Retooling Metropolis: Working Landscapes, Emergent Urbanism (Harvard GSD Studio Report) - Softcover

Reed, Chris

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1934510688 ISBN 13: 9781934510681

Publisher: Harvard University Graduate School of Design, 2017

Synopsis

What is the status of the 20th-century metropolis? How do we rethink it (and retool it) in an era of significant climate change, considerable social and economic inequities, and cultural dissonance? And what of this in a disciplinary age when conversations on urbanism are likely to be better informed by ideas of indeterminacy, dynamism, operational ecologies and landscape, and emergence over time? These questions are at the center of this research and studio work, both of which examine possibilities for cultivating new landscape occupations and new forms of nascent urbanism in an area of Houston along the eastern stretch of the Buffalo Bayou. This is an area marked by large-scale abandonment, some active heavy industry, remnant poor neighborhoods, industrial ruins, denuded ecologies, contaminated lands, and a radically transformed hydrologic system. How does one act here, when contemporary environmental and social circumstances call for a shift in thinking and a need for change, yet where there is no obvious economic or political driver to initiate or sponsor transformation on the ground? Retooling Metropolis: Working Landscapes, Emergent Urbanism is a Studio Report from the Fall 2016 semester at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design.

Edition details

• Publisher: Harvard University Graduate School of Design
• Publication date: 2017
• ISBN 10: 1934510688
• ISBN 13: 9781934510681
• Binding: Paperback
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 112