re-reading my praxis

some words on landscape ubarnism. Charles Waldheim writes:

"The tendency to use landscape as a represntational lens to describe the contemporary city reminds us that landscape first existed as a genre of painting, a way of seeing, before it became actively engaged in either designing built environments or reordering natural ones. The description of contemporary metropolitan areas in ecological terms is most evident in work which appropriates the terms, conceptual categories, and operating methodologies of field ecology: the study of species as they relate to their natural environments. One of the implicit advantages of landscape urbanism over urban design or civil engineering is that it avoids the ideological opposition of environmental and infrastructural systems. In lieu of modernist engineering "solutions" through the civil engineering of natural environments, or postmodernist urban design desires for a mythical return to origins, landscape urbanism advocates the conflation, integration, and fluid exchange of environmental and infrastructural systems. James Corner describes the poetic and imaginative potential of this disciplinary breakdown as:
'...the lyrical play between nectar and Nutrasweet, between birdsong and Beastie Boys, between springtime flood surge and drip of tap water, between mossy heaths and hot asphaltic surfaces, between controlled spaces and vast, wild reserves...'"