Feeds:
Posts
Comments

Posts Tagged ‘landscape architecture’

Academic Blogging

Posted in Landscape Planning, Reflective Practice, tagged , , , , , , on January 12, 2014| Leave a Comment »

When I launched this blog 2 1/2 years ago, I sent a link to several academic friends and acquaintances, asking them what they thought. In general, the response was “what do you think you will get from this?” and “are you sure that this is a good use of your time?” I posted a lot in the first year and, sadly, much less since (although I would like to reverse the downward trend this spring). Two and a half years out, though, I think I can answer the suspicious questions with an enthusiastic, positive response. Connecting with a global community of landscape architects and planners has been transformative for me, even though those connections have not taken the form that I thought they would.

I remain intrigued with the idea of a global landscape planning “community of practice.” At the blog’s launch, I thought I might elicit enough comments on my posts to build a fledgling community here. That has not happened for various reasons (the writing would have to be much more prolific (and perhaps just better!), I would have to actively promote it, and so forth). For me, connections have been build around a steady flow of site visitors (even without new posts people still discover the blog) which, I believe, resulted in greater numbers of people contacting me directly – prospective graduate students, professionals seeking a LinkedIn connection, etc. Academics who jealously guard their time, typically for very good reasons as demands on academic performance have increased considerably in recent years, can still find an outcome such as mine to be worthwhile, I think. We all need the steady flow of good graduate students, right fellow academics?? More importantly, though, blogging and reading to support the blog – Twitter feeds, Google Alerts, and so forth – has given me the sense that this global community of practice is within reach.

Those of us at the intersection of landscape architecture and urban planning are small in numbers. Landscape architecture alone is a small profession. A subset of a small profession is, perhaps, tiny. However, a larger group, going well beyond the narrow confines of landscape architecture, is interested in physical planning. Wouldn’t it be great if we had a platform to discuss best practices? Does such a thing already exist? If so, let me know! The prospect excites me. Our communities face such challenges. Talking with other professionals around the world who are facing remarkably similar problems (even if unique to place in obvious ways) would be so helpful. LinkedIn groups could eventually fill this need. So far, my experience says that they do not. Nevertheless, the prospects are like we have never had before. Immersion in blogging, Twitter, and other social media offers professional benefits that are obvious to those engaged in them. More academics should get on board! It’s a GREAT use of your precious time! And you get to use exclamation points – a perk!

Read Full Post »

Art, Science, and Philosophy Become One

Posted in LA Education, Shoulders of Giants, Visualization, tagged , , , , , on December 16, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Each year, I begin my course on Ecology and Design with quotes from astronauts who have seen Earth from space, and I remind my students of the first time humans were able to get this awe-inspiring view of Earth. After 40 years of Earth imagery, we take this perspective for granted, I’m afraid. The 40th anniversary of the Blue Marble image, shot by the crew of Apollo 17 in 1972, is celebrated in a short film by Planetary Collective.

The quotes that I use in my class are the following:

Suddenly, from behind the rim of the moon, in long, slow-motion moments of immense majesty, there emerges a sparkling blue and white jewel, a light, delicate sky-blue sphere laced with slowly swirling veils of white, rising gradually like a small pearl in a thick sea of black mystery. It takes more than a moment to fully realize this is Earth . . . home.
- Edgar Mitchell, USA

For the first time in my life I saw the horizon as a curved line. It was accentuated by a thin seam of dark blue light – our atmosphere. Obviously this was not the ocean of air I had been told it was so many times in my life. I was terrified by its fragile appearance.
- Ulf Merbold, Federal Republic of Germany

The Earth was small, light blue, and so touchingly alone, our home that must be defended like a holy relic. The Earth was absolutely round. I believe I never knew what the word round meant until I saw Earth from space.
- Aleksei Leonov, USSR

Before I flew I was already aware of how small and vulnerable our planet is; but only when I saw it from space, in all its ineffable beauty and fragility, did I realize that human kind’s most urgent task is to cherish and preserve it for future generations.
- Sigmund Jähn, German Democratic Republic

Read Full Post »

Landscape Architecture’s World Wide Web

Posted in Design Practice, tagged , on October 7, 2012| 2 Comments »

Location of Praxis in Landscape Architecture readers since March 2012

In order by numbers of page views: United States, United Kingdom, Canada, Turkey, Australia, Philippines, India, France, Malaysia, Germany, South Africa, Republic of Korea, Italy, Netherlands, New Zealand, Finland, Jordan, Greece, Mexico, Hong Kong, Brazil, Portugal, Romania, Spain, Belgium, Poland, Israel, Indonesia, Thailand, United Arab Emirates, Croatia, Sweden, Armenia, Serbia, Singapore, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Norway, Chile, Saudia Arabia, Taiwan, Denmark, Russian Federation, Lithuania,Ireland, Ukraine, Switzerland, Austria, Moldova, Japan, Guatemala, Slovenia, Columbia, Uruguay, Hungary, Viet Nam, Cyprus, Namibia, Peru, Bahamas, Nicaragua, Sri Lanka, Uganda, China, Slovakia, Kenya, Cayman Islands, Czech Republic, Mali, Argentina, Puerto Rico, Barbados, Ecuador, Angola, Togo, Albania, Malawi, Honduras, Bulgaria, Libya, Georgia, Nigeria, Algeria, Qatar, Costa Rica, Ethiopia, Laos, Oman, Lebanon, Dominican Republic, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bolivia.

So this begs the question: what’s up Venezuela, Paraguay, Guyana, Kazakhstan (and most of the other -stans), Madagascar, and others I’m missing? I think, for one thing, a Spanish language version would be a good thing! And, perhaps, a return to more frequent posting.

 

Read Full Post »

The Sinuous Path

Posted in Design Practice, LA Education, Recession Watch, tagged , , , , on June 12, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Last summer, I began this blog with several posts aimed at graduates of landscape architecture programs who have faced difficulty in the tough job market. Some of those posts, like this one and this one, have been among the most popular. When I saw the series of opinion pieces in the New York Times Sunday Review (June 3, 2012) titled “My Brilliant Career,” with the tagline of “it’s worth remembering that careers aren’t built in a straight line, and that sometimes the oddest jobs are the ones that matter most,” I knew I had to read the articles. I especially like the entry by Leonard Mlodinow and the excerpt below.

Many of us wish for the security of a straight line path. When a career proves to be more unpredictable, it can be disconcerting. But the sinuous path often leads to a fulfilling life. And sinuous is an apt descriptor for many landscape architecture careers. Take heart and be inspired by Mlodinow’s words.

When we’re in college, we think about our future as a direct line from now to then, from here to there. You might get an internship at a financial services firm, then become an assistant, and gradually move up until someday you’re the boss. That’s a fine life’s path. But if you look at the careers of many successful people, you’ll find that their route is often far more sinuous. And if you look at happy people, you’ll find even fewer who traveled a straight line.

When I got my first job at Caltech after graduate school, a famous mathematician warned me not to keep working on that theory of infinite dimensions. It’s a bad idea to make a career of your Ph.D. work, he told me. Then, when I began to consider problems in an apparently too different area of physics, he told me: “You can’t keep jumping around. You have to stay in the field you made your name in.” I was 26, and I was supposed to think the boundaries of my career were already sharply defined.

The life that mathematician urged on me would probably have been an equally happy one. But instead of listening to his advice, I have written for television, produced computer games, designed a curriculum for math education and returned to Caltech, to physics research, teaching and writing — this time, nonfiction. I still see that famous mathematician, now an elder statesman, walking around the campus. I haven’t talked to him in a few years, but I hear that when my name comes up, he just mutters and shakes his head. And that’s fine with me.

Read Full Post »

While You Were Out

Posted in Design Practice, Visualization, tagged on May 21, 2012| Leave a Comment »

How to re-engage after a month of few blog posts due to the rush of the academic year semester schedule? I’m checking back with some of my favorite blogs to see what I have missed. Notable posts below.

Read Full Post »

On the Nature of Design

Posted in Design Practice, LA Education, Landscape Research, Reflective Practice, tagged , , , , , , on April 12, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Image credit: personaldevelopmentplanning.pbworks.com

A 1992 article titled Wicked Problems in Design Thinking by Richard Buchanan in Design Issues journal is worth a fresh look, and, in fact, it continues to be cited by many authors. [A description and definition of wicked (and super wicked) problems can be found here.] I found the discussion of the communication gap between scientists and designers to be especially interesting.

Members of the scientific community, however, must be puzzled by the types of problems addressed by professional designers and by the patterns of reasoning they employ. While scientists share in the new liberal art of design thinking, they are also masters of specialized subject matters and their related methods, as found in physics, chemistry, biology, mathematics, the social sciences, or one of the many subfields into which these sciences have been divided. This creates one of the central problems of communication between scientists and designers, because the problems addressed by designers seldom fall solely within the boundaries of any one of these subject matters (pg. 14).

Buchanan then speculates that the heart of the problem is the indeterminate nature of the problems addressed by designers. In other words, design problems are wicked because they are indeterminate.

Design problems are “indeterminate” and “wicked” because design has no special subject matter of its own apart from what a designer perceives it to be. The subject matter of design is potentially universal in scope, because design thinking may be applied to any area of human experience. But in the process of application, the designer must discover or invent a particular subject out of the problems and issues of specific circumstances. This sharply contrasts with the disciplines of science, which are concerned with understanding the principles, laws, rules, or structures that are necessarily embodied in existing subject matters. Such subject matters are undetermined or under-determined, requiring further investigation to make them more fully determinate. But they are not radically indeterminate in a way directly comparable to that of design (pg.16).

Buchanan further explains:

design is fundamentally concerned with the particular, and there is no science of the particular.

In actual practice, the designer begins with what should be called a quasi-subject matter, tenuously existing within the problems and issues of specific circumstances. Out of the specific possibilities of a concrete situation, the designer must conceive a design that will lead to this or that particular product. A quasi-subject matter is not an undetermined subject waiting to be made determinate. It is an indeterminate subject waiting to be made specific and concrete (pg. 17).

Buchanan explains how designers deal with indeterminacy through his theory of “placements” – signs, things, and actions organized by unifying ideas or thoughts.

This is where placements take on special significance as tools of design thinking. They allow the designer to position and reposition the problems and issues at hand. Placements are the tools by which a designer intuitively or deliberately shapes a design situation, identifying the views of all participants, the issues which concern them, and the invention that will serve as a working hypothesis for exploration and development. In this sense, the placements selected by a designer are the same as what determinate subject matters are for the scientist. They are the quasi-subject matter of design thinking, from which the designer fashions a working hypothesis suited to special circumstances.

This helps to explain how design functions as an integrative discipline. By using placements, the designer establishes a principle of relevance for knowledge from the arts and sciences, determining how such knowledge may be useful to design thinking in a particular circumstance without immediately reducing design to one or another of these disciplines (pg. 17-18).

I am particularly interested in essays like this one that explore the relationship between design and the sciences – natural, physical, and social. Landscape architecture academics often find themselves having to prove the value of design thinking in relation to the scientific disciplines that dominate university campuses. Explication of the unique role of design and its relationship to other disciplines aids this process. But, Buchanan’s work is just one perspective. Do any challenges to his stance come to mind? Or thoughts that expand on his work? Feel free to comment by following the link.

Read Full Post »

A Legacy of Community Activism

Posted in Design Practice, Landscape Urbanism, Shoulders of Giants, tagged , , , , , , , on January 13, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Karl Linn

On the planning academic listserv, Planet, a recent string of posts debated the emerging interest in tactical urbanism (also known by several other names including pop-up urbanism and insurgent urbanism). Ellen Shoshkes from Portland State University pointed out that the conceptual forerunners of activist urban design include people like Karl Linn, a landscape architect who worked with communities in the San Francisco Bay area since the early 1960s. Ellen is right to suggest that we all can benefit by knowing more of this history. Karl Linn died at the age of 81 in 2005, but a website lives on in his name at karllinn.org.

A brief description of Karl Linn’s life is found in a SFGate article that announced his death. An excerpt is provided below. A more thorough description of Karl’s long and generous career is found here.

As an 11-year-old Jewish boy in Germany during the rise of the Nazis, Karl Linn knew about persecution when he fled with his family to Palestine.

The conflict he saw in both places launched him on a lifelong quest for social justice and harmony, notably through landscape architecture and community gardens, three of which he established in his adopted city of Berkeley.

“My experience with racism motivated me to devote my life to contribute to the emergence of a humane society,” he said in a 2003 documentary film that focused on him and one of his community gardens. “That’s the way I’ve attempted to live my daily life.”

Very fitting to be thinking of Karl Linn on the weekend of the Martin Luther King holiday.

Read Full Post »

Green Infrastructure Website

Posted in Design Practice, Green Infrastructure, tagged , , on January 10, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Stumbled upon a nice stormwater green infrastructure website today and am passing it along. It’s the work of a private Nashville landscape architecture firm, Hawkins Partners. Take a look. The post that attracted my attention was GI in Seattle: The Importance of Pilot Project Success For All Green Infrastructure.

Read Full Post »

Cautious Optimism – Economy and Landscape

Posted in Recession Watch, tagged , , , , , , on January 9, 2012| Leave a Comment »

Since last summer, I have been writing about the impact of the Great Recession on planning and landscape architecture. My vantage point, as a college professor, means that I see creative, bright young people who have had the odds stacked against them for the past few years. Today, I am passing on an optimistic article, one of the many written over the past four years. Somehow, this one has a hint of possible truth to it, and I know that I, for one, am eager to hear good news. The premise is that the U.S. has finally reached a point where pent-up demand will finally loosen the purse-strings of those who have been sitting on cash and afraid to spend. Perhaps it rings true because I just came from a meeting where attendees discussed putting a multi-million construction project out to bid (we’ll never get a better interest rate…) because I’m one of the people driving an old car, knowing that it won’t last indefinitely.

Of the people who fear the country’s best days are behind it, a well-known economist recently said that people in 1933 thought the same thing. In that spirit, take what you will from this: (more…)

Read Full Post »

2011 Landscape Architecture Year in Review

Posted in Design Practice, Recession Watch, Reflective Practice, tagged , , , , , , , , , on December 29, 2011| Leave a Comment »

Second Phase of The High Line

Suspended animation, with some promising stirrings of change. That is my assessment of the past year. Expectant waiting, but little change overall in the U.S. economy. In the coming year, there will be a U.S. presidential election, meaning that any significant new action (economic, environmental) is at least a year away. New economic uncertainties have arisen in countries around the globe. The planning and design professions do not exist apart from these circumstances. Four years into the Great Recession, what does seem to be changing is interest in activism, highlighted in the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) demonstrations this past fall. Activism in planning and design circles means community empowerment, innovative, insurgent urban design, and continued attention to all things local, including food systems, infrastructure, and alternative transportation. These stirrings of change portend exciting developments in 2012, I think, but not the scale of excitement seen in the bubble years. That could be a very good thing, really.

The short 160-year or so history of landscape architecture doesn’t appear to be much of a guide to the present, although there are some parallels. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, some landscape architects continued to plan gardens for the owners of great estates (the 1% of that time), while others planned and carried out New Deal programs, finding employment with the federal government. To date, there have been no new New Deal initiatives in the U.S., although our aging infrastructure begs for investment. Perhaps after the election…  Meanwhile, some landscape architects and land planners serve the global elite, while others serve local communities in a host of ways, often with nonprofit organizations as government jobs at all levels continue to be cut.

An emerging trend is the latter – design that serves the public good (admittedly, a loaded phrase) – an impulse that is closely aligned with the fall’s significant uprising, OWS. The website, Archinect, reflects this in its top 10 design milestones of 2011 and top 10 design initiatives to watch in 2012. Local is big, and getting bigger. The New York Times made the case this week, as it tracked major changes in environmental organizations, many of which are shifting their activism toward local issues as a means of survival. People have little faith in the big aims these days, like cap-and-trade or new New Deals, so they are focusing more on creating change in their own communities, something that seems much more tangible. Urban agriculture and tactical urbanism are manifestations of this urge to take matters into one’s own hands (individually and collectively) and make change happen.

A scan of other top 10 lists and year-in-review posts reveals the following causes for optimism: (more…)

Read Full Post »

Older Posts »