The Future Metropolitan Landscape: Conference Reflections by Peter Bosselmann, Jennifer Brooke, Louise Mozingo, Deni Ruggeri and Michael Southworth   Introduction The February 2005 reopening of New York’s Museum of Modern Art was marked by an exhibition, “Groundswells,” that also represented a new beginning for the field of landscape studies.   The show, on the sixth floor of the reconfigured MoMA tower, sought to inform visitors of the potential for art, culture, and active new uses on urban land that has been abused, wasted, or simply passed over. A few weeks later, a mid-March conference with a similar theme took place at the University of California at Berkeley.   Organized by the Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning, its purpose was to collect interdisciplinary perspectives on “The Future Metropolitan Landscape” and to help formulate the mission for a new metropolitan study center.   Such a center would be part of a new program initiated by the College of Environmental Design at UC Berkeley and integrated with work by research groups in Social Sciences, Natural Resources, Engineering, and Geography. It is no coincidence these two events took place within two weeks of one another.   It is becoming increasingly apparent that contemporary metropolitan landscapes almost by definition include large amounts of leftover land.   In America, the closures of large industrial plants and military bases in recent decades have helped make urban populations more aware of the issue.   But the dynamics that now shape cities worldwide make it possible to spot wasted land virtually anywhere: along highways; in large empty parking lots designed for single purposes; along commercial strips rendered marginal by newer commercial developments; in the layout of streets and intersections; and especially in recently built residential subdivisions. For more than three decades now, urban areas have also become increasingly fragmented — not only physically, but also socially and economically.   Great numbers of people now inhabit landscapes of competing suburban centers connected by corridors of movement, where they are represented by multiple political institutions, and where they are engaged in disjoined economic activities.  Specialists from different disciplines tend to see different things when they look at such twenty-first-century environments.   Ecological scientists, for example, often regard such urban landscapes with a measure of contempt: the landscapes may still be subject to natural processes, but their systems of climate, topography, vegetation, and water flow have all been drastically altered by human activities — and in many cases severely compromised. Social scientists may see such environments as arenas of conflict between different groups.   Among the signs they read are relative distributions of people and resources — how the density of human activities may be high in one area but sparse or nonexistent in another.   For them, such distinctions may indicate the workings of capital markets or the dynamics of race or class exclusion. Meanwhile, for the designer and planner, the metropolitan landscape offers a source of opportunities to invent new structures and uses.   The best of these may help repair damaged ecological systems or overcome barriers — both physical and social. Certainly this topic is complex.   And the organizers of the “Metropolitan Landscape” conference recognized there was no way a two-day event could comprehensively address all issues.   For this reason they narrowed its focus to cities in the developed world.   Eventually, the event came to feature 21 speakers from Europe, Japan, the U.S., and Canada, who addressed four themes: "Reclaimed landscapes," "wasted landscapes," "the landscape of Capital" and "Contested Landscapes, the Ecological Structure of City-Regions."  Like all interdisciplinary work, the study of the metropolitan landscape requires a productive tolerance and mutual interest in differing research traditions.   Conference organizers also stressed the need to accept more than one truth, more than one legitimate approach.   Out of such a willingness to listen and share viewpoints, the organizers hoped the event would give direction to a new collective understanding.
	Conference Keynote The conference began with a keynote address by Thomas Sieverts , entitled Cities without Cities.   The Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning invited Sieverts to Berkeley as a Regents’ Lecturer.   Until 1999 he served as scientific director of the International Building Exhibition, Emscher Park, in the Ruhr District of Germany.   He is a Professor Emeritus of Town Planning from the Darmstadt University of Technology.   Currently, he is involved in a multidisciplinary research project on the regional metropolitan landscapes of Europe. Sieverts paper began his remarks by posing seven questions, each associated with a related mode of cognition regarding the metropolitan landscape. What are the forms of the new metropolitan landscape, and how can their essence be made productive for design and planning?   Such an approach is basically phenomenological. What are the forces behind the emergence of the metropolitan landscape?   This question involves interpretation through statistical analysis, an approach taken by empirical social science. What does the landscape mean for people living and working in it?   This approach is one of hermeneutics, the art of reaching a deeper understanding. What are the appropriate metaphors bridging form and image in the metropolitan landscape?   This approach, familiar within cultural studies, involves the art of interpretation. How do we reach understanding, and how do we group political opinions as a basis for action?   This approach leads to communication theory and to the processes that describe learning. How can we organize the metropolitan landscape?   This is the approach taken by political scientists. How can we improve its spatial structure?   This is the approach taken by planners and designers. Sieverts reminded listeners of the previous generation’s attempt to explain the phenomenon of cities according to a sweeping mathematical theory.   The end of the current inquiry, he predicted — if it ever arrives — will not involve such singularity.   Nevertheless, partial answers may still emerge: some may be found through phenomenology’s attempt to reach discovery without prejudiced cognition; others may emerge at the intersection of art and values, as through hermeneutics; still others may come from more traditional work in the empirical sciences.   In all cases, however, the prospect for success will be increased by tolerance for different forms of partial cognition.   In this regard, he predicted the emergence of a multidimensional image of the metropolitan landscape — one with many open edges. According to Sieverts, the landscape of capital serves as effective machinery for production, distribution and consumption.   However, it has an autistic character that leads it to isolate itself from the surrounding environment, and it ultimately destroys itself, leaving large ruins.   This observation not only applies to capitalism, but to all large institutions, he said.   Therefore, the metropolitan landscape is a cosmos of individual realms with their own specific personal and individual centers and peripheries.   It is a world where the automobile is dominant.   And in its social condition, such a landscape is also highly segregated. Sieverts then went on to point out that the ecology of this metropolitan landscape is similar to a great wilderness.   The animal and plant life there — much of it not native — is far richer than in the surrounding countryside.   Four types of nature are now present in the world, Sieverts noted: “natural” nature; the nature of industrialized agriculture; the idealized nature of gardens and parks; and the nature of waste land — a “harlequin” landscape that holds great potential for beauty. Sieverts concluded his presentation with images of the Bochum West Park and Century Hall at the International Building Exhibition, Emscher Park.   Originally built in 1900, the hall once housed great boilers that helped power the nearby blast furnaces needed to produce steel. Today, with relatively little architectural interference (so that it retains a stark industrial character), the hall has been converted into a space for cultural events and large exhibitions. Landscape designers applied a similar attitude to the layout of the park around Century Hall.   With much restraint, bridges, walks, stairways, and points for observation have been added to complement the massive foundation where the blast furnaces once stood.   Visitors can walk along the embankments where railroad cars once arrived with coal and left with newly forged steel.   And a coliseum-type structure that also serves as a lookout now holds back the accumulated mounds of slag and cinder. Without romanticizing or glorifying the past, the park both holds great beauty and informs visitors of the industrial activities that once took place there.   It is also well connected physically to surrounding areas, so that nearby residents frequently cross it on bicycles or on foot as part of their daily routine.   And as a regional cultural center, it may bring the performance of a world-class symphony orchestra one night and that of a renowned rock group the next.   Perhaps most importantly, however, it provides a prime example of an evolving “harlequin” landscape.   As Sieverts pointed out, stands of white birch have taken root on its former slag heaps, and — for the time being — spread to a neighboring property where the steel wheels for high-speed trains are still being forged.
	Reclaimed Landscapes Following Sieverts’ presentation, the first of the four principal themes of the conference was addressed by a panel of design practitioners.   Irene Curulli, Yoji Sasaki, Chris Fannin, and Annie Kammerer each described efforts they have been involved in attempts to reclaim land in contexts similar to those described by Sieverts. Irene Curulli is a specialist in the recycling of formerly industrial and transportation landscapes.   Trained in Italy, she currently works in the Netherlands.   Her case studies included a former gasworks in Amsterdam, a train yard and a former Philips factory in Eindhoven, Netherlands. In her remarks, Curulli was critical of site-reclamation projects where new uses were too intensely programmed.   Instead, she advocates an ethic that leaves open a perspective into the past and that perpetuates understanding of the culture that originally generated a landscape. Curulli’s discussion brought back an old issue — the value of ruins.   By highlighting their presence, designers may support the collective memory of nearby residents.   Too often, design innovations can erase such memories.   However, the process of promoting the gradual renewal of a site is very difficult, because design additions may equally fail when they do not impose enough new architectural intent on the past. In summary, Curulli advocated three standards for site reclamation: such work should not erase memory; it should hold the potential for gradual transformation; and it should introduce sufficient new intent.
	Yoji Sasaki is a renowned landscape architect based in Osaka, Japan.   In many of his projects — which are frequently situated on rooftops, skywalks, and other unlikely locations in metropolitan Tokyo — he has first had to create the “land” for his landscape designs. The Japanese word for landscape, fuu-kei , is a compound of fuu , meaning wind, and kei , meaning scape.   The direct translation is full of suggestions: the invisible force and the visible space; land open to the elements; the experience of wind on one’s face as opposed to dwelling indoors.   Considering this, it is remarkable that Sasaki often chooses to work in highly congested places near large employment and transportation hubs. For example, at Saitama, in collaboration with Peter Walker and Associates, he designed a “sky forest” of 222 Zelkova trees planted on an exact grid of 6x6 meters in a busy circulation space over a rail yard. As commuters hurry across this roof plaza, Sasaki explained, the trees connect in their minds to a substantial Zelkova grove at a historic shrine nearby. Sasaki has frequently sought to create such a heightened experience of nature in places where one does not normally expect to encounter living things.   For example, he has placed “sunken plazas” and “lawn squares” next to escalators and elevators — mechanical devices that move people vertically in great numbers. At Roppongi, in Tokyo, he also designed a 200-sq.m. wet rice field on the roof of a television studio.   Realizing this design involved serious engineering challenges: because of its weight and potential for movement during earthquakes, the slab that supports it had to be seismically isolated from the structure below.   Nevertheless, the design has been a tremendous success.   School classes visit to watch the rice grow, and office workers in surrounding buildings can watch as the field changes with the seasons, its lush summer green giving way to straw after harvest and a pattern of rows in the snow during winter. For Sasaki, nature is always a metaphor that constructs a shared image of a place.   But as living, growing things, he also intends that his designs improve the lives of all living things — not just human beings, but also birds and insects.   Roof landscapes such as Sasaki’s could greatly improve Tokyo’s metropolitan climate, if there were more of them.
	Chris Fannin is a landscape designer based in Charlottesville, VA. Together with his partner Julie Bargman he has founded DIRT Studio, a firm focusing on the creation of new landscapes out of former industrial sites.   In this work he uses natural elements to manifest the morphology of a place and its former culture. By calling on these existing artifacts in the landscape, his work is able to generate a more meaningful connection between the site and the installation. Fannin presented recent work that DIRT Studio has been involved in at the former Philadelphia Navy Yard.   In their effort to convert portions of the Yard to new uses, Chris Fannin and Julie Bargman have tried to respectfully remind people of the grand scale of the former industrial facilities by refusing to trivialize and memorialize the obvious signs of industrial use. They have employed a multidisciplinary, collaborative approach to the issue of integrating new program with the ruins of industrial development, reusing these complex sites and turning limitations and constraints into design opportunities.   Their designs have so far employed traces of these facilities to site green buildings and create spaces for the workers of a stylish clothing manufacturer, which now occupies some of the Navy’s old machine shops.   Some of the traces Fannin has employed can’t be missed — like a 300-ft.-long dry-dock.   Others are more subtle, like the curvature of former rail tracks set in asphalt.
	The final presenter of the panel on reclaimed landscapes, Annie Kammerer , works for the international engineering firm Ove Arup & Partners.   Her talk shed light on the approach that environmental engineers take toward the remediation of hazards on reclaimed land.   She also stressed how important it is for different people involved in a large project to seek out each other’s points of view. In the past, Kammerer said, urban design was compartmentalized, with each of the major players (engineers, planners, landscape architects, city officials, etc.) performing their roles in relative isolation.   To make matters worse, the ultimate users and owners of resulting spaces were also rarely given a meaningful opportunity to influence aspects of the project directly affecting them.   Such a piecemeal approach often caused complex site-reclamation projects to fall far short of their potential. Kammerer proposed an alternative approach incorporating early and frequent communication among all parties.   A key element is to solicit input from people who both understand and can express the needs and opportunities inherent in a project from the perspective of their respective disciplines.   In dense urban areas housing, transportation, business and nature all compete for the same resources.   However, by enabling a meeting of minds early on, it may be possible to optimize resources in ways that individual interests might never imagine on their own.   The result may be rich and stunning urban spaces. Such cooperation also greatly increases the potential for developing and reaching goals related to sustainability.   In addition to examples of Ove Arup’s work in the U.S. and abroad, she gave a demonstration of SPeAR, a collaborative tool using a triple-bottom-line approach that helps incorporate and quantify sustainability goals in complex projects.
	Wasted Landscapes The keynote speaker for the second round of presentations was Roger Trancik , Professor of Landscape Architecture and City and Regional Planning at Cornell.   He joined a panel with Tridib Banerjee, Anastasia Loukaitou Sideris, Elizabeth Macdonald, and Bernardo Secchi. Trancik’s keynote presentation dealt specifically with new ways to conceptualize and locate wasted spaces.   In the 1980s Trancik published a seminal book, Finding Lost Space (New York: Wiley and Sons, 1980) , in which he identified the principal reasons why large areas of urban land had been “lost” to productive use.   Trancik’s conference presentation first reiterated five reasons why these wasted landscapes still exist: automobile dependency; the continuing emphasis of the Modern Movement in architecture on freestanding objects; the separation of uses as a result of urban renewal and zoning policies; privatization of public space; and radical transformations of land use. Trancik then turned to ways that wasted landscapes can be transformed into new sites of cultural and natural heritage.   Even the most unproductive and unappealing landscape may hide a rich history, he pointed out; however, new methodologies may be needed to uncover it.   He used his work for the city of Goteborg, Sweden, as a paradigm for how this might come about.   An in-depth analysis of that city’s maps and archival documents eventually showed how wasted land had ancient roots, resulting from hundreds of years of destruction and reconstruction according to uncoordinated plans. In research on Goteborg, New York and Boston, Trancik has also used such technologies as digital mapping and 3D computer modeling to help trace how such a process unfolds over time.   Using such new tools, he said, urban designers should be able uncover the layers that constitute a site’s complex morphology and employ them as the foundation for contemporary transformations.   Trancik concluded that designers should look at waste lands as a normal part of a city’s evolution.   As such, they offer test sites for new strategies to revitalize the city according to principles of sustainable urbanism and respect for natural and cultural heritage.
	Following Roger Trancik’s keynote, the first panel speaker was Tridib Banerjee , a Professor of City Planning at the University of Southern California.   His presentation evaluated the potential for transforming brownfields into affordable housing developments in Los Angeles County. Given current rates of housing production and population growth, state sources indicate that by the year 2020 the shortage of low-income housing units in California will top 3.7 million.   Banerjee noted that creative new approaches will obviously be needed if this shortfall is to be met.   One that has received attention recently is a concerted program of brownfield reuse as an alternative to more costly infill or greenfield development. In cooperation with colleagues and graduate students, Banerjee developed a methodology for locating and mapping potential brownfield sites in L.A. County for such affordable housing.   Among the factors used to establish candidate sites were proximity to existing residential neighborhoods, services, and amenities.   Once identified, sites were then evaluated in terms of the possible housing densities they could sustain.   Surveys and other participatory methodologies were also used to gather information from developers on issues such as possible contaminants, likely remediation and infrastructure costs, sources of remediation funding, ownership issues, and typical unit costs. With regard to the economic feasibility, Banerjee next sought to summarize the advantages and disadvantages of brownfields vis-à-vis suburban greenfields as sites for new affordable housing.   Brownfield development does normally involve some degree of added cost for environmental remediation, he found; however, infrastructure costs tend to be higher in suburban settings, which may lack existing roads and access to natural gas, electricity, sewer, and water systems.   Meanwhile, he found there is little difference in the difficulty of entitlement processes: cases may exist where the permitting of a brownfield project is easier than, more difficult than, or comparable to on a suburban greenfield. Based on this analysis, Banerjee determined that the development of affordable housing on brownfield sites only makes economic sense when compared to greenfield development that is not immediately proximate to existing infrastructure.   If suburban development is within roughly eight-tenths of a mile of existing utility services, the costs of brownfield remediation will, on average, exceed the costs of building the necessary extensions to these services. Moreover, even if all of the suitable brownfield sites were developed, they could not address the entirety of housing demands and Greenfield housing would still be needed.
	Anastasia Loukaitou Sideris , Professor and Chair of Urban Planning at the University of California, Los Angeles, focused her paper on the conditions of cultural diversity that often characterize the reclamation of wasted metropolitan land.   Her presentation described three cases where disused commercial strips in the Los Angeles Metropolitan Area have been renovated by entrepreneurs who have moved into once decrepit neighborhood and given them distinct new identities — Chinese in one case, Vietnamese and Latino in the other two. Ethnic strip are becoming the sites of a re-appropriation of the inner cities after years of neglect. Once popular among consumers by the late 1970s inner city commercial strips had become wasted landscapes, unattractive shopping environments with limited variety of retail, absence of supermarkets, lower quality of goods and even higher prices. However, with the new waves of immigration from Asia and Central America came a new wave of entrepreneurs who found in the inner city strips fertile ground for their establishments. Unlike the commercial establishments that always existed within the ethnic ghettos of the industrial city, these new spaces have transcended specific boundaries and identities. Loukaitou Sideris has documented the resilience of formerly abandoned commercial areas and the prospects and challenges faced by new ethnic entrepreneurs using three case studies of ethnic strips in the Los Angeles Area. What she has discovered is a new type of landscape of re-territorialization. Unlike ghettos, ethnic strips are very visible and vibrant economic landscapes where culture/ethnicity is used as a motor for economic growth that transcends the limits of the ethnic economy.   While not completely integrated with the rest of the city, business in the ethnic strips are starting to appeal to a larger audience and attract an increasing number of “non ethnic” customers. In the context of the multicentered metropolis, these strips, once part of isolates suburban areas are playing the role of centers. Ethnic spaces are hybrid spaces in the sense that they belong at once to the global and to the local. While they display architecture that is often unauthentic and “global” they also provide real spaces in support the everyday life of local ethnic communities.
	Elizabeth Macdonald , Professor of Urban Design at the University of California, Berkeley showed examples of innovative street designs that challenged existing, entrenched engineering standards for roadway design.   Macdonald believes that a significant amount of land in cities is lost to traffic lanes that are too wide and turning radii that are too generous.   With her partner Allan Jacobs at the firm City Works, she has demonstrated her place-making approach to street redesign first in Ahmedabad, then in San Francisco and Vancouver. MacDonald’s work stresses the principle that even busy streets can be designed for multiple uses.   Design elements, if carefully placed, can create a gradual transition from the realm of fast-moving traffic to that of pedestrians and no motorized vehicles.   One important tactic she employs is to mix traffic modes at the edges of a roadway, slowing it down and creating a better setting for building entrances and the neighborhood activities that may occur there. The design that MacDonald and Allan Jacob developed for Octavia Boulevard in San Francisco demonstrates that such a street, designed for multiple uses, can accommodate traffic volumes at near freeway capacities.   At the time of the conference this project was still under construction, but it has since opened and functions as replacement for the elevated Central Freeway, one of the city’s main east-west connectors, which was demolished as a result of the 1989 Loma Prieta Earthquake.
	Bernardo Secchi , Professor of Urban Planning at the Istituto Universitario di Architettura Venezia (IUAV) in Venice, Italy concluded the second panel with a talk that used the Antwerp-Brussels metropolitan region as a case study of the difficulties of finding viable new uses for large areas of disused land in European cities. Secchi began by arguing that the amount of wasted land in urban areas is growing as a result of population dispersion and economic and social fragmentation.   As a result, considerable amounts of land have accumulated in European cities since the 1970s that cannot just be filled with new uses such as concert halls, museums and other cultural activities. Similarly, such a scale of intervention needs a clear vision and one that takes into account the needs of all the population. Unfortunately most of the interventions in former industrial areas today are expression of the world of capital and economics.   Some theorists, like Italian Architectural historian Manfredo Tafuri are comparing these projects to the “renovatio urbis” many cities engaged in during the XVI century, when social issues were deal with by means of limited, punctual interventions on the urban form. Secchi argues that these projects are questionable and they cannot address the complexity of issues that face our post-modern metropolitan landscapes. The city of Antwerp in Belgium illustrates the lack of a vision for the future. Despite its importance as a port, the city has not been able to deal with its problems and has engaged in a policy of “separation” rather than integration of all its parts. It separated itself from the water by pushing the port away from the city; it separated the people from each other by expanding toward the suburbs. Today, the city is in need of a vision for its future. The strategy Secchi offers is to use the heritage of the industrial past to re-define the city of the future.   Watercourses once engineered for transport can be set free or reconnected to wetlands.   Industrial areas can be transformed into porous sites, and the infrastructure of rail lines can become an opportunity to enhance mobility and make the city truly accessible to all without relying on private transportation. At a time of great uncertainty, the multi-faceted visions outlines above—the city of water, the city of mobility, the city of industrial sites used as linkages between open spaces—can inspire city officials and residents in making specific and punctual decisions. Secchi concluded by suggesting that when forecasts are implausible and impossible to make, pushing people to think of possibilities and opportunities can be the key to a better planning.
	The Landscape of Capital The second day of the conference began with comments from François Ascher , a Professor of Urban Planning at the University of Paris-8.   Trained as an economist and social scientist, he began by describing his daily commute from his home in the historic center of Paris, through the metropolitan landscape of the Isle de France, to one of Paris’ satellite cities where his branch of the university is located.   Using this journey as an example, Ascher argued that the dynamics of mobility have been chiefly responsible for present-day metropolization patterns.   Such an observation should not be surprising, however, since it was just as true of cities in the past as it is today.   Little has changed with the advent of information technology; to the contrary, new technologies have only led to greater mobility — to more real movements between real places. Ascher calls the emerging metropolitan landscape a multi-network métapolis, a discontinuous and heterogeneous landscape for a choice-oriented society.   In this regard, he argues that nostalgia for the lost urban experience has diverted attention from the real issues that planners and designers need to face.   He describes these as a redefinition of the very notion of urbanity, in regions that now function simultaneously in multiple centers, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. To some at the conference, Ascher’s comments were reminiscent of Mel Webber’s famous treatise on “Community without Propinquity” ( Order in Diversity, 1963).   However, for Ascher the social, and ecological consequences of the fragmented landscape are now paramount; indeed, they have become a major political issue. Ascher’s comments provided an introduction to the third principal topic covered by the conference, the contested landscape of capital.   The panel that took up this topic was composed of Kristina Hill, Margaret Pugh O’Mara, Robert Fishman, and Richard Walker.
	Kristina Hill , a Professor of Landscape Architecture from the University of Washington, Seattle, provided a window into direct democracy as practiced in the American West.   Hill described how most states in the region allow citizens to influence decision-making at the state and local levels by direct referendum.   In that regard, the case study she presented may not be indicative of how private capital has often risen to dominance in shaping metropolitan landscapes.   In her case, citizens voted to use public capital to extend a short section of monorail, originally built to carry people from downtown Seattle to the site of the 1972 World’s Fair, into a viable citywide service. Hill explained how the transportation equipment itself, a capsule floating in midair, has deep associations with late modernism.   The passengers inside glide above street level seemingly free from gravity and without the typical noises associated with mass transit.   From this privileged vantage point, the rider may catch glimpses of the nearby harbor, its ferries, and the wooded islands and peninsulas across it. Seattle residents took the issue of an expanded monorail system to the local ballot four times.   But each time powerful detractors argued against it, citing concerns over aesthetic and functional conditions along sidewalks below.   Now the proponents have finally won, and $1.7 billion in public capital has been appropriated to make the sky train a reality and reshape Seattle’s urban landscape.
	Margaret Pugh O'Mara , a Professor of History at Stanford University argued convincingly that the metropolitan landscape is not an accidental creation of markets run amok and planners overruled.   Rather, that landscape has come about with much deliberation and carefully targeted investment.   Its form is directly related to the knowledge industry that started to emerge even prior to the middle of the twentieth century.   At that time the physical setting of production and administration took leave from the traditional places of industry and moved to suburban locations.   Here it has adopted the imagery of a university campus, heavily landscaped to give it a pristine, slightly aloof character. The consequence of such a new geography of knowledge has been more noticeable in the western states, where fewer heavy industrial installations existed prior to World War II.   East of the Mississippi the presence of older factories has made it more difficult to justify abandoning existing patterns and relocating existing communities.   However, the emerging telecommunication industries, advanced electronics, and computer manufacturers have all used the campus model to guide construction of new facilities in eastern suburbs.
	Robert Fishman , a Professor of Architecture at the University of Michigan, also a historian, continued the story line initiated by Margaret Pugh-O’Mara with a talk about the relation between industrial economics, class structure, and city form in Detroit.   His first image was of a single free-standing home located on what appeared to be a country lane.   In reality the Victorian structure was the only home remaining in a former working-class neighborhood of Detroit once filled with dense rows of such homes. Fishman next showed an aerial view that explained the proximity of this worker housing to former places of production.   For years, the location of such housing had been dictated by the need for workers to live near the factories in the area that spread in linear form along the railroads that served them. At Big Beaver Road, however, several miles to the north, this arrangement changed.   As the car-manufacturing industry matured, it chose to relocate its administrative offices and research-and-development shops to this wealthy area close to the homes of corporate managers.   Here, development was again laid out in a linear fashion, but this time following a supply axis for trucks and private cars.   This new axis, Big Beaver Road, also became the route that ordinary workers had to take from their now-distant low-income neighborhoods. Recently, Fishman pointed out, the spatial pattern of the city and its suburbs is again being transformed.   But this time the catalyst is the decision by auto-parts suppliers to move their production offshore to take advantage of cheap labor in China and other developing nations. Decisions such as these are ultimately behind the return of the Detroit’s former wooded landscape.
	Richard Walker , a Professor of Geography at Berkeley, concluded the morning session with a talk about the boom and bust of high-tech economy and how it affected the landscape of the San Francisco Bay Area.   In the late 1990s a frenzy of investment in computer-related industries and the Internet fueled an economic boom of unparalleled intensity in the region, which was compared by some to “a new gold rush.”   At one point, the Bay Area figured as the most wired region in the world, and terms like web-journalism were coined in San Francisco, also birthplace of Wired magazine, The Well, and Craigslist. The Bay Area, and Silicon Valley in particular, offered new models of postindustrial business organization.   Corporations were able to seize on the potential of a new virtual economy based less on manufacturing than on system design, marketing and branding.   As the center for new high-tech industries, the Bay Area also attracted a new type of highly skilled and mobile employee.   Such workers jumped frequently from company to company, or else sought to start their own “dot-com” companies with the aid of venture capital firms. The bubble was short lived, however.   By 2001, 90 percent of the dot-coms were gone.   Nevertheless, the boom’s impact on real estate markets was profound.   In San Francisco it created significant pressure on traditional lower-income neighborhoods like the South of Market, Mission, and South Beach districts.   The construction of expensive lofts drove out existing industries and lower-income families, and formerly mixed-use areas were transformed into residential enclaves.   At the same time, Silicon Valley became a poster child for suburban sprawl in the postindustrial era. Walker explained that one result of the boom has been to push the frontiers of the Bay Area metropolitan region into the Central Valley.   In outlying areas from Santa Rosa to Tracy, growth boundaries, urban limit lines, and greenbelts are now all jeopardized by new development.   Meanwhile, the region is still dealing with the “rubble of the bubble,” whose symptoms include the loss of 13.4 percent of all regional jobs.
	Contested Landscapes, the Ecological Structure of City-Regions The final session of the conference, on ecological systems, was introduced by Professor Michael Hough , and included presentations by Hidenobu Jinnai, Stephanie Pincetl, Walter Hood, and Randy Hester. Hough is a Professor of Environmental Studies at York University in Toronto and author of Cities and Natural Processes (London: Routledge, 2005) and Out of Place: Restoring Identity to the Regional Landscape. (Yale University Press, 1990).   He explained how the metropolitan landscape of Toronto is distinguished by a number of important ecological features.   One is the Niagara Escarpment, which forms a continuous greenbelt between Lake Ontario and Lake Erie, and functions as a clearly marked western boundary for Toronto’s metropolitan expansion. Another much-recognized ecological asset are the ravines that originated in the former lake bed of Lake Ontario after the glacial period but which now cross an otherwise urbanized landscape.   Despite their value as wildlife corridors and refuges, the neighborhoods of Toronto and surrounding cities continue to challenge this ecosystem of ravines.   Hough today advocates a concentrated effort to inform residents of the value of the wildlife and vegetation they shelter. A third important regional ecological asset is Toronto’s former industrial shoreline and its many abandoned port facilities provide a tremendous opportunity to establish new wetlands. Hough described the longstanding concern for the regional landscape of the Toronto area.   This started with the writings of Patrick Geddes, and included work by Ian McHarg as young student.   As a teacher today, Hough has advocated renewed study of the interrelated urban and natural systems of this metropolitan landscape.
	A Professor of Urban Design at Hosei University in Tokyo, Hidenobu Jinnai has been known to take his students on long boat rides along the remaining canals of Tokyo.   In his presentation, he described how the goal of these journeys is to encourage them understand the morphology of this vast metropolitan region in relation to its underlying urban ecology. After decades of growth, Jinnai believes Tokyo is now entering a period of stable, or possibly shrinking, population.   And he predicts that the need for state-sanctioned large-scale urban renewal will soon disappear and be replaced by a more natural process of urban regeneration.   Instead of recycling areas of lower-intensity use into massive new urban concentrations, this means Tokyo’s future may be distinguished by greater respect for ecological systems and historic patterns. Today, the memory of Japan’s mid-nineteenth-century capital, Edo, is still very much alive in the substratum of modern Tokyo.   The urban structure of this older city, created before Japan opened to the West, would have been considered ecologically sound according to modern analysis.   Old Edo was built on the flood plains of several rivers at the head of Tokyo Bay, and among other things, utilized a sophisticated canal system to keep water flows in balance.   Its blocks and streets were laid out with respect to two distinct landscapes: the Yemenite, a garden city on the upper plain; and the Shitamashi, the water city in the low-lying areas of tidal marsh near the river mouths. During the extensive period of growth after World War II many historic and ecological references were discarded.   Green spaces such as an escarpment that provided a break between the two landscapes was erased, and many natural springs were covered over.   Today, as Tokyo’s urban society has matured, however, its citizens have increasingly come to demand a higher-quality of urban life.   This call has included a growing awareness of historic patterns and a greater sensitivity to ecological systems.
	Stephanie Pincetl , a Professor at the Institute of the Environment at the University of California, Los Angeles, next provided a critical review of the many problems caused by the ideological divide between nature and culture.   However, she pointed out that the idea of living within the carrying capacity of an urban ecosystem, though not new, has yet to enjoy much traction in U.S. cities. Pincetl believes a fundamental change is needed in how natural processes are valued in cities.   In natural systems, trees sequester stormwater for free; hidden microbiological activities maintain the fertility of soil; and permeable surfaces percolate water into underground aquifers.   All these processes are indispensable to life, and yet they function poorly in cities because their benefits are not properly accounted. To solve the problem, the field of biophysical economics is now trying to introduce new metrics of value based upon public health and intrinsic ecosystem benefits.   For example, it attempts to assign proper dollar values to the functioning of trees and apply neoclassical economics to environmental management based on laws derived from the natural sciences.   Such an approach, if carried out, would require improvements to ecosystem modeling, changes to current administrative responsibilities, and a new accounting of ownership interests with regard to ecological amenities and deficiencies. For example, in Los Angeles stormwater runoff is the primary cause of beach closures to protect public health.   Currently, the Regional Water Control Board is charged with improving the quality of this runoff.   But the board has no legal power to zone for designated stormwater infiltration sites.   The Parks Department could do so, but it does not have the budget.   Nor can the Water Control board plant trees strategically to slow down runoff, or redesign alleyways and less-traveled streets to create water infiltration zones.   The latter would fall into the realm of the Public Works Department. Pincetl does not expect that a nature-service budgeting approach would overcome the deeply engrained schism between nature and culture.   But it might serve as a not-so-subtle reminder of all the elements in a metropolitan landscape — not just parks, alleys and streets — that will need to be reevaluated it the ecological performance of city regions is to be improved.
	Walter Hood , a Professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of California, Berkeley described how the ecological functioning of a site may often be deeply intertwined with how it is socially contested. Hood presented three projects with which he has been involved.   The first was an entry in a competition to redevelop a section of Washington, D.C., where public housing was first built on wetlands along the Potomac River in the 1940s.   Five firms were invited to compete to create a new plan for the area, but they soon found that control over the site also involved a contest between the federal government, the local administration, and residents.   Hood joined a team that included environmental scientists and engineers.   Their analysis dealt with the site’s natural and social history, and led them to propose that current residents be allowed to claim space as community gardens and gathering places under groves of trees.   In addition to providing a much-needed amenity for current residents, the plan would have improved water quality in an environmentally degraded area.   The entry was ultimately rejected by the competition sponsors, who appeared more interested in using the redevelopment process to displace the current population.   Nevertheless, members of the local community let it be known that the plan did more for them than any of the other competition entries. Hood’s second project involved a public-art program in Charleston, where artists are invited to work in the community for an extended period of time, and are encouraged to uncover dormant values among the local people.   Near Charleston is a string of small river towns where African people have lived since colonial times.   Unlike European settlers, early African Americans knew how to grow rice.   As part of the program, Hood installed 300 water bins to once again grow the crop.   For three months during the summer an artificial wetland emerged.   Elders blessed the rice and the school children who helped plant it, and in the afternoons herons would fly over it, squawking.   The project reminded people of the environment they had lived in for generations, and how their newly displaced African ancestors might once have felt.   It also reminded them how their community is tied to water, and how planned new developments along the river threaten to displace them. The third project involved the design of a park at the end of one of the watery fingers of Oakland’s Lake Merritt.   A now-culverted creek formed a wetland in this location when the lake still functioned as an estuary.   However, this wetland was covered over when the Lake was severed from the rest of San Francisco Bay, and later an elevated freeway was routed over it.   As a result of these interventions, the space came to be considered marginal — until a nearby community defeated a proposal from the Oakland City Council to develop it.   Ultimately money was raised to build a park with an open-air market and community gardens there.   The market is now successful and attracts many visitors.   Hood has also designed a fountain that recalls the wetland, and other surfaces have been made permeable to encourage rainwater infiltration. In all three projects, Hood has advocated openness to different views and cultural norms for building and sustaining the urban landscape.   In all three he has also used a new appreciation for the local ecology to as a rallying point to strengthen community resistance to outside forces seeking to displace them or determine the shape of their local landscapes.
	The last conference presentation was by Randolph T. Hester , a Professor of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at the University of California, Berkeley.   He argued that local democratic movements combined with environmental activism — grounded and attentive to the local, but aware of the external — may offer real visionary alternatives to the “puppet” futures supported by remote powers, global economic forces, and distant nation states, including our own.   Indifference toward the environment and hostility to place will only change, Hester predicted, if grassroots democracy continues to exercise power. Hester could have used these ideas to delve into the history of environmental battles in the Bay Area.   Instead, he moved to a discussion of geometry.   Just as cities are formed by geometry, he said, ecology also follows rules that can be traced with the help of geometry.   Measures of proximity and distance, surface area and radii may be used to describe ecological conditions, just as they can be used to describe human settlements through polygons of power, sensual and spiritual experience, memories and identities.   Hester further linked his notions of an ecological geometry to Kevin Lynch’s notions of territory, density, core, hierarchy and size ( Image of the City , 1960; Managing the Sense of a Region , 1976; Good City Form , 1980). Hester presented a number of examples of how knowledge from ecological sciences can be combined with local experience to produce positive results.   The first involved an alliance between an international ecological scientist and a local activist to prevent a large coastal lagoon in Taiwan from becoming the site of a new petrochemical plant.   Their effort included documenting the flightways of black-faced spoonbills between feeding grounds.   Another example involved using local park politics to generate jobs for youngsters and keep them off the streets.   A final effort aimed at the redesign of portions of the Los Angeles River channel to improve social and ecological conditions in adjacent neighborhoods.   Hester concluded that only when mutual benefits accrue to multiple local interests can any place-based revision of the metropolitan landscape be implemented.
	Conference Summary Much of the discussion that concluded the second day of the conference focused on how the event served as an example of the type of collaborative effort that will be needed if the landscapes of contemporary metropolises are to be improved. In this regard, John Ellis compared the conference to a similar event that took place in Berkeley fifteen years earlier — a symposium that eventually led to the founding of the Congress for the New Urbanism.   The organizers of that event, who included Daniel Solomon, Andres Duany, and Peter Calthorpe, realized that a new and multidisciplinary approach to urban design was needed to reshape American suburbs.   Today, he said, it is equally important to acknowledge the need for multidisciplinarity in addressing the ills of the metropolitan landscape. Marcia McNally also pointed to the importance of listening to the voices of community members and people living in cities as a way to create a better metropolitan landscape.   In this regard the work of researchers such as Anastasia Loukaitou Sideris in the ethnic neighborhoods on West Los Angeles may be indicative of a new type of metropolitan landscape: multicultural, diverse, democratic, and participatory. The conference ended with a reminder of its purpose.   The organizers had hoped it might result in the formulation of a set of collective ideas to guide a new study center for metropolitan landscape research.   Thomas Sieverts took this challenge, proposing three ideas to guide the mission of such a center.   They are reprinted here to provide a conclusion and a point of departure for further work. Learning to live in a region requires support for enlightenment I strongly believe that it is virtually impossible to force from “above” some kind of efficient central, but also democratic, control on the metropolitan landscape.   Only a process of realizing mutual interests between the communities and the public/private bodies that form the region will eventually, and over several steps, evolve towards a new regional culture — and as a consequence create a new type of regional government.   Therefore, the new center should conceive the metropolitan landscape as some kind of a “learning region.” First of all, this learning process should lead to an acknowledgement of assets.   Due to sheer size, the metropolitan landscape contains special and diversified sub regions with their particular “gifts.”   These different parts form a complementary regional culture.   The emergence of an economic specialization in one part of the region happens of course all the time.   This process should be encouraged and should lead to a clustering of economic functions that follows a path, which usually has its roots in history.   The new task would be to complement this process by realizing the typical cultural characteristics of each sub region. Developing cohesive rules and procedures The metropolitan landscape is a self-organizing body.   Therefore, conventional plans alone have less and less influence on the real changes of the metropolitan landscape.   The myriad of disconnected decisions forming the metropolitan landscape has to be directed by implicit and explicit rules and procedures.   Planning the metropolitan landscape will mean to combine principal, long-term plans, setting the general goal as a kind of point of orientation at the horizon, with short-term projects implementing the general goal.   At the International Building Exhibition-Emscher Park, we called this method “focused incrementalism.”   An uncountable number of steps take on orientation by keeping in perspective the desired direction. Helping to create a climate and milieu for a culture of building This goal means that the discussion of aesthetics should be an important part of the new institution, and this might need some explanation.   I think nearly everybody will agree that the normal, everyday environment for the majority of people, especially in the U.S., is ugly and becomes uglier.   But people do not seem to mind, why then bother?   I think it necessary to get involved in the discussion about aesthetics because the “don’t mind it” attitude means also that people do not feel any responsibility for their environment; they just “do not care.”   It is in the connection between aesthetics with care and responsibility, as opposed to anesthetics with neglect that the new center can make an important contribution.   This is not a matter of style — there are many different aesthetics — but of emotional ties to the environment as the prerequisite of deeper interest, responsibility, and care.
© 2005 U.C. Berkeley - Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning Photos Mel Scott Collection, Barry Rokeach and Jennifer Brooke Not to publish without permission. For information, please contact: Department of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning 202, Wurster Hall, MC #2000 Berkeley, CA 94720-2000 email: druggeri@berkeley.edu