CONSTRUCTED GROUND : LANDSCAPE URBANISM – POLLACK & LEFEBVRE VIA LAND READER

In the The Landscape Urbanism Reader (2007), editor and protagonist Charles Waldheim gathers together a set of essays that  formed the basis of a seminal movement in Landscape Architecture and has been the subject of much debate and contention with, amongst others, New Urbanism’ s Andres Duany (See The battle of the “- ism’s” & the “-ology’s”), The essay by Linda Pollack “Constructed Ground:of Scale” is one of the most practical  and using a diagram from Henri Lefebvre’s “The Production of Space’ (1991) published in French in the 1970’s,  sets out a way of considering the the city in its complexity as  “space of differences”

Linda Pollack, quoting Lefebvre’s  idea that it is an illusion to believe that we can see reality as it really is and further  his use of a diagram which introduces a Transitional Space (T)  between that of Private (P) and Global(G) which each is  in turn nested within each other. Thus when viewing the city it makes possible the realization that all scales are linked to each other and that we must take cognizance of this when we design even the smallest part and likewise that we must consider the local when we are planning the whole – they are intimately connected “holons” to use Ken Wilber’s term in his “‘A Brief History of Everything’ (2000)