The Landscape of Landscape Urbanism

A Brief Introduction to the Discourse of Landscape Urbanism

Landscape urbanism is “a discourse or a nexus of ideas” (Thompson 2012), a movement or platform for discussing the relevance of landscape in urban projects and advancing awareness of it. It has been called a “school” (Sordi 2014), probably with regard to the fact that many of its proponents’ paths have crossed at formative moments in time, such as the University of Pennsylvania Design School in Philadelphia in the 1980s and early 1990s (Sordi 2014). It has not, however, been conceived as a unified, consistent theory (see, for example, Thompson 2012; Tully 2012, 440). Even though more recent publications in landscape urbanism make greater claims of coherence, proponents have emphasized and promoted a range of ideas under its banner (Mostafavi in Sordi 2014, 115; Reed in Sordi 2014, 149). Apart from the ambiguous conceptual umbrella of landscape (as) urbanism, the movement is united less by what it has proposed than by what it has rejected, namely, the incapability of much urban design and planning to deal with the contemporary urban condition. The formalist commitment in urban design to neo-traditional models of town planning (New Urbanism) has been attacked, as has been the neglect of design by urban planning in the wake of the turn to the social sciences. Nevertheless, it is possible to identify several guiding principles of landscape urbanism (cf. Czerniak 2006; Weller 2008; Thompson 2012; Tully 2012). Ian Thompson (2012), for example, discusses ten tenets upon which most landscape urbanists would agree. Among these is the idea that landscape urbanism encourages hybridity between natural and engineered systems; it is, Thompson argues, more interested in what things do than in what they look like, and it embraces ecology, complexity, and indeterminacy. Assuming that readers are sufficiently familiar with the principles of landscape urbanism (for early formulations of key ideas see, for example, Waldheim 2006b and Corner 2006; for a critical review, see Thompson 2012), this article introduces and contextualizes the discourse.

As noted by both its proponents and critics (Waldheim 2002, 2006b; Thompson 2012, 7f.; Tully 2012, 440; Sordi 2014) landscape urbanism draws on a wide range of intellectual sources. Formative among these has been Anglo-American regional environmental planning (as espoused by Patrick Geddes, Benton MacKaye, Lewis Mumford, and especially Ian McHarg). Landscape urbanism remains distinct from this work, however, due to its focus on the urban and on design culture. According to Waldheim, “it was only through the unlikely intersection of modernist ecological planning with postmodern architectural culture that landscape urbanism would emerge” (2016, 6). Landscape urbanists often identify certain design projects as “precedents” or “antecedents” to their ideas (Waldheim 2016, 6). These include the competition entries for Paris’s Parc de la Villette in the early 1980s, especially the schemes by Bernard Tschumi and by the Office for Metropolitan Architecture (OMA) with Rem Koolhaas, as well as historical projects such as Olmsted’s designs for New York’s Central Park and for the Back Bay Fens in Boston (Waldheim 2002, 2006b, 2016; Thompson 2012; Tully 2012, 440; cf. Sordi 2014). This historiography may jar readers who view, for example, Tschumi’s design for La Villette as an example of deconstructivism, which can be understood to be in opposition to the holistic, systems oriented approach of landscape urbanism. In what may be viewed as an ex-post facto theorization of landscape urbanist principles, the movement’s protagonists appear to appropriate certain design projects as precedents for landscape urbanist ideas, revealing a postmodern approach to history. Indeed, Waldheim (2016, 6) argues that the “construction of a useful history” has always been a “flank of the landscape urbanist agenda.”

While it is not always clear whom to rank among landscape urbanists, some individuals have shaped it more authoritatively than others. These include Charles Waldheim, who coined the term landscape urbanism and is the John E. Irving Professor of Landscape Architecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design (GSD); Mohsen Mostafavi is the Dean of the Harvard Graduate School of Design; Ciro Najle, founder and former Director of the Landscape Urbanism Graduate Design Programme at the Architectural Association in London; James Corner, founder and director of Field Operations and Professor Emeritus of Landscape Architecture at the School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania; and Richard Weller, director of both the Australian Urban Design Research Centre and the design firm Room 4.1.3. Weller succeeded Corner as Chair of the Landscape Architecture Department at the University of Pennsylvania in January 2013. This list shows that proponents of landscape urbanism “hold very high academic ground, indeed the principal nexus of ideas is that which exists between Harvard and the University of Pennsylvania, which might be thought of as the intellectual twin peaks of landscape architecture” (Thompson 2012, 8). It also shows that landscape urbanism is primarily a North American discourse (Sordi 2014). Its claims to originality have puzzled European landscape architects (see, for example, Diedrich 2009; Andersson 2010; Thompson 2012) and caution should be applied when translating its precepts for other cultural contexts, be it Europe (Shannon 2006; Höfer 2013), the Global South (Morenas 2013), or the Middle East (Bolleter 2015).

Landscape urbanism has had considerable impact despite the relatively small number of books and journal issues dedicated exclusively to its discourse. Among the earliest of these is the volume Landscape Urbanism: A Manual for the Machinic Landscape, edited by Mohsen Mostafavi and Ciro Najle in 2003, and the highly influential The Landscape Urbanism Reader, edited by Charles Waldheim in 2006. In 2007, Kerb, the student-run journal of landscape architecture produced by the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology in Australia, dedicated an issue (no. 15) to landscape urbanism, as did Center (no. 14) a year later. Topos, the German-based international review of landscape architecture, followed in 2010 (no. 71), as did Anthos, the Swiss magazine for landscape architecture, in 2013 (no. 2/2013). Key publications also include a number of other texts, such as those by North and Waldheim (2013), Waldheim (2002) and Weller (2008). Furthermore, a number of books document projects that put landscape urbanist principles into practice (Weller 2009; Castro et al. 2013; Weller and Bolleter 2013). Waldheim’s publication of Landscape as Urbanism: A General Theory in 2016 demonstrates that the discourse of landscape urbanism is still very much alive, even 20 years after its founding at a 1997 Graham Foundation conference in Chicago.

Projects frequently mentioned in the literature as representing the movement’s principles include for example: a) finalists in the competition held in connection with Downsview Park in Toronto in 1999, such as Tree City by Rem Koolhaas’ office OMA together with Bruce Mau, and The Digital and the Coyote by Bernard Tschumi and Derek Revington; b) the master plan for Fresh Kills Park on Staten Island, New York City, developed in 2001 by James Corner’s firm Field Operations; c) the High Line Park in Manhattan by the same studio in collaboration with Diller Scofidio+Renfro in 2004; and d) the competition entry RIVER + CITY + LIFE for the Lower Don Lands waterfront in Toronto, developed by Chris Reed’s firm Stoss in 2007. The concept of landscape has played a key role in these projects as well as in the theoretical writings of landscape urbanism.

Why a Critique of the Theory of Landscape Urbanism?

Several scholars have argued that landscape urbanism “emerged less as a theory than as a way to innovate at the level of design practice” (Shannon 2006, 146; similarly Hight 2003, 22). One might therefore object that a theoretical critique of landscape urbanism such as that undertaken in this article misses the point. However, some of the contributions to the literature, especially more recent ones, are clearly intended as theoretical contributions (see, for example, Corner’s essays in Corner and Hirsch 2014; Mostafavi 2003; Najle 2003; Waldheim 2006b, 2007, 2016; Weller 2006, 2008). In his book, Waldheim explicitly “aspires to provide a general theory for thinking the urban through landscape” (2016, 2). This claim for theory sets the bar.

My choice of a theoretical perspective on landscape urbanism is further motivated by a wish to strengthen theoretical approaches in landscape architecture, particularly in landscape design, which is (or at least claimed to be) chronically under-theorized. Theory-making in landscape design is of far greater relevance—including ultimately practical relevance— than it might seem at first sight: it is, as Waldheim notes, “a necessary element of disciplinary formation and reformation” (2016, 7). Theory can also enrich a designer’s own creative practice as well as influence and inspire others, as Weller notes in his critical appraisal of Corner’s theoretical and practical work (Weller 2014, 361; see also the closing chapters in Corner and Hirsch 2014). Furthermore, theoretical debate enables detection of internal contradictions within landscape urbanist theory as well as inconsistencies between theory and design and planning practice (cf. Gray 2007). Such contradictions are a potential weakness when landscape urbanists enter into discussions with awarding authorities or the public about the realization of their design ideas. Furthermore, they may compromise its academic clout, as suggested in the previously mentioned puzzlement of European landscape architects, or the sometimes unnuanced criticism that has led to a wholesale rejection of the entire movement, prominently by New Urbanism (Duany and Talen 2013a). Duany and Talen accuse the movement of a “peculiar combination of agendas” (2013b, 8). They hold its environmental concern to be mere empty rhetoric that lends a “scientific gloss” (Duany and Talen 2013b, 7) to the “‘green’ aesthetics” invoked by “skillful” designers to “refurbish the reputation of suburbia” (Duany and Talen 2013b, 11).

To the uninitiated, landscape urbanism appears as a many-headed Hydra. Indeed, “iterations and interpretations abound” (Tully 2012, 440) in its discourse. It has been characterized as “often contradictory” (Gray 2007, 94) and as “riddled with imprecision, ambiguities and fashionable rhetoric” (De Meulder and Shannon 2010, 72). Landscape urbanists view this elusiveness not as problematic, but rather as expressing programmatic openness, which is welcomed for its heuristic capacity to “multiply the available thinking on cities” (Waldheim 2010, 24; see also Corner 2003, 58).

This programmatic openness poses a serious challenge for the critic: how is one to deal with such an elusive body of writing and do justice to the movement’s true complexity? Landscape urbanism appears to some as immune to all critique, pushing it dangerously close to a realm beyond rational discourse that might be characterized as pure ideology. If landscape urbanism is to remove the shroud of opacity and ambiguity, writing and other dialog associated with the movement must be analyzed, no matter how limited its existing rhetoric may be. In the following section, I offer such an assessment through a discussion of the way in which the term ‘landscape’ is used in landscape urbanist discourse.

Landscape as the Basic Building Block of Urban Design

One usage of landscape refers to it as a material object, a system of such objects, or an area on the earth’s surface. Waldheim’s dictum that “landscape supplants architecture’s historic role as the basic building block of urban design” (Waldheim 2006b, 37; see also Waldheim 2007, 292) and his characterization of landscapes as “horizontal surfaces” (Waldheim 2007, 292) are examples of this usage. Such an objectivist understanding of landscape is also revealed in Mossop’s assumption that the “most permanent and enduring elements of cities are often related to the underlying landscapes— the geology, the topography, the rivers and harbours” (Mossop 2006, 172).

This conception of landscape resembles that developed by American geographer Carl O. Sauer and the Berkeley School of landscape studies. In his influential essay The Morphology of Landscape, Sauer characterizes landscape as “a naïvely given, important section of reality, not a sophisticated thesis” (Sauer 1925/1963, 316). In contrast to Sauer’s predilection for the rural and the wild, landscape urbanists emphatically embrace urban and infrastructural elements and assemblages of these elements (for example Weller and Musiatowicz 2004; cf. Connolly 2004a; Bélanger 2006, 2009; Corner 2006; Mossop 2006; Weller 2007; De Block 2016). Rather than “the camouflaging of ecological systems within pastoral images of ‘nature’,” landscape urbanism recommends “the use of infrastructural systems and the public landscapes they engender as the ordering mechanism of the urban field itself” (Waldheim 2006b, 39).

Infrastructural landscapes are conceived as models of the hybrid nature of landscapes. Landscapes are either to be designed as “a hybrid of natural and man-made systems” (Tatom 2006, 184) or they are conceptualized as always already being nature–culture hybrids, “an admixture of cultural, technological and natural systems” (Weller 2006, 78; see also Mossop 2006, 170). This perspective resembles Sauer’s understanding of landscape as cultural landscape (Sauer 1925/1963, 343; cf. Wylie 2007, 19–30). In both cases, landscape is a hybrid object in a concrete sense: an assemblage of material, factually given elements of varying nature or origin—cultural and technological, as well as natural.

Landscape as Medium

The topos of landscape as medium is common in landscape urbanist writings (see, for example, Mossop 2006, 165; Shane 2006, 58; Shannon 2006, 143; Waldheim 2006a, 15, 16, 17; Waldheim 2006b 37, 39, 40; 41, 42, 46, 48; Waldheim 2016, for example 2, 15, 21, 56, 125, 151; and Weller 2006, 73). Yet its exact meaning remains elusive. The dictionary definition of medium as “a substance regarded as the means of transmission of a force or effect” (Merriam-Webster 2016) is instructive: landscape as medium conjures, first, an understanding of landscape as a means that facilitates or brings about a certain effect. Landscape as the medium for the contemporary city or the medium of urbanism thus refers to landscape’s role as organizer of the urban fabric. It also relates to a conception of landscape as ground or field (Allen 1999; cf. Connolly 2004a) insofar as landscape is conceptualized as a surface (Wall 1999) to be programmed to facilitate the occurrence of different functions and processes.

As a medium, landscape is understood as being or having a substance, a conception that ties in with the objectivist understanding of landscape as discussed above. This means that landscape as medium can be used synonymously with the notion of landscape as a building block; that is, something that has the same physical materiality as a building. This becomes apparent, for example, when Waldheim characterizes landscape as a medium through which the contemporary city is constructed, explaining that it is landscape’s “ability to produce urban effects traditionally achieved through the construction of buildings simply through the organization of horizontal surfaces” (Waldheim 2006a, 15). Furthermore, he recommends “the landscape medium for use in contemporary urban conditions” (Waldheim 2006b, 37; cf. Shane 2006, 58–59).

However, the notion of landscape as medium prevails in the landscape urbanist discourse primarily to move beyond a conception of landscape as a physical object—without reverting to its representational meaning. Landscape is believed to be “the most suitable medium through which to order programmatic and social change over time” (Waldheim 2006b, 40–41). Central to this is the idea of a site’s program: “the term ‘landscape’ no longer refers to prospects of pastoral innocence but rather invokes the functioning matrix of connective tissue that organizes not only objects and spaces but also the dynamic processes and events that move through them” (Wall 1999, 233, original emphasis). Landscape, it is claimed, can perform this adaptive function because it is conceptualized as a “terra fluxus” (Corner 2006), as “a medium […] uniquely capable of responding to temporal change” (Waldheim 2006b, 39). It is even abstracted into “a model for process”per se (Stan Allan, cited in Waldheim 2006b, 39; cf. Thompson 2012, 14).

The linchpin of this rationale is the rejection of a scenic concept of landscape in favor of an instrumental or performative one. Landscape is no longer considered to be “simply a passive, scenic background but more the actual engine in shaping new forms of urban settlement” (Corner 2010, 26). This notion led landscape urbanism to favor “an organizational rather than aesthetic approach” (Lyster 2006, 231), pursuing a “Utopia of process rather than a Utopia of form” (Corner 2003, 61; cf. Gray 2007, 96).

Landscape as the Imaginary

A third usage of landscape in landscape urbanist discourse focuses on the intangible cultural, symbolic, and aesthetic dimensions of landscape. It was Corner first and foremost who (re)directed attention to the immaterial dimensions of landscape, predominantly through his use of the concept of “the imaginary” (Corner 2006, 32; cf. Hirsch 2014, 30). The imaginary dimension of landscape refers to “collective memory and desire,” to “a mental conception that may be picture-able but may equally be acoustic, tactile, cognitive, or intuitive” (Corner 2006, 32). In other words, it refers to what he characterized as “eidetic” in his essay “Eidetic Operations and New Landscapes” (Corner 1999a, 153). Corner emphasizes the importance of the imaginary in response to “the failing of twentieth century planning,” which he attributes to the “oversimplification, the reduction, of the phenomenal richness of physical life” (Corner 2006, 32). This is why landscape urbanism, to him, is “first and foremost an imaginative project” (Corner 2006, 32).

The sources referenced by Corner suggest that the imaginary can be traced back to a range of theories in Anglo-American landscape studies.³ Formative here were ideas developed as part of the new cultural geography, notably by geographer Denis Cosgrove, who characterized landscape as an “idea” or a “way of seeing” (Cosgrove 1984/1998, 1). However, Corner (1999b) also refers to art historian Kenneth Clark (1949/1956) to emphasize the cultural contingency of the landscape idea. That the ideas developed from these different sources conflict with each other—despite the shared understanding of landscape as something primarily visual—is illustrated by John Wylie (2007, 55–93).

However, Corner seeks a “dialectical middle ground” (Hirsch 2014, 15) in both his theorization of landscape architecture and in his conception of landscape itself. Thus landscape for him is also something other than an immaterial cultural construct. It is not only landschaft but also landskip; that is, not only scenery but also the environment of a working community (Corner 1999a, 154). However, how exactly Corner theorizes the relationship between objectivist and eidetic dimensions of landscape remains elusive—and, as such, a “primary fuel for [his] persistent investigation into the dialectical potentials of his medium” (Hirsch 2014, 21).

Tensions Created by the Multiple Meanings of Landscape

For decades, landscape has been used in many often categorically and ontologically distinct ways, both in academia and in everyday language. In 1939, geographer Richard Hartshorne lamented that the student of geographic thought was “repeatedly confused by the many variations—some radical and clear, others more subtle but even more confusing—in the usage of a single all-important term, namely the ‘landscape’” (Hartshorne 1939, 149). Forty years later, in his essay “The Beholding Eye,” Donald W. Meinig elaborates ten concepts of landscape, or “ten versions of the same scene,” as he calls it (Meinig 1979, 33). Landscape is and will remain a polysemic word in the English language (as are its cognates in other languages). It thus seems inevitable that landscape will assume many meanings in landscape urbanist discourse. Trying to police the use of landscape would be not only hopeless but a clear sign of ignorance and dogmatism. Nevertheless, the lack of reflection among landscape urbanists regarding the tensions created by multiple meanings of landscape is problematic.

One question that is notoriously contested in landscape theory is whether “landscape belongs to an external, objectively real world,” that is, whether landscapes “are really out there: solid, physical and palpable entities,” (Wylie 2007, 6) or whether “a landscape is ‘scenery’,” that is, not “the land itself, but the land as seen from a particular point of view or perspective” (Wylie 2007, 7). By conceptualizing landscape simultaneously as building block, and medium, and imaginary, landscape urbanists have brought this conceptual tension to the very core of their discourse. Simply stating that landscape simultaneously is all of the above offers neither a viable conceptual solution for this tension nor even acknowledges the problem.

Waldheim’s most recent book ostensibly addresses this blind spot (Waldheim 2016). In its introduction, Waldheim announces his intention to examine “the plural and promiscuous meanings of landscape” (Waldheim 2016, 3). He explicitly refers to multiple concepts of landscape: landscape as “a genre of painting,” as “a way of seeing or experiencing the world,” as a “description of the land viewed in such a way,” and finally as “those practices to modify that land to such effect”—in other words “landscape as academic discipline and design profession” (Waldheim 2016, 3). However, Waldheim does not (want to) contribute to the debate about the ontological status of landscape or how the multiple meanings of landscape relate to each other. He is primarily interested in their “potential for revising our received understanding of the urban” (Waldheim 2016, 3). Fair enough, one could say. However, this theoretical generosity comes at a high price.

Chronicling the thinkers who have influenced landscape urbanism, Waldheim mentions both Kenneth Frampton and Rem Koolhaas. He writes that it might seem “curious” to invoke their names together but notes that “[d]espite their divergent cultural politics, by the mid-1990s, Frampton and Koolhaas had come to occupy curiously convergent positions, concurring on the fact that landscape had supplanted architecture’s role as the medium most capable of ordering contemporary urbanism” (Waldheim 2006b, 42; Waldheim 2016, 18). However, what these thinkers meant by landscape seems to be quite different. As Waldheim himself notices, for Frampton the landscape is in complete contrast to, or at least compensates for, the homogenizing forces of capitalism and globalization; whereas for Koolhaas, it is a means of programming the urban setting given the existing mechanisms of modernization.⁴ However, Frampton’s and Koolhaas’ use of the same word does not mean that they have the same conception of landscape.

This insight can be applied to uses of the word landscape in landscape urbanist discourse as a whole: the fundamental assumption of landscape urbanism— namely, that landscape is the most suitable medium for the contemporary design of the city—is a highly ambiguous and potentially much more contested one than it may seem at first sight. Waldheim’s rhetoric of curiously convergent positions makes it impossible to conceptualize the de facto differences between those positions, including the divergent cultural politics mentioned above (cf. Eisel 2009).

Pitfalls of Naturalized Concepts of Landscape

The above overview of meanings of landscape shows that objectivist, or naturalized, concepts of landscape feature strongly in landscape urbanist discourse. This is the result of an understandable rejection of the pictorial understanding of landscape. It exists, however, at a high price.

One major problem with a naturalized conception of landscape—that is, a conception of landscape as a reified, material object⁵—is that it promotes reductionist notions of landscape. In such a view, the complex nature of landscape is reduced to phenomena that can be mapped and explained in terms of quantitative, nomothetic, generalizing science. Many authors argue that the nomothetic sciences such as ecology, hydrology, or geology, helped promote reductionist conceptions of landscape in which their advocates cannot conceive of the inalienable cultural, aesthetic, and symbolic dimensions of landscape (see, for example, Hard 1970; Olwig 1996, 2002; Corner 1999a, 1999b; Eisel 2009; Herrington 2010).

A reductionist approach to landscape is inevitable if and when the “science of ecology” (Weller 2006, 74), understood as “the study of species as they relate to their natural environments” (Waldheim 2006b, 43), is ascribed a crucial role in developing an understanding of landscape (Corner 2003, 2006; Waldheim 2006b; Weller 2006; North and Waldheim 2013). Weller notes that “[w]hat is meant by landscape cannot be considered unless one works through what can be meant by ecology,” claiming that “the landscape itself is a medium through which all ecological transactions must pass” (2006, 73).

Many of the arguments against a reductionist understanding of landscape are echoed within landscape urbanist discourse, in particular when emphasizing its difference to Ian McHarg’s rational approach to planning (Corner 2006, cf. Hirsch 2014; Mossop 2006; Weller 2006, 2007; North and Waldheim 2013; Waldheim 2016, 50ff.). Weller, for example, warns explicitly of a “tendency towards reductionism” (2006, 73) and observes clear-sightedly that in “conflating nature with culture, landscape urbanism naturalizes the city” (2008, 249)—and, arguably, the landscape.

The analysis offered above makes sense only if the term ecology is used in its original sense to designate the scientific study of interactions among organisms and their environment. However, the term is used by many landscape urbanists in a different, wider sense and with the explicit intention of being inclusive and holistic (see, for example, Corner 1997/2014; Mostafavi 2010; Reed and Lister 2014; Lister 2016). According to Weller, “ecology” is a “discourse which implicitly leads to questions of meaning and value, questions of art” (Weller 2006, 74–75). Admittedly, this wider conception of ecology enables landscape urbanists to successfully avoid reductionist tendencies. But here lurks a second pitfall: conceptual tensions between the many, partially irreconcilable conceptions of ecology.⁶ When landscape urbanists insist on the scientific character of such an inclusive ecology, they are effectively appealing to a non-existent science. There cannot be one unitary science that integrates analyses from the natural and social sciences and the humanities because there are no corresponding methods in existence that combine all these approaches (Trepl 1994; Spirn 1997; Kirchhoff, Trepl, and Vicenzotti 2013). To be clear, this is an objection from the philosophy of science against the claim that such an ecology could be a singular modern, paradigmatic science. Such an argument does not, however, deny the possibility—and necessity—of accounting for causal ecological processes and cultural conditions and symbolic meanings and aesthetic concerns in inter- and transdisciplinary environmental research or design and planning practice.

A third pitfall of naturalized conceptions of landscape is that they accommodate de-politicizing or post-political tendencies present in planning and design (cf. De Block 2016; Swyngedouw 2013). From a perspective that considers landscape as adequately comprehended by means of sciences such as ecology, it also makes sense to claim that its development is best managed by ecologists, ecological engineers or other scientific and technical experts. Greet De Block (2016, 377) observes a “rise of the ‘objective’ expert with his/her ‘innovative’ and precise design techniques” within landscape urbanist discourse and notes critically that in this way “the political disappears from the equation” (De Block 2016, 383; see also Rios 2013).

This criticism is similar to what Talen refers to as “social apathy” or “social indifference” (Talen 2013, 105), and it prompts Thompson to warn of the “great danger [. . .] that the individual human life gets forgotten” (Thompson 2012, 22). Similarly, it leads Gray to observe that landscape urbanism “fails to acknowledge the real world from which it is allegedly derived” (Gray 2007, 99; see also Connolly 2004a, 94).

Finally, another danger of a naturalized conception of landscape lies in its tendency to relegate the aesthetic dimension of landscape. As evidenced above, there is a powerful shift in landscape urbanist theory away from formalist, representational concepts and towards functional concepts of landscape that often imply, or are based on, a naturalized conception of landscape. This shift has been interpreted as going hand in hand with a general demotion of the aesthetic dimension in landscape urbanist theory (Connolly 2004a; Fulton 2005, 21; Gray 2007; Weller 2007, 67; Herrington 2010, 8; Jorgensen 2011, 354; Thompson 2012, 12). Indeed, it seems as if the aversion to specific aesthetic landscape ideals, namely, the pastoral, romantic, or picturesque, often leads landscape urbanists to dismiss the aesthetic dimension of landscape per se so that not only these specific aesthetic landscape ideals but also the aesthetic dimension in general are rendered superfluous by a naturalized, primarily functional conception of landscape.