Video lecture on Landscape Urbanism (2010) by Charles Waldheim at the UNCC College of Arts & Architecture Lecture.

I just got my hands on Reshaping Toronto’s Waterfront, In the Nature of Cities and Changing Toronto as well some past essays by Gene Desfor about the history of Toronto’s urban and exurban growth patterns. What Waldheim makes very clear in his lecture is the fact that while urban planning was at an intellectual end after the demolition of Pruitt-Igoe, the neo-liberal dominance in the 1980s ended planning in general. What has emerged is an urban form fuelled by competitive economic growth. This is the realm of landscape urbanism apparently. The translation between ecology and economics, the idea of growing a place through modest overhead, dynamics and indeterminacy, is what serves as the recent paradigm of landscape design.

So what does that mean in Toronto? Well the problem with neo-liberal growth is that its is inherently biased towards white, middle-class and in regards to density-increasing urban development, the ‘creative class’. Desfor states that the Waterfront proposal is fuelled by the city’s ambitions to qualify or remain relevant as a competitive world-class city. Toronto has always suffered from poor self-esteem and an inferiority complex, but it is sad to realize all the fighting for ‘good urban spaces that are beautiful’ results in homogenous bourgeois (does anyone use that term anymore?) spaces that don’t give back to the city. I didn’t realize how important the global economy is and how Toronto is actually a neo-liberal city in spite of its liberal politics.

(Source: afasiaarq.blogspot.com)

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