• An International Public Open Lecture at University of Greenwich
• Tuesday 24th May, 2016 / 6:30pm
• Lecture Theatre 11_0004, University of Greenwich, Stockwell Street, London SE10 9BD

“Landscape as Urbanism” proposes a general theory for thinking the city through the medium of landscape. The lecture rehearses recent claims for the landscape architect as the urbanist of our age and describes landscape as a medium of design from a variety of disciplinary formations and professional identities. It surveys the emergence of various professions responsible for the shape of the city across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries including landscape architecture, urban planning, and urban design. The lecture describes the origin of the profession of landscape architecture in the nineteenth century as a ‘new art’ charged with reconciling the design of the industrial city with its ecological and social functions. It locates the origins of landscape urbanist discourse in the intersection of progressive architectural culture and populist environmentalism in the context of neoliberal economies. In this context, landscape practices accelerated ecological thinking across the urban arts, and landscape urbanism emerged to occupy a void created by urban planning’s shift away from design culture in favor of social science, as urban design committed to neo-traditional models of town planning.

Charles Waldheim is a North American architect and urbanist. Waldheim’s research examines the relations between landscape, ecology, and contemporary urbanism. He coined the term ‘landscape urbanism’ to describe the emergent discourse and practices of landscape in relation to design culture and contemporary urbanization. Waldheim is author of Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory and editor of The Landscape Urbanism Reader. Waldheim is John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at Harvard University’s Graduate School of Design where he directs the School’s Office for Urbanization. Waldheim serves as the Ruettgers Curator of Landscape at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. He is recipient of the Rome Prize Fellowship from the American Academy in Rome; the Visiting Scholar Research Fellowship at the Study Centre of the Canadian Centre for Architecture; the Cullinan Chair at Rice University; and the Sanders Fellowship at the University of Michigan.