The American landscape is an extremely complex terrain born from a history of collective and individual experiences. These created environments, which all may be called metropolitan landscapes, constantly challenge students and professionals in the fields of architecture, design and planning to consider new ways of making lively public places. This book brings together varied voices in urban design theory and practice to explore new ways of understanding place and our position in it.

Understanding Metropolitan Landscapes considers and reflects on the fundamental relationships between metropolitan regions and their landscapes. It investigates how planning and policy help to protect, manage and enhance the landscapes that sustain our urban settlements. As global populations become more metropolitan, landscapes evolve to become increasingly dynamic and entropic; and the distinction between urban and non-urban is further fragmented and yet these spaces play an increasingly important role in sustainable development. This book opens a key critical discussion into the relational aspects of city and landscape and how each element shapes the boundaries of the other, covering topics such as material natures, governance systems, processes and policy. It presents a compendium of concepts and ideas that have emerged from landscape architecture, planning, and environmental policy and landscape management. Using a range of illustrated case studies, it provokes discussions on the major themes driving the growth of cities by exploring the underlying tensions around notions of sustainable settlement, climate change adaption, urban migration, new modes of governance and the role of landscape in policy and decision making at national, provincial and municipal levels.

Adaptations of the Metropolitan Landscape in Delta Regions is about environmental quality and the long term livability of urban areas. In decades to come, climate change will affect cities everywhere, but nowhere have the effects of climate change already been felt as strongly as in low-lying coastal cities, cities located in large river deltas and near tidal estuaries. This book reflects on the contribution that spatial planning and urban design can make to a complex discussion about how city form and landscapes will need to adapt within metropolitan areas. The book’s focus is on the urban form of three delta regions: the Pearl River Delta in Southern China; the Rhine, Maas, and Scheldt Delta in the Netherlands; and the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California. The three regions differ greatly, but despite their different political systems, history, culture and locations in three different climate zones, all three regions will be forced to respond to similar issues that will trigger transformations and adaptations to their urban form. Richly illustrated in color with detailed diagrams, models, photographs and sketches, the book is written for students, scholars and practitioners of environmental planning, and designers who need to respond to the future form of cities in light of climate change. For the professions shaping the physical world of cities and regions, the challenge is not only one of designing physical geometries but of social consequences.

This edited volume covers many aspects of the Metropolitan Landscapes. Solutions are needed to meet the demand of the citizens of a renewed metropolitan region landscape. It opens up discussions about possible toolkits for strategic actions based on understanding the territory from geographical, urban, architectural, economic, environmental, and public policy perspectives. This book intends to promote the Metropolitan dwelling quality, ensuring human well-being proposing a discussion on the resilient articulation of the interface space among the city's infrastructure, agriculture, and nature. This book results from the Symposium: Metropolitan Landscapes that MSLab of the Politecnico di Milano and ETSA (Sevilla) organized at the IALE 2019 Conference (Milan, July 2019) to manage radical territory transformation with a strategic vision. The widespread growth of urban areas indicates the importance of building resilient sustainable cities capable of minimizing climate-change impact production. The Symposium aimed to discuss the Urban Metabolism approach considering the combination of Landscapes set in a single Metropolitan Ecosystem. Accordingly, new design strategies of transformation, replacement or maintenance can compose Urban-Rural Linkage patterns and a decalage of different landscape contexts. Ecological interest in environmental sustainability, compatibility, and resilience is not tied exclusively to the balance between production and energy consumption. Thus, it is the integration over time and at several scales of the urban and rural landscapes and their inhabitants that nourish the Metropolitan Bioregion. Moreover, the Metropolitan Landscape Book's research hypothesis is the need for a Glossary, strengthening the basis of understanding Metropolitan Landscape's complexity. This book's topic is particularly relevant to Landscape Urbanism, Architecture, Urban disciplines Scholars, Students and Practitioners who want to be connected in a significant way with Metropolitan Discipline’s research field.

In this work, Paul Mattingly provides a model for understanding suburban development through his narrative history of Leonia, New Jersey, an early commuter suburb of New York City.

For generations, New Yorkers have joked about "The City's" interminable tearing down and building up. The city that the whole world watches seems to be endlessly remaking itself. When the locals and the rest of the world say "New York," they mean Manhattan, a crowded island of commercial districts and residential neighborhoods, skyscrapers and tenements, fabulously rich and abjectly poor cheek by jowl. Of course, it was not always so; New York's metamorphosis from compact port to modern metropolis occurred during the mid-nineteenth century. Empire City tells the story of the dreams that inspired the changes in the landscape and the problems that eluded solution.Author David Scobey paints a remarkable panorama of New York's uneven development, a city-building process careening between obsessive calculation and speculative excess. Envisioning a new kind of national civilization, "bourgeois urbanists" attempted to make New York the nation's pre-eminent city. Ultimately, they created a mosaic of grand improvements, dynamic change, and environmental disorder. Empire City sets the stories of the city's most celebrated landmarks--Central Park, the Brooklyn Bridge, the downtown commercial center--within the context of this new ideal of landscape design and a politics of planned city building. Perhaps such an ambitious project for guiding growth, overcoming spatial problems, and uplifting the public was bound to fail; still, it grips the imagination.

One of the oldest metropolitan areas in North America, Montreal has evolved from a remote fur-trading post in New France into an international center for services and technology. A city and an island located at the confluence of the Ottawa and St. Lawrence Rivers, it is uniquely situated to serve as an international port while also providing rail access to the Canadian interior. The historic capital of the Province of Canada, once Canada's foremost metropolis, Montreal has a multifaceted cultural heritage drawn from European and North American influences. Thanks to its rich past, the city offers an ideal setting for the study of an evolving urban environment. Metropolitan Natures presents original histories of the diverse environments that constitute Montreal and it region. It explores the agricultural and industrial transformation of the metropolitan area, the interaction of city and hinterland, and the interplay of humans and nature. The fourteen chapters cover a wide range of issues, from landscape representations during the colonial era to urban encroachments on the Kahnawake Mohawk reservation on the south shore of the island, from the 1918-1920 Spanish flu epidemic and its ensuing human environmental modifications to the urban sprawl characteristic of North America during the postwar period. Situations that politicize the environment are discussed as well, including the economic and class dynamics of flood relief, highways built to facilitate recreational access for the middle class, power-generating facilities that invade pristine rural areas, and the elitist environmental hegemony of fox hunting. Additional chapters examine human attempts to control the urban environment through street planning, waterway construction, water supply, and sewerage.