- The sustainable urban territory, towards an environmental urbanism    83 kb by    Bradbury, Matthew | mbradbury@unitec.ac.nz    Short Outline Rethinking the contemporary city as a landscape, one in which the natural environment, water, plants, and topography are privileged, will ensure a balanced ecology. Abstract Traditional urbanism often divides the city between building and parks. Since the middle of the 19th century, the park was presented as a panacea to the ills of urban life. FL Olmsted, the designer of Central Park, explicitly invoked the body to expound on the worth of New York’s new park. 'The necessities for the Central Park are: 1. Health. - A million people will soon be crowded on this island, and if these Lungs of the City are not furnished, instead of the healthiest, this will become a sickly place'. Contemporary calls for more ’green space’ echo this classic urban dichotomy, now ‘landscaping’ replaces the park as a cure for the ills of the contemporary city. This paper suggests an alternative to the classical city/park dialectic. The paper begins by re conceptualized the contemporary city as a landscape, one in which the natural environment, water, plants, topography are privileged in a way that ensures a balanced ecology, leading to reduction of carbon consumption in the city. The paper draws on an urban design case study in Auckland New Zealand, to demonstrate how this speculation may be developed into a new urban design process. Through the use of spatial analysis tools, ArcGIS, the case study, a development of a city edge next to a new motorway development, is initiated by the mapping of the sites hydrology, the overland flow paths, and speculative indigenous horticulture patterns. New social networks are developed through investigation of the sites aspect and the surrounding urban matrix. Finally housing zones are proposed, ones that engage with the new city/landscape in unfamiliar yet socially and environmentally rewarding ways. A new urban model is proposed, one that responds to the headlong rush to urbanise the planet by foregrounding the development of a sustainable landscape that will lead to the development of a low carbon city. Keywords Landscape Urbanism GIS Case Study presented on the ISOCARP Congress 2009: Low Carbon Cities   Click to open the full paper as pdf document   Click to send an email to the author(s) of this paper