometries of the new lake, forest and open landscape complement the existing beauty of the polder grid and the ‘water machine’ weaves together the rich textures of old and new in carefully designed sections [figure 10a, 10b]

Scene 5: Terra Fluxus20

Finally, the choreography ends with one of landscape urbanisms main protagonists: James Corner and his seminal text, Terra Fluxus, in which he develops four characteristics of the landscape urbanism model, which are summarized as follows 1] process over time (space-time ecology); 2] the staging of surfaces (vast surfaces of potential); 3] the operational or working method (reconsideration of traditional conceptual, representational an operative techniques); 4] the imaginary (a speculative thickening of the world of possibilities). He concludes by placing the newest –ism in a larger field:‘… the union of landscape with urbanism promises new relational and systemic workings across territories of vast scale and scope, situating the parts in relation to the whole, but at the same time the separateness of landscape from urbanism acknowledges a level of material physicality, of intimacy and difference, that is always nested deep within the larger matrix or field.’21

figure 10b figure 11

drain off polder lake

supplylake polder

drain off lake bosom

supplybosom lake

drain off bosom river

supplyriver bosom

Sea DunesSand Peat

Bosom

PolderLakeClay

drain off river sea

seepage water

Bosom

RiverSea level

figure 10a

figure 12a

course, embedded in their particular site specificities, but, at the same time, are representative of a large and growing importance of the regional project in the context of issues such of climate change (water storage, flooding resilience), housing and new landscape and infrastructure development. The complex spatial dynamics of peri-urban territories in transformation involve all sorts of processes and Strootman Landschapsarchitecten engineer nature in the best Dutch tradition, but also craft contemporary beauty with a sensitivity to a site’s geological history and layered socio-cultural complexity. They choreograph urban ecologies with flair and finesse. And … perhaps most importantly – they always have the WATER WOLF in mind. They do not try and tame him, they do not try and cage him. They work with him and do their job of choreography – they dance with the dear water wolf!

be developed at a slower pace and with as flexible as possible development strategies [figure 11] In Salento, the territory has been conceived of as a park—an extensive, articulated and complex habitat. ‘The term “park” is used in a contemporary sense and not only alludes to a place of leisure, but is to be understood as a group of environmental situations in the broadest sense, whose essential combination will go towards encouraging the development of some or all the main social activities as affairs […]. Contrary to current opinion the porous character of the diffused city presents a great opportunity for paving the way for a correct development of biodiversity and expansion of nature, in order to construct landscape and an environment that will interpret the values of contemporary society.’ [figure 12a, 12b, 12c, 12d]

Epilogue: Dancing with the Water Wolf & Water Urbanism Through 5 scenes, the work of Strootman Landschapsarchitecten has been discussed through a landscape/ ecological urbanism approach, whereby landscape development and ecology have together been orchestrated to guide urbanization. The projects are all situated in peri-urban areas within urban-regional contexts and include large pre-investments in the landscape. As projects in themselves they are, of

figure 12b figure 12c figure 12d