The History Of Landscape Urbanism: Detroit and Rome

Name
Professor
Course
17 November 2018
Landscape as Urbanism
In the twentieth century, the landscape has emerged as a model and medium for the contemporary city, described as landscape urbanism. The concept of landscape urbanism is extensively explored in the book Landscape as Urbanism by Charles Waldheim. The book goes beyond the original and ideological views on landscape urbanism in a much broader set of the historical, theoretical and cultural formation. Landscape urbanism is the understanding of urbanism through the lens of the landscape (Waldheim, 2). The book situates the emergence of landscape as a medium of urbanism.
Chapter 5 of the book Landscape as Urbanism, “Urban Crisis and the Origins of Landscape” relates landscape to the postindustrial shrinking of cities. The chapter looks into the history of landscape urbanism. In this chapter, Detroit and Rome are provided as examples of shrinking cities. The concept of disabitato is introduced and demonstrated in Claude Lorrain’s drawing and paintings.
The first claims of landscape as urbanism were made at the turn of the twentieth century, a time when more than seventy urban centers in the United States were experiencing abandonment, disinvestment, and decay, Detroit was one of them. Detroit was once the fourth largest city in the U.S. but lost over half of its population in the second half of the 20th century. The shrinking was a result of decentralization that was accelerated by Ford relocating production to the outskirts of the city. Despite efforts to revitalize the city in the 1990s, the city continued to lose its population and building stock. Landscape has emerged as a medium suited in the description of and intervention in the “formerly urban,” offering a new disciplinary framework for approaching sites of the formerly urban (Waldheim, 93).
Landscape was established as a genre at the beginning of the 16th century. Rome is the most significant example of the long cultural history of the formerl...