What is urban vegetation for?

Reading the excellent Topos  (no. 77) in the library today, I was struck by a comment from Jorg Sieweke in a piece called ‘Paradox City’. He claimed that “the promise of Landscape Urbanism has lost momentum and struggles with credibility ...people are overwhelmed by too much change and too few means of handling it”. This seemed to me an odd claim to make in a journal brimming with LU thinking, both in its theory-based features and its write-ups of built projects. Immediately following Sieweke’s article, for example, were some very clear-thinking polemical pieces by Leibniz University’s Antje Stokman. She writes with simple purpose and legibility about LU thought and practice, for instance stating “one can never control landscape because it is a process.” She has prompted me to synthesise some thoughts about planting within an LU context, so here is my own list of some things that such urban vegetation might achieve, if done well;

1.       It is allowed to grow and change in unplanned ways which are steered by the designer

2.       It has a constructive interplay with human systems

3.       It is the backbone of a place rather than merely an adornment; it drives the process of city formation

4.       It has the potential to be the basis for new natures

5.       Its beauty is in pragmatic function not visual aesthetic

6.       It resolves conflict between design and ecology

7.       Its a means of reducing  human alienation from the urban environment

8.       It has concord with the identity of the place and is located in its biotic context

9.       It defies accepted divisions between the urban and the natural

10.   Is sustainable

11.   It aids social and physical reclamation of spaces

12.   It sows the seeds of future possibility at all scales

13.   Has final forms open to speculation

Hmm, thats quite a few. I propose to reassess these, one by one and in no particular order, in future blogs. I will probably get rid of some of them and edit others. Some might turn out to be laughable. But in the spirit of discovery and genuine enquiry, let the thought experiments begin!