Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism: A View of the Debate

摘要

Matthew Heins' (2015) effort to find common ground between Landscape Urbanism and New Urbanism is a worthy project. We should encourage constructive debates between today's competing approaches to urban design, hopefully based on evidence, logic and theoretical coherence. However, Heins is more optimistic than this author. So far, Landscape Urbanism falls far short of launching a "disciplinary realignment in which landscape supplants architecture's historical role as the basic building block of urban design" (Waldheim 2006, 37). It suffers from the same practical and theoretical problems as neomodern architecture, with which it shares many family resemblances.