Open urban spaces are an ideal stage for public events. An important prerequisite for their design in an increasingly heterogeneous multicultural cityscape is the relationship between design, use, and social function.The book documents both temporary as well as permanent installations of various kinds – from the open-air courtyard of a museum to the design of a river bank promenade, through to a city park.

A call for landscape architects to leave the office and return to the garden. Addressing one of the most repressed subjects in landscape architecture, this book could only have been written by someone who is both an experienced gardener and a landscape architect. With Overgrown, Julian Raxworthy offers a watershed work in the tradition of Ian McHarg, Anne Whiston Spirn, Kevin Lynch, and J. B. Jackson. As a discipline, landscape architecture has distanced itself from gardening, and landscape architects take pains to distinguish themselves from gardeners or landscapers. Landscape architects tend to imagine gardens from the office, representing plants with drawings or other simulations, whereas gardeners work in the dirt, in real time, planting, pruning, and maintaining. In Overgrown, Raxworthy calls for the integration of landscape architecture and gardening. Each has something to offer the other: Landscape architecture can design beautiful spaces, and gardening can enhance and deepen the beauty of garden environments over time. Growth, says Raxworthy, is the medium of garden development; landscape architects should leave the office and go into the garden in order to know growth in an organic, nonsimulated way. Raxworthy proposes a new practice for working with plant material that he terms “the viridic” (after “the tectonic” in architecture), from the Latin word for green, with its associations of spring and growth. He builds his argument for the viridic through six generously illustrated case studies of gardens that range from “formal” to “informal” approaches—from a sixteenth-century French Renaissance water garden to a Scottish poet-scientist's “marginal” garden, barely differentiated from nature. Raxworthy argues that landscape architectural practice itself needs to be “gardened,” brought back into the field. He offers a “Manifesto for the Viridic” that casts designers and plants as vegetal partners in a renewed practice of landscape gardening.

This book aims to understand how the wellbeing benefits of urban green space (UGS) are analysed and valued and why they are interpreted and translated into action or inaction, into ‘success’ and/or ‘failure’. The provision, care and use of natural landscapes in urban settings (e.g. parks, woodland, nature reserves, riverbanks) are under-researched in academia and under-resourced in practice. Our growing knowledge of the benefits of natural urban spaces for wellbeing contrasts with asset management approaches in practice that view public green spaces as liabilities. Why is there a mismatch between what we know about urban green space and what we do in practice? What makes some UGS more ‘successful’ than others? And who decides on this measure of ‘success’ and how is this constituted? This book sets out to answer these and related questions by exploring a range of approaches to designing, planning and managing different natural landscapes in urban settings.

This book on urban design extends and develops the widely accepted 'compact city' solution. It provides a design proposal for a new kind of sustainable urban landscape: Urban Agriculture. By growing food within an urban rather than exclusively rural environment, urban agriculture would reduce the need for industrialized production, packaging and transportation of foodstuffs to the city dwelling consumers. The revolutionary and innovative concepts put forth in this book have potential to shape the future of our cities quality of life within them. Urban design is shown in practice through international case studies and the arguments presented are supported by quantified economic, environmental and social justifications.

A Landscape Inventory is a richly illustrated and elegantly designed manifesto on landscape experimentation, the work of the internationally renowned architect, Michel Desvigne. As an "anti-monograph," this publication is not comprehensive and projects are not discussed in depth. Instead, it features a composite view of elements such as tree pattern and density across scales, from diminutive urban courtyard to territory, to reveal the weight of planting and material choices in shaping landscapes, irrespective of design language. Highly idiosyncratic, A Landscape Inventory offers a broader reflection on how to present and represent landscapes, organized in two parts - equally casual and purposeful. The first discusses Desvigne's trajectory, influences, and design method; the second is an inventory of elements, a contact sheet of details to be assembled and reconfigured without prescribed order. Both focused and panoramic, Desvigne's antipathy for "recognizable design" is revealed with his ambition to resist political shifts and master planning with a panoply of landscape strategies such as pilot, demonstration garden, and prototype. Intended to be of great interest to those concerned with the shaping of the environment, this publication can be used as a thesaurus of landscape components - a quick reference to trigger the design imagination of students and other curious individuals.

Focusing on iconic parks in Paris, New York, and Mexico City, Heath Schenker explores the cultural and social meanings embedded in these elaborate stage sets. Schenker teases out the goals and ambitions of park proponents and describes the singular ways in which the public received and used the parks in each city. The book showcases some of the trademark features of these parks, ranging from the soaring, rocky cliffs of Buttes-Chaumont in Paris to the mythic Aztec springs of Chapultepec Park in Mexico City to the secluded Dairy in Central Park.

The creation of metropolitan areas is influenced by a wide array of factors, both practical and ecological. They can also be influenced by immaterial characteristics of a given area. The Handbook of Research on Perception-Driven Approaches to Urban Assessment and Design is a scholarly resource that assesses metropolitan development and its relation to the ecological and sustainability issues these areas face. Featuring coverage on a wide range of topics such as user-centered urban planning, perception of urban landscapes, and thermal comfort in urban contexts, this publication is geared toward professionals, practitioners, researchers, and students seeking relevant research on the effective planning of metropolitan areas and their relation to the ecological and sustainability issues that face such areas.