Urban Runoff and the City of Relations - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 21

of twentieth century urban development rather than standard practice.
Specialization of urban design and development would contribute to the
modernist dichotomy of form versus function with aesthetic practices
such as park design and landscaping relegated to landscape architecture,
while the regulation of urban waterfl ows was the province of engineers.
The emphasis of landscape architecture was fi rst and foremost on aesthet-
ics, leaving function and governance to engineers and urban planners. 15
This division of labor between form and function would have important
implications for the governance of urban nature; Schultz notes that “un-
like engineers, landscape architects contributed little to the reformulation
of public policy or to changes in administrative reach and authority of
municipal governments.” 16
The Emergence of Ecological Planning
At the beginning of the contemporary environmental era, landscape archi-
tects broke the mold of aesthetic practice and reembraced the integrated
design approach developed by Olmsted. 17 After World War II, landscape
architect Garrett Eckbo promoted landscape design and planning as a
science for social engineering, and in the 1960s, ecological planner Ian
McHarg crystallized the idea of merging landscape design with ecologi-
cal science in his groundbreaking topic Design with Nature . 18 However,
McHarg rejected the organic philosophy of nineteenth-century landscape
design in favor of a rational, objective practice based on the principles of
ecological science. His approach involved the layering of different attri-
butes atop one another to plan cities within existing environmental condi-
tions, a strategy that would later be adapted to the widely used practices
of geographic information science and environmental impact statements.
McHarg's so-called layer-cake method continues to be favored by contem-
porary conservation biologists and landscape ecologists who use complex
remote sensing and modeling techniques to describe the ecology of cities. 19
Like Olmsted, McHarg was interested in the relationships between
nature, society, and technology, but he replaced Olmsted's embrace of
mystery and soul with a rational and objective approach based in the
natural sciences. McHarg was highly critical of the artistic focus of land-
scape architecture that had dominated since the 1930s, noting that “art
has occult and esoteric pretensions and an intrinsic obscurantism.” 20 He
emphasized landscape architecture and ecological planning practices as the
application of natural science principles and advocated for the rejection of
a signature artistic style in favor of collaborative interdisciplinary work. 21