As landscape urbanists hover in the exalted world of the designer-hero-genius, Emily Talen asks — where are the people?
In this piece from New Urban Network, Emily Talen provides a serious critique of the landscape urbanism. Although she admits that "it's easy to poke fun at landscape urbanism...the rapid growth of literature, academic appointments, and conference themes associated with it forces a more serious appraisal."
Upon exploring The Landscape Urbanism Reader during a recent trip through China, she concludes that "landscape urbanists are really, really good at describing things" and the movement is essentially unoriginal, contributing "nothing more than a series of restatements - in a hundred different ways - of the same issues that have been reframed, reconceptualized, and rewritten for the past 150 years."
Ultimately, Talen asserts that "by far the most serious problem with landscape urbanism is that it completely leaves out of the discussion something many of us consider to be pretty essential: humans."
Thanks to Scott Ulrich
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