As global urbanization rates increase, how these areas of new settlements are organized, deployed, and managed is emerging as the critical question facing the city design and development disciplines (United Nations 2013). Given the volatile character of this urbanization, coupled with the disciplinary aspirations articulated within recent Landscape Urbanism and Landscape Infrastructure discourses, it would appear that the unpredictability seen in the deployment of these urban expansions is a milieu ripe for engagement through landscape and thereby ecological considerations (Belanger 2012; Waldheim 2006). However, I would contend that this engagement cannot be landscape and ecology defined solely through the lens of the biotic. Rather, these ecological considerations should be understood and employed as potentially operative political and economic devices for negotiating the speculative nature of contemporary settlement.
In the 2006 volume The Landscape Urbanism Reader, both Charles Waldheim’s essay “Landscape as Urbanism” and James Corner‘s essay “Terra Fluxus” suggest that landscape’s hypothetical capacity to navigate and subvert the hegemony of political, economic, and regulatory pressures on contemporary urbanization is a potentially potent disciplinary competence worth advancing. However, although both Corner and Waldheim evocatively describe this capacity, one can argue that a decade on from the initial publication of these essays, we have yet to see this facility tangibly manifest itself in practice. In fact, an increasingly common critique of the Landscape Urbanist discourse as simply a savvy rebranding of traditional landscape architectural capacities during a period of increased cultural awareness of environmental concerns could be understood as emerging directly from the perception of a rhetorical potential unfulfilled (Allen and McQuade 2011; Duany and Talen 2013). Certainly, it is this aspiration for a more politically operative role in the formation of the urban that I would argue has led to the emergence of the North American Landscape Infrastructure discourse out of Landscape Urbanism with its deliberate focus on relieving civil engineering and urban planning of their respective roles in the conceptualization and organization of the urban (Belanger 2012).
Ultimately though, if one considers the bulk of the projects being undertaken by the leading landscape architectural practices of today—Field Operations, West 8, MVVA, Agence Ter, Topotek, Gross Max, Turrenscape, SWA, etc.—they are, more often than not, engaged in elaborating the familiar public realm typologies