THE URBAN LANDSCAPE: THE HIDDEN FRONTIER

Summary

This paper addresses a little recognised frontier: the city landscape. While the term ‘frontier’ implies the last reaches of unspoiled areas of the globe not yet affected significantly by mankind, it is also concerned with landscapes where human goals confront natural processes. The propensity to think of the grass as being greener on the other side of the fence leads inevitably to a search for solutions to environmental issues that ignore the habitat in which most people live. Landscape architecture now recognises ecology as the basis for planning and design, but ignores ecology in the design of cities. The expansion of industrial cities over the last 100 years, the dominance of technology in human life, and culturally determined aesthetic values have created two landscapes in the city. The first is a cultivated landscape of parks whose exclusive focus is recreation. The other is a naturalised landscape of waste places that represents urban natural systems at work.

This paper examines the conflicts of environmental values inherent in the city and illustrates, by way of case studies, how a new urban design form can arise when an ecological view of the urban environment becomes central to the design process.