Metropolitan form and Landscape Urbanism

Abstract

Do we know how to design a metropolitan region, the now-ubiquitous urbanized territory sprawling fi fty or one hundred miles without a break? Can we even conceive of it as a place with its own identity? Even if we can imagine ways to conceptualize design ideas at the metropolitan scale, can we imagine a level of control that still corresponds to our traditional idea of “design”? Much of the contemporary urban landscape is a loose, fl at, agglomerated fi eld, interspersed with natural landscape, large industrial uses, airports, shopping malls, high schools with enormous sports facilities, stadiums, offi ce parks, subdivisions and a vast, fl attened landscape devoted to parking. Most commentators decry it as formless sprawl: without structure and too amorphous to have identity. Even describing this landscape is diffi cult. Although the notions of concentric rings of “center, suburb, and periphery” are clearly obsolete, urban designers have not coalesced around a conceptual framework of metropolitan form that embraces both its scale and its physical diversity. Robert Lang (2003) postulates two formal conceptions. One is the idea that the metropolis is (or could be) multicentered, with the “ur-center” of the historic downtown, and a distributed set of mini-downtowns. These are imagined as mixed use centers with higher density than the usual suburban development, preferably connected by transportation networks. The second conception is that of a non-centered metropolis, or, as Lang puts it, “edgeless” city, where business land uses (for example) do not coalesce in signifi cant centers, and do not coincide with higher density housing or with mixed uses, since this is not a necessary condition in an auto-centered metropolis. (Lang 2003: 10). Drawing on the fi rst conception, a frequently suggested metropolitan design strategy is to propose more, higher density urban centers (Ewing et al. 2008) to absorb growth and offer greater potential for sustainability. Dunham Jones and Williams (2008) note an increasing suburban trend to redevelop large malls and other derelict sites into mixed use housing and retail, which they consider a signifi cant fi rst step in creating dispersed centers. But even those who fi rmly support the multi-centric strategy concede that the metropolitan landscape cannot be substantially reconfi gured into something resembling a traditional urban setting. Even if we stopped adding territory to metropolitan areas tomorrow (which is unlikely), what has already been built is diffi cult to reshape. Highways, low-density housing, and the corresponding vast extent of the metropolis will remain the dominant urban form in the US for many decades.