"What’s remarkable about all spontaneous urban plants is the fact that they require no human assistance to assert and maintain themselves in extreme, often volatile urban conditions, while providing the same ecologically performative benefits of traditional landscape plants and street trees. Rather than seek to discard and eradicate them, we now have an opportunity to harness their benefits and tell their histories."

"There’s two maps of New York overlapping here. The map of places that are somehow forgotten and beautifully mysterious, and the map of people that are forgotten."

How did I never bookmark this before? Show me a photograph of a motel that I don't love. No, really some good stuff in the fine new topographics tradition. [flickr: .bijou]

official site of the Chernobyl Disaster Zone

"The hangar on the edge of Floyd Bennett Field has the familiar, post-apocalyptic look of urban decay"

lovely photographs of the Line by Colin Stearns.

Step by step. Terrif.

GIS clearinghouse in area of 'natural resource protection and land preservation' for Wisconsin, Illinois and Indiana. "Partnership between the Center for Neighborhood Technology and Openlands. Funding for this project was generously provided by The Joyce Foundation."

"Across 400 acres in Brooklyn that served as landfills — parcels that are still listed as toxic waste sites — 33,000 trees and shrubs and a variety of grasses are taking root." Heavy planting strategy for a frmr landfill.

Peter Del Tredici's plant site: "We vilify as weeds those organisms that flourish in the urban environment without our approval or assistance. It is these plants-the spontaneous vegetation of the urban environment-that are the subject of this website."

jessicabridger.com

conceptual and land art. via leahb IRL

How to do a design project for a city you don't want to visit: just acknowledge that you're doing it for Google Earth, and lay some transparencies on screenshots. Laziness is godliness.

Review of the 4 delta metropool proposals from the 2002 brief.

She of the Most Complete tree collection on flickr.

"If Masonville Cove is anything, it is a place without original conditions"

1930 Olmsted-Bartholomew Plan for the Los Angeles Region

"Landscape artist Alan Sonfist (1946- ) created Time Landscape as a living monument to the forest that once blanketed Manhattan Island. He proposed the project in 1965. After extensive research on New York’s botany, geology, and history Sonfist and local community members used a palette of native trees, shrubs, wild grasses, flowers, plants, rocks, and earth to plant the 25' x 40' rectangular plot at the northeast corner of La Guardia Place and West Houston Street in 1978. The result of their efforts is a slowly developing forest that represents the Manhattan landscape inhabited by Native Americans and encountered by Dutch settlers in the early 17th century."

Disturbed sites, chain link, rubble, weed trees, entropic succession

765 moves into landscape architecture / art / generative geometry.

Landscape writer & early critic of Victor Gruen, apparently. To read

rural / urban test plots: "ecology on amphetamines ... domination by invasive weed trees: ailanthus, Norway maples and mulberries. [After] five years ... the biggest ailanthus in the rural test site measured about five feet tall. The city site boasted a 2

up and coming landscape architect

Bettina Johae's project remaps the five boroughs based on waterfront accessibility inferred from excursions around the perimeter of each. ... gated communities, ship cemeteries, hazardous waste dumps, beach-front property and sleepy neighborhoods, exotici

"The Canary Project produces visual media, events, and artwork that builds public understanding of human-induced climate change and energize commitment to solutions."

bump-out based stormwater-management

"short film composed of pix taken automatically from back seat of car while driving cross-country from PDX to NH. Taken over 5 days, every 10 seconds"

waste lands

brownfield lookup

"WANDERING EARTH MOUNDS AND GRAVEL PATHS"

open contributions of poetry, photo & writing on the quintessential urban invasive. Henry James: Washington Square was mostly Ailanthus

ghetto palm working group

fire are a land use problem. disaster (landscape) urbanism

7 reasons to like grasscrete. SPOILERS: #7 is the best!

Daily superfund site for 2007-8

"The scientists who produced the map estimate that more surface area is devoted to lawns than to any other single irrigated crop in the country. ...More than 3x the acreage than irrigated corn."

"This piece consists of a complete listing of Manhattan property, indexed by block/lot. Blocks are indicated through an alternating dark-gray background. Vacant lots are invisible until moused-over, in which case the visual hierarchy is inverted and they

Thoreau picking huckleberries after getting out of jail, the connections between city and country, landscape and politics and why "a passion for justice and pleasure in small things are not incompatible"

"an appropriation-friendly, browsable collection of ~40,000 books, periodicals, printed ephemera & government documents, located in SF... freedom to browse serendipitously is becoming rarer."

"A petrosomatoglyph is an image of parts of a human or animal body incised in rock" carved-in-stone footprints used "for the journey and return" and for King-making. Cf Sword and the Stone, Grauman's Chinese

"Imagine if Walton were more like [the patron of Kindred Spirits], supporting the art of her time. Imagine if, in the mode of the Venice Biennale or the Sao Paolo Biennale, there was a Wal-Mart biennale."

of Int'l Airport Montello fame

The 10,000 acre Hobet Mountaintop Removal Complex in Boone County, West Virginia, superimposed over 38 different cities with Google Earth.

"I began to see the built environment ... as less than real and more like stage sets" Photographer/painter, saw speak @ Cleve Museum in 2002. Site is a dense archive of visual detritus, incl wordless logos

"CUP makes educational projects about places and how they change."

A little scary in the long-term; great map of East Branch Delaware (02040102) and Croton (02030101) watersheds. (#s thnx to next link)

via leah

property for sale from city of Chi.

New magazine, published by 'stockyard inst', based at Depaul (?). Needs a dose of humor & central place theory. What's the word for being both excited and depressed by something?

art proj exploring the cultural & historical landscape of IL/ the USA. Focus on Amer. Indian histories & appropriation of. rilly great.

when you start quoting anecdotes from a book you read from the library years ago, you should probably just buy it. thank god for the internets that I could find which book it was I was talking about

All advertising effaced on Vienna shopping Neubaugasse. Provokes "existential horror vaccui" (?)

Focal points for surveyors. Lines of influence/ zones of increasing errors

Burnham suggested the way to deal with the impoverished neighborhoods would be to cut "'broad thoroughfares through the unwholesome district.'"

Using Chicago, Champaign-Urbana and the land between as site, setting, and subject, investigate movements of water, resources, waste, and power across and through the categories of urban, rural, and wild.

Atchafalaya

USA Topo maps

on landscape archit

canadian drainage