Landscape (and) urbanism? Engaging Nolli

Abstract

Landscape urbanism is articulated against the purported failures of traditional urban design practices to conceptualize adequately the transience, adaptability, and ecological complexity demanded by contemporary urbanism. This paper engages Giambattista Nolli’s 1748 map of Rome, a seminal example of the figure ground representational method, to highlight some contradictions in landscape urbanism’s texts and projects. Whereas the figure ground is often reduced to a binary black and white image, Nolli’s map illustrates the intertwining of public and private spaces, through rendering detailed attributes of site, infrastructure, history, and architecture. Also considered is the assertive restructuring of disciplinary influence within what Linda Pollak identifies as ‘constructed ground.’ This reclamation constitutes a re-territorializing of landscape architecture through re-engagement of the urban fabric, as well as the more aspirational and necessary re-territorializing of design through intentional consideration of ecological complexity in the making of public urban spaces.

Keywords:

• landscape urbanism
• urban design
• figure ground
• Nolli’s map
• anthropological place
• ecological place

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers who provided very helpful comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Rebecca L. Stein and Thomas Campanella for their instrumental comments and suggestions on early drafts of this paper.

Notes

1. Nolli’s map was so accurate that it served as the primary municipal map of center-city Rome until the 1970s (Tice 2011).

2. See Matthew Cooper’s extensive discussion of bioregionalism and Toronto’s planning efforts (Cooper 1999).

3. As Paul Goldberger describes, however, Olmsted saw urban parks as ‘a way of providing escape from the city, not connection to it’ (Goldberger 2009, 6).

4. See Waldheim’s (2004) extensive study of Lafayette Park and Hilberseimer’s work.

5. These three measures are very similar to David Harvey’s description of a primary ‘struggle’ for designers, to achieve ‘more socially just, politically emancipatory, and ecologically sane mix(es) of spatio-temporal production processes’ (quoted in Corner 2006, 28).

6. For a detailed discussion of Brasilia, where limited connectivity results in the intentional elimination of intersections, i.e. street corners, and indeed the street as a place of social exchange and identity, see Holston (1999).

7. This disciplinary re-territorialization raises obvious questions of scale, questions that have persisted for three generations between architecture, landscape architecture, city planning, and urban design. Is the urban design site constituted as the parcel, neighborhood, city, region, or biome?

8. The Solaire, an award-winning residential tower in Battery Park City, provides irrigation water for Teardrop Park.