‘Landscape Urbanism’ is, by definition, transdisciplinary. While drawing upon the legacy of landscape design to address the dynamics of contemporary urbanism, it integrates knowledge and techniques from environmental engineering, urban strategy and landscape ecology, deploying the science of complexity and emergence, the tools of digital design and the ideas of political ecology. All these means are combined to project new material interventions that operate within an urbanism conceived as social, material, ecological and continually modulated by the spatial and temporal forces in which it is networked.

The Landscape Urbanism MA programme is a 12-month studio-based course designed for students with prior academic and professional qualifications. It comprises a design studio, interrelated workshops and a series of lectures and seminars that form the core of project development.

Prototypical Urbanities: Toward an Interstitial Ecology

China’s economic boom, combined with migration from the countryside to the cities, is boosting a high-speed urbanism that produces new cities in the shortest imaginable time, changing the faces of older towns. This directional urbanisation, propelled from the coastal zones into the countryside, has brought the smallest villages face to face with the phenomenon of globalisation – and its foreign capital and generic architecture.

Framework 2011/12

The course will focus on China’s ambitions to build 400 new cities by the year 2020, as the basis for its brief. We will engage opportunistically with the generation of ‘proto-strategies’ for new large-scale agglomerations as a means of critically addressing the phenomenon of mass-produced urban sprawl. Our test bed will be the urban agglomerations of the Yangtze River Delta – including Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, Ningbo – with students focusing on the emergence of three benchmark issues:

1. Metabolic rurbanism: the emergence of ‘desakota’ (urban villages) in which urban and rural processes of land use are combined, and the potential it presents for the origin of industrial ecologies

2. Tactical resistance: where generic, top-down masterplanning collides with informally developed urban cores, there may be the potential to locate the fault lines of this dynamic as a space that is qualitatively informed and territorially specific.

3. Material identities: the inadequacy of providing new urban settlements with an instant ‘identity’, through application of either vernacular or western styles of building, in the context of ‘post-traditional’ urbanisation.

Design Studio

1. Indexical Models: Mediation Between Typical Organisational Paradigms and Local Conditions Term 1 is based on a series of intensive workshops. It aims to initiate a dialogue between the techniques being acquired and their application in the development of new organisational models.

2. Sensitive Systems: Development of a Prototype The second term begins with a field trip to China, providing us with the opportunity to engage with a real large-scale urban project and local planners and architects. Central to this phase will be the development of a prototype, a malleable model capable of continuous transformations.

3 & 4. Network Urbanism: Global Behaviour During the third and fourth terms work develops different logics of proliferation while mastering degrees of self-differentiation, specificity and responsiveness within the field. Investigations developed during the year will be presented as a final Design Thesis in a public review at the end of September.

Landscaping Urbanism:

Douglas Spencer Terms 1 & 2
This lecture series and seminar unit is designed to synergise with its workshops, projects and field trips. Over its two terms it introduces the student to the transdisciplinary origins of landscape urbanism whilst defining its unique configuration and potential in the context of contemporary urban conditions.

Machining Landscapes:

Tom Smith Terms 1 & 2
Félix Guattari, in his essay ‘On Machines’, proposed that the concept of the ‘technological machine’ be expanded to one of the ‘machinic assemblage’. Following this proposition the lecture series introduces a range of construction techniques related to the design of landscape projects that adopts a ‘machinic’ ethos for technical practice.

Ecology & Environment

Ian Carradice & Ove Arup Associates
Summer Term (Term 4)
This lecture series by experts from the Ove Arup Environmental Unit addresses environmental concerns, introducing a wide range of techniques aiming at ensuring sustainable management and design.

Landscape Urbanism Guest Lecture Series 3

Term 2
These lectures, which are open to the public, allow the Landscape Urbanism programme to continue to refine its own transdisciplinary approach by inviting an international and diverse range of speakers to offer new perspectives on the issues that concern its practice.

Indexing Territories:

Eva Castro, Alfredo Ramírez, Eduardo Rico
Term 1
This workshop aims to develop the students’ capacity for reading information from fields and then decoding, synthesising and systematically processing it into indexical models. There will be tutorials on software packages such as Maya, Rhino, Land-desktop and Space Syntax.

DFC (Digitally Fabricated Cities):

Eva Castro, Alfredo Ramírez, Eduardo Rico
Term 1
The workshop explores digital fabrication techniques to acquire an instrumental deployment of these tools and to create a feedback loop to overcome the traditional bi-dimensional reading of the city.

Scripting Prototypes:

Alfredo Ramírez, Eduardo Rico, Clara Oloriz
Term 2
Differing scripting techniques will be explored as a means of creating flexible design tools that are capable of accommodating change and a degree of indeterminacy within the design process.

Relational Urbanism:

Eduardo Rico, Enriqueta Llabres
Term 2
This workshop will deal with the mediation of bottom-up readings and strategic decision-making concepts. The overall arrangement of the material components produced will be adjusted and further articulated to respond locally to specific conditions and globally to relational strategies.

Lu_ In The Field 10–11:

Eva Castro, Eduardo Rico, Alfredo Ramírez + LU collaborators
Easter Break
This is the fifth of a series of workshops to be held each year during the spring break in conjunction with different LU collaborators. Its aim is to serve as a quick and intense test-bed for the application of the techniques acquired in a real project within a new political context. A final public presentation of the project will be given to the clients.

Landscape Urbanism Programme Tutors

Douglas Spencer has studied design and architectural history, cultural studies, and critical theory, and has taught history and theory at a number of architectural schools. His research and writing on urbanism, architecture, film and critical theory has been published in journals including The Journal of Architecture, Radical Philosophy, AA Files and Culture Machine. He is currently researching for a book that formulates a Marxian critique of contemporary architecture and ‘control society’.

Tom Smith is a landscape architect and urban designer currently at EDAW AECOM. His work has been diverse, ranging from masterplanning for the Chelsea Flower Show, to developing networks of rural communities on the Portuguese coast, to large-scale multidisciplinary landscape, engineering and architecture projects. He has been instrumental in the design of the London 2012 Olympic and Legacy Masterplan. He is currently focusing on leading the design and delivery of the Olympic and Legacy Parklands, as well as the development of the Legacy Masterplan framework.

Workshop tutors

Studio Masters

Alfredo Ramirez is an architect and director of Groundlab where he has won and developed several competitions, workshops, exhibitions and projects, including the winning entry for Longgang City international competition master plan and the 2011 International Horticultural Fair in Xi’an. Alfredo is also Director of the AA Visiting School in Mexico City and has given workshops and lectured on the topic of Landscape Urbanism and the work of Groundlab in Italy, Mexico, China, UK and Venezuela among others.

Eduardo Rico studied civil engineering in Spain and graduated from the AA’s Landscape Urbanism programme. He has acted as consultant and performed research in the fields of infrastructure and landscape in Spain and the UK. Currently he is involved in the development of infrastructural strategies for large-scale urban projects within the Arup engineering team as well as being part of the collective GroundLab.

Director

Eva Castro has been teaching at the AA since 2003. She studied at the Universidad Central de Venezuela and subsequently completed the AA Graduate Design programme with Jeff Kipnis. She is cofounder of Plasma Studio and GroundLab. She is winner of the Next Generation Architects Award, the Young Architect of the Year Award, the ContractWorld Award and the HotDip Galvanising Award. Her work is published and exhibited worldwide. Plasma and GroundLab are lead designers for the 2011 International Horticultural Fair in Xian, China.