Katherine Crewe

LandSCAPES: A Typology of Approaches to Landscape Architecture

This paper presents a typology or classification of six landscape architecture approaches or theories summarized by the acronym landSCAPES: 1. S design as Synthesis 2. C Cultivated expression 3. A landscape Analysis 4. P Plural design 5. E Ecological design 6. S Spiritual landscapes These categories have distinctive approaches to landscape architecture on eight dimensions: (1) its goals, (2) the process used in design or analysis; (3) main clients or audiences; (4) the scale of concern; (5) intellectual or knowledge base; (6) ethical approach; (7) relation to the natural world; and (8) the approach’s analysis of power relations or the larger role of landscape architecture in society. By classifying approaches and thinking about such classifications, landscape architects can reflect upon and debate dimensions of the profession that are too often implicit and invisible.

A Typology of Comprehensive Designed Communities Since the Second World War

This paper classifies designed comprehensive districts and towns, focusing on those built from the end of World War II through the early 21st century. While comparatively rare, such models are a dominant part of the intellectual history of urban design, physical planning, and urban development. Identifying the range of such designed communities helps clarify their specific contributions. Types include social neighborhoods, architectural villages, environments supporting diversity, designed enclaves, ecoburbs, ecocities, and developments emphasizing the role of technology. The classification is based on the developments’ key assumptions and intellectual histories, and particularly their social, ecological, economic, political, and aesthetic character. It is a classification not of the physical forms of such planned communities but of their underlying design, planning, and development ideas. For each type, the paper outlines important subtypes and proposes some key dilemmas in its future evolution. The least socially and ecologically idealistic models have been the most replicated, while the most idealistic have remained the mainstay of courses in the history of physical planning and urban design.

Compactness and Connection in Environmental Design: Insights from Ecoburbs and Ecocities for Design with Nature

It is widely agreed that planners should be aiming to create cities that are more ecologically sensitive. Governments, developers, planners, and designers almost everywhere claim to be doing just that. What does this mean, however? We argue that planners have been promoting a compact and efficient approach to green development, on the basis of a comprehensive yet evolving understanding of environmental systems. There is an alternative approach, however, more firmly based in psychological and human perceptions of nature. With popular appeal, as well as academic and professional roots in landscape architecture and environmental psychology, this connective approach stresses human connection to nature at a local scale. These represent distinctly different approaches to ecologically sensitive development and quite different priorities about which ecological processes are most important. Case studies of the Woodlands, Village Homes, Civano, Almere, Hammarby Sjöstad, and Sydney Olympic Park demonstrate these issues. Planners will need to make some difficult choices not only between more and less ecologically sensitive designs but also between competing ecological values.

New Visions for Suburbia: Reassessing Aesthetics and Place-making in Modernism, Imageability and New Urbanism

This paper explores three controversial and large-scale attempts by architects to build more attractive suburban areas: Cumbernauld in Scotland (key designs constructed in the 1950s and 1960s), Irvine in California (key designs from the 1960s and 1970s onward), and Poundbury in England (key designs created in the 1980s and built from the 1990s on). They represent major approaches to the issue of aesthetics and place—modernism, humanistic imageability and legibility, and new urbanism or the Urban Villages Movement. The paper distinguishes between several terms relevant in assessing visual character: objective aesthetics, style, place and satisfaction. It is argued that all three developments conform to some principles of the visual and psychological aspects of good design; but these principles differ, resulting in criticisms from those promoting different styles.

Desert New Urbanism: testing for comfort in downtown Tempe, Arizona

Abstract Outdoor human comfort is determined for the remodelled downtown of Tempe, Arizona, USA, an acclaimed example of New Urbanist infill. The authors desired to know whether changes were accompanied by more comfortable conditions, especially in hot, dry summer months. The physiological equivalent temperature provided an assessment of year-round outdoor human comfort. Building compactness and tree shade that became part of the changes in the downtown provided more overall daytime human comfort than open nearby streets; however some downtown sites were less comfortable at night, but below 40°C, a threshold for human comfort in this desert environment.

Arizona Native Plants and the Urban Challenge

This paper explores how Arizona landscape architects have promoted the use of Sonoran native plants in Phoenix, Tucson, and surrounding desert cities and examines their strategies to create ecologically minded communities in challenging surroundings. In promoting native plants, landscape architects have not only created a vernacular landscape for Arizona’s cities, but have helped find solutions to rising summer temperatures and excessive use of borrowed water. In their planning and design for native plants, they have integrated native plants into the diverse functions of cities, both societal and ecological, creating multifunctional landscapes. While these endeavors have widely entrenched native plant design as part of major urban initiatives in Arizona’s desert cities, they have also revealed radical obstacles for native plant designs. Landscape architects have had to find a place for native plant systems amidst the diverse sets of needs of arid cities, from city-wide infrastructure systems to commercial interests and popular preferences, and in light of an overall energy balance within a desert region. This encounter marks yet another chapter in the history of landscape architects’ work with native plants.

Chandler's Hotel San Marcos: The Resort Impact on a Rural Town

This paper looks at the role of the elite and ambitiously designed San Marcos Hotel in the small farming town of Chandler, 25 miles south east of Phoenix, Arizona. The study traces the hotels impact on the towns 2000 or less white farmers, and the sizeable population of Mexican migrant workers, questioning how a real city can thrive amidst a landscape dedicated to recreation and luxury. What is the impact of high-style design in a pioneering town, how can local people find their identity in a resort milieu, and what might be the tourist impact on the high immigrant populations common to many resort areas at the time? Using reports from the local Chandler Arizonan since 1912, oral histories and miscellaneous archival materials, the paper traces an evolving identity during the towns early decades. The paper responds to a call for locally based histories of rural towns, shedding light on a key period in North American town making, while contributing to a growing research about resort environments.

Book Review: Rough Guide to Sustainability: A Design Primer:

greatest teaching challenge; that of matching teaching methods with learning styles by using project-based learning (Tileston 2005). Tyler and Ward draw on a wealth of communication in their concrete stories of planning projects, hierarchy of ideas, visual bubble diagrams, schematic plans, finished site plans, and interactive plan making and thereby address the demands of a modern classroom where an instructor must respond to multiple learning styles. Tyler and Ward’s visual communication is not always perfect, as evidenced in two-dimensional images illustrating transitoriented development, which should be three-dimensional to capture the essence of transit-oriented development success—density, design, and diversity—as discussed by Dr. Robert Cervero of the University of California, Berkeley. The excellent comparison of topographic quadrangle maps, aerial photographs, and soil surveys mentioned above could be improved if placed on one page, thereby reducing the need to flip back and forth. The Rivertown assignments are sequential yet interrelated, just as a real planning process is. Therefore, Chapter 1 Exercise 1 requires students to review Chapter 16 to match relevant costs to public funding and Chapter 10 Exercise 10 requires students to read Exercise 12 for development inputs to traffic counts. Tyler and Ward have referenced the links clearly but this could be frustrating to undergraduates with short attention spans and demanding academic schedules. Tyler and Ward provide a hierarchy of ideas in each topic area and travel seamlessly from the general, such as the Ahwahnee Principles of Economic Development, to the specific, “4-times rule” (p. 131) that states that a successful activity must entertain visitors four times as long as it took them to drive to the venue. This hierarchy of ideas within each topic creates a memorable depth and breadth. Another weakness lies in the discussion of rural zoning, housing density and open space, especially in “sliding scale” zoning (p. 200), where graphic illustrations would add clarity. Likewise the discussion of purchase and transfer of development rights (Purchase of Development Rights and Transfer of Development Rights) in rural areas needs example case studies. Issues of agriculture and open space will become more and more important as planners refocus on sustainable communities and populations begin to migrate back to the Midwest from overcrowded, expensive west and southwestern locations. Young planners should be ready for the challenge. The book is insightful as to how planning works and exhibits an apprehension of the inner nature of things by discussing stories behind the facts gained from experience. For example, rural planning where the inclusion of correspondence from a former graduate student in “Spotlight on the Experiences of a Rural Planner” informs the reader of certain realities in the field. The young planner’s commute is “slowed down more for buffalo than other motorists,” he is “warned of existence of hanging trees within the county that await any one coming here with idea of change.” He works with a zoning committee charged with writing a zoning ordinance “debating the necessity of zoning as opposed to developing a zoning ordinance, which is their charge,” and “preparing the community for its introduction is far more daunting task” (p. 169). Tyler and Wood’s Planning and Community Development: A Guide for the 21st Century is accessible, informative, and insightful. I highly recommend it and plan to adopt it for use myself in my first year planning class. It will also be a useful text for faculty teaching sophomore history and theory and for citizen planners, plan commissioners, and members of BZAs who wish to be no ordinary planners. The casual clarity and visual vibrancy of the book exhibit a lifetime of teaching, practice, and personal experience in planning.

Reviews: The Evaluative Image of the City Jack L. Nasar Thousand Oaks: Sage Publications 1998. 182 pages.

too many currents of political and planning theory. Critics from the right will dislike Healey’s effort to expand the powers of the state, however optimistically conceived, into local arenas best left in private hands. Public choice theorists will balk at the costs of inclusion. From the left, critics will scoff at shared power and meaningful collaboration with the owners, investors, and managers of capital. As a (small <a0 democrat at heart, I found Healey’s comprehensive effort competent and commendable, if not compelling. The efficacy of improved practical deliberations among the livers, doers, and makers of urban settlements requires more detailed accounts of what to do and how to do it to win my firm consent. But I am still adding this text to my graduate students’ required reading list as a healthy antidote to American intellectual provincialism.