Landscape Infrastructures DVD

From the sleeve of the Landscape Infrastructures DVD:

“Responding to the growing inertia of urban planning and the unchallenged predominance of civil engineering at the close of the 20th century, landscape infrastructure emerges to redefine the conventional role of infrastructure in the future of urbanized regions. Foregrounding the dynamics of living, biophysical systems historically marginalized by the divide between the economy and ecology of big cities, this dual agency repositions landscape as a complex, instrumental system of essential services, resources and processes that underpin contemporary urban economies.”

Signaling a departure from centralized forms of urban development and the predominance of civil engineering in the design of cities, more flexible forms of infrastructure and design practices have begun to emerge during the past decade as a response to the increasing demand for renewable and integrative forms of urban development. Strategies that combine landscape ecological principles with urban infrastructure are now rapidly becoming the dominant logic in the renewal of infrastructure systems for new industries as well as contemporary cities.

Foregrounding the reciprocity between landscape and infrastructure, this one-day symposium gathers a series of influential thinkers and practitioners from around the world to discuss emerging practices, paradigms and technologies that are reshaping the contemporary urban landscape. Re-examining the historically divisive, technocratic nature of engineered infrastructure, the symposium aims at formulating a more synthetic vision of urban infrastructure as a landscape that combines ecological and economic imperatives of big cities and urban regions. The penultimate objective of the symposium is to reposition the agency of landscape architects, urban designers and architects vis-à-vis the design of urban infrastructures for the new economy of the 21st century.


I'm trying to find and order a copy of this thing, it looks totally badass. Fuck though it makes me want to weasel my way into University of Toronto or Harvard, bastards.