Urban Runoff and the City of Relations - Politics of Urban Runoff: Nature, Technology, and the Sustainable City - page 22

For McHarg, form followed function, and function was determined by
the principles of ecological science. He recognized that the application of
scientifi c principles was useful to garner infl uence, respect, and power, as
did engineers in the nineteenth century.
One of McHarg's most famous projects has urban drainage as its struc-
tural backbone. The Woodlands, a twenty-seven-thousand-acre master
planned community located thirty miles north of Houston, Texas, was
built in the 1970s by oil and gas magnate George Mitchell. The project
was part of a larger movement in the 1960s and 1970s to reimagine
suburban development and metropolitan form; today, the Woodlands is
often heralded as the most comprehensive example of McHarg's ecological
planning method. 22 Along with his design team from the noted landscape
architecture fi rm of Wallace, McHarg, Roberts & Todd, McHarg identi-
fi ed fl ooding as the most critical environmental concern of the project.
The team used the natural contours of the site to create a surface drainage
system that preserved fl oodplain areas, limited impervious surface cover-
age, and promoted infi ltration of stormwater rather than conveyance and
disposal, predating the source control strategies of LID practitioners by
several decades (see fi gure 2.1). 23
Today, critics of the Woodlands recognize its innovative aspects but
frequently denounce it as a green and attractive form of suburban sprawl.
Planning theorist Ann Forsyth characterizes the Woodlands as an “eco-
burb” because the car-based development is shrouded in a lush forest of
trees and natural waterways. The project comprises 16 percent open space
and 4.4 dwellings per residential acre (equivalent to typical suburban resi-
dential density), and the most prominent visual feature of the Woodlands
is its wooded aesthetic. 24 The implicit message of the Woodlands is that
suburban development densities are required to protect the ecological
integrity of the landscape and ecological science can be used to justify the
appropriate density for human habitation. Refl ecting on the Woodlands,
urban theorists Andres Duany and David Brain write, “The outcome of
this environmental model is that the better parts of nature are preserved
while traffi c-generating and socially dysfunctional development is cam-
oufl aged with a natural aesthetic.” 25
Duany and Brain's assessment refl ects a larger critique of McHarg's
ecological science approach to landscape architecture and site planning
by those who emphasize the social rather than natural aspects of cities.
McHarg's critics describe the layer-cake method as deterministic, utilitar-
ian, and ecocentric; indeed, McHarg describes himself as an “ecological
determinist” and his colleagues characterize him as an evangelist of the