This paper explores the relationship between policies of increasing green infrastructure in cities and the development of planting designs that will allow new vegetation to be interesting and attractive, while fulfilling ecological requirements. The challenge is to maintain a balance between beauty and function, which in the past, have sometimes been seen as mutually exclusive. One key problem in applying vegetative infrastructure to Chinese cities is that the nursery infrastructure, needed to supply cities with both native and non-native plants, is poorly developed. There is a significant nursery industry in China, but it is focused on growing a relatively limited palette of “everywhere” plants, rather than reflecting the regional diversity of native Chinese plants or plants that have specific ecological function, such as floodable or drought tolerate vegetation. Hence, there is a pressing need to initiate research to develop a wildflower seed industry, to develop a large volume of good quality to supply the nursery industry and sell for direct planting. Increasing the seed industry will require a regionalized research effort to identify and collect founder seed in wild habitats that have a high potential for urban use, understand seed germination and emergence, and will involve companies in commercial production to make it available to the wider market of landscape professional.
Landscape structures the new parts of the expanding city and new forms of city-life. “Landscape Infrastructure” invokes the social and cultural elements as part of the equation, and physically and operationally demonstrates its potential of city-making. This interview explores the relation between landscape and infrastructure, how the landscape design integrates into the urban-scale infrastructure, and the way for Chinese landscape architects to engage into the urban design process.
Ignoring the artistic and cultural facets of urban infrastructure is the reason why so many urban landscapes are not satisfying. Many spaces taken by infrastructure are also abandoned because of unreasonable use. These urban problems like fragment of urban functions are primarily caused by the frame segmentation of urban management. Architecture design can add consideration of art and culture into infrastructure, and through integrated urban governance and space expansion, architectures provide better life to citizens.
A road traverses the land, composes cities, and connects buildings. It exists at various scales, bringing to life the sensory effects of different speeds. A road reconciles public space, landscape, infrastructure, and the city. Through analyzing classical urban planning cases, this article explores the relevance of roads as an infrastructure, to urban development, to urban landscape, and to urban image.
The concept of the boulevard is of a hybrid road, which includes transport links and greenbelt open spaces. This type of street, found across wide scales, usually links a city’s landmarks or significant open spaces. This essay discusses the rise, development, and decline of the boulevard, as well as the types found during different historic periods, and will use the case of Tainan Hai-An to illustrate the significance of the multi-layered boulevard as an emerging type of street space for urban development.
This article focuses on discussion of several important mechanisms or issues related to the influence of urban landscape on human health, including the importance of biodiversity and related research methods; opportunities of developing a comprehensive green infrastructure and its effects on human health; how electronic technology would alter research and design for creating healthy landscape; and effects of urban design on physical activity.
The Atlanta BeltLine is a 22-mile (35 km) transformative corridor project that will connect 45 neighborhoods through transit, open space and trails. As a repurposed series of abandoned railroad segments that run across the valleys and ridges of the Piedmont Plateau region, the physical design of the corridor actively responds to both the physiographic and cultural diversity of its context. It is a comprehensive example of landscape infrastructure that will serve to organize, engage and guide future development in one of America’s fastest growing metropolitan areas.
Sea barriers such as dikes are essential for safety. It is now time for the next step in the evolution of Dutch coastal engineering. Rather than merely minimizing negative effects, we now wish to create positive effects. This vision is an example of how the narrow technological approach can be abandoned in favor of an approach which addresses a broad range of environmental, ecological and social interests.
Parkmerced is a re-development of a 1940s' neighborhood based on a vision of neighborhood livability, environmental sustainability and ecological revitalization for a 220-acre community in southwest San Francisco. The project seeks to capture, recycle and reuse stormwater to regenerate a landscape. It transforms a car-centric neighborhood into a holistic urban ecology — a pedestrian-focused community that establishes a productive network of open space, applies evolving environmental technologies to reduce energy and water usage, and resolves automobile dependency by realigning public transit. The goal is to be one of America’s first net-zero carbon communities.
Traditionally, the world’s leading universities have included a spacious quadrangle at their hearts, often forming the epicenter of campus life. UTS is on a fast track program to modernize its dislocated urban campus and the Alumni Green project will be a key symbol for this expansion being accessible 24/7 to both students and the city at large.The design proposal explores an innovative interpretation of this historical landscape element through a new quad which is created through two simple moves: the Treillage — a functional lung — and the Grillage — s permeable living skin.
The widening of the “Lekcanal”, one of the busiest shipping routes in the Netherlands, and construction of a larger sea lock meant that some elements of the New Dutch Water Defence Line would have to be moved. Bureau B+B investigated strategies to treat the WWII defence line with integrity regarding its cultural historic value. In order to retain this authenticity it was decided to not replace but relocate the effected monuments, as if tipped over and rolled away to make place for the new development. They remain as “Objets Trouvés” – “Found Objects” along the dike.
Since the Ariel Sharon Park is planned was a natural, rich urban center with emphasis on the ecology, the principle of “Reuse” is incorporated into our proposal of the Container Bridge. The abandoned, old steel containers are transformed and shaped into a bridge that will play a role in transportation, landscape, culture and education.
A growing number of the world’s population has little or no access to sanitation. This is particularly prevalent in India, where over 750 million people are without adequate sanitation facilities. With burgeoning urban populations, cities like Kolkata, Mumbai and Delhi are incapable of providing even basic municipal services like sanitation and clean water for many of the cities’ recent migrants. As a result, living conditions for these new arrivals are less than ideal.
“Sh*tscape: Mumbai’s Landscape In-Between” proposes the making of an entirely functioning landscape built from human excreta. Its location, Appapada Quarry, is found along the western edge of Sanjay Gandhi National Park in Mumbai. The quarry separates an established neighborhood and a hillside of informal settlements. The project takes the view of human feces as an abundant and renewable resource rather than waste. By linking certain biological processes, infrastructural strategies, and local communities, a more harmonious relationship between the needs of the human residents and those of the nearby National Park can be established.
Dredging is typically understood as a linear industrial activity: dredge channel here, deposit waste there. The work of the Dredge Research Collaborative argues that dredge must be understood within a broader context of human technologies, tools, organizations and practices that manipulate sedimentary processes across wide geographic and temporal scales. Dredging is a key moment within this cycle of activities — the moment at which human influence over sedimentary processes is most intensely concentrated — but never an isolated moment.
We refer to these relatively new sedimentary regimes as the dredge cycle to emphasize the key position of the activity of dredging within this set of anthropogenic sediment-handling practices. This broader understanding of our influence upon such processes advocates for a set of changes to the way that this influence is designed.
One of the primary ways that the Dredge Research Collaborative has sought to pursue these changes is through the organization of an on-going event series called DredgeFest. This article describes the Dredge Research Collaborative’s motivations for organizing DredgeFest, recounts lessons drawn from the inaugural DredgeFest as well as the Hurricane Sandy, that struck New York City a month after the festival, and sketches future directions for the Dredge Research Collaborative and DredgeFest.