''Landscape's role for our time must be redefined Now. The need is urgent. This book sketches twp major new tasks that come out of such redefinition, and shows how they can be accomplished.
First, Landscape can now create a new kind of livable city; second, through design it can broker the coexistence of human beings with the rest of nature. To design a livable city that coexists with nature as a whole will require establishing different relationship among parts. The harmful relations created by nineteenth-century industrialization will have to be revised in some cases, reversed on others.
I have chosen a Manifesto as the format to express the critical shifts needed to carry out these tasks. You may be surprised by the use of the word Manifesto. Usually it means a rigid set of rules, pronounced in a stentorian voice, that you must (lest you fall of the right path). This Manifesto instead proposes the realignments required of our work and lives in order for us to participate in the permanent re-creation of our world. ''
Diana Balmori
The book proposes to a new definition of the landscape, with bringing together the concepts from biology, evolutionary theory, and ecology. Biology shows that even at the level of our cells, we are historical structure that adapts old pieces to new uses - but that history does not move toward and end we plan on. Evolutionary theory shows us a nature constantly changing, and us changing with it. Ecology puts us inside nature and shows our interdependence with its many parts.
Landscape Manifesto - 25 points
1.Nostalgia for the past and Utopian dreams for the future prevent us from looking at our present.
2. Nature is the flow of change within which humans exist. Evolution is its history. Ecology is our understanding of its present phase.
3. All things in nature are constantly changing. Landscape artists need to design to allow for change, while seeking a new course that enhances the coexistence of humans and the rest of nature.
4. Landscape forms encapsulate unseen assumptions. To expose them is to enter the economic and aesthetic struggles of our time.
5. Historical precedents do not support the common prejudice that human intervention is always harmful to the rest of nature.
6. Shifts are taking place before our eyes. Landscape artists and architects need to give them a name and make them visible. Aesthetic expertise is needed to enable the transforming relations between humans and the rest of nature to break through into public spaces.
7. High visibility, multiple alliances, and public support are critical to new landscape genres that portray our present.
8. Landscape - through new landscape elements - enters the city and modifies our way of being in it.
9. New landscape elements can become niches for species forced out of their original environment.
10. The new view of plants as groups of interrelated species modifying each other, rather than as separate and fixed, exemplifies fluidity a main motif of landscape form.
11. Nostalgic images of nature are readily accepted but they are like stage scenery for the wrong play.
12. in his History of Modern Taste in Gardening (1780), Horace Walpole writes that William Kent ''was the first to leap the fence and show that the whole of nature was a garden.'' Today landscape has leapt the fence in the opposite direction, to the city, making it part of nature.
13. Existing urban spaces can be rescued from their current damaging interaction with nature.
14. Landscape artists can reveal the forces of nature underlying cities, creating a new urban identity from them.
15. Landscape can create meeting places where people can delight in unexpected forms and spaces, inventing why and how they are to appreciated.
16. A landscape, like a moment, never happens twice. This lack of fixity is landscape's asset.
17. We can heighten the desire for new interactions between humans and nature where it is least expected: in derelict spaces.
18. Emerging landscapes are becoming brand-new actors on the political stage.
19. Landscape renders the city as constantly evolving in response to climate, geography, and history
20. Landscape can show artist intention without imposing a predetermined meaning.
21. Landscape can bridge the line between ourselves and other parts of nature between ourselves and a river.
22. Landscape is becoming the main actor of the urban stage, not just a destination.
23. The edge between architecture and landscape can be porous.
24. Landscape can be like poetry, highly suggestive and open to multiple interpretations.
25. We must out the twenty-first century city in nature rather than put nature in the city. To put a city in nature will mean using engineered systems that function as those in nature and deriving form from them.
