After more than a century of heroic urban visions, urban dwellers today live in suburban subdivisions, gated communities, edge cities, apartment towers, and slums. The contemporary cities as we know are more often the embodiment of unexpected outcomes and unintended consequences rather than visionary planning.

As an alternative approach for rethinking and remaking today s cities and regions, this book explores the intersections of critical inquiry and immediate, substantive actions. The essays inside recognize the rich complexities of the present city not as barriers or obstacles but as grounds for uncovering opportunity and unleashing potential. Now Urbanism asserts that the future city is already here. It views city making as grounded in the imperfect, messy, yet rich reality of the existing city and the everyday purposeful agency of its dwellers.

Through a framework of "situating, grounding, performing, distributing, instigating, " and" enduring," these essays written by" "a multidisciplinary group of practitioners and scholars illustrate specificity, context, agency, and networks of actors and actions in the re-making of the contemporary city."

Richard Haag is best known for his rehabilitation of Gas Works Park in Seattle and for a series of remarkable gardens at the Bloedel Reserve on Bainbridge Island. He reshaped the field of landscape architecture as a designer, teacher, and activist. In 1964, Haag founded the landscape architecture department at the University of Washington, and his innovative work contributed to the increasingly significant design approach known as urban ecological design, which encourages thinking beyond the boundaries of gardens and parks to consider the broader roles that landscapes play within urban ecosystems, such as storm water drainage and wildlife habitat. Gas Works Park is studied in every survey of twentieth-century landscape architecture as a modern work that challenged the tenets of modernism by engaging a toxic site and celebrating an industrial past. Haag's work with ecologists and soil scientists in his landscape remediation and reclamation projects opened new areas of inquiry into the adaptive reuse of post-industrial sites. Thaisa Way places Haag's work within the context of changes in the practice of landscape architecture over the past five decades in the Pacific Northwest and nationally. The book should be of interest to specialists as well as to readers who are interested in the changes in urban landscapes inspired by Haag's work. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fUBeOCA8-kQ

Women have practiced as landscape architects for over a century, since the founding of the practice as a profession in the United States in the 1890s. They came to landscape architecture as gardeners, garden designers, horticulturalists, and fine artists. They simultaneously shaped the profession while reflecting contemporary practice. It is all the more surprising, then, that the history of women in American landscape design has received relatively little attention. Thaisa Way corrects this oversight in "Unbounded Practice: Women and Landscape Architecture in the Early Twentieth Century. "Describing design practice in landscape architecture during the first half of the twentieth century, the book serves as a narrative both of women--such as Beatrix Jones Farrand, Marian Cruger Coffin, Annette Hoyt Flanders, Ellen Biddle Shipman, Martha Brookes Hutcheson, and Marjorie Sewell Cautley--and of the practice as it became a profession.

Winner of a 2008 David R. Coffin Publication Grant, awarded by the Foundation for Landscape Studies

After more than a century of heroic urban visions, urban dwellers today live in suburban subdivisions, gated communities, edge cities, apartment towers, and slums. The contemporary cities as we know are more often the embodiment of unexpected outcomes and unintended consequences rather than visionary planning.

As an alternative approach for rethinking and remaking today s cities and regions, this book explores the intersections of critical inquiry and immediate, substantive actions. The essays inside recognize the rich complexities of the present city not as barriers or obstacles but as grounds for uncovering opportunity and unleashing potential. Now Urbanism asserts that the future city is already here. It views city making as grounded in the imperfect, messy, yet rich reality of the existing city and the everyday purposeful agency of its dwellers.

Through a framework of "situating, grounding, performing, distributing, instigating, " and" enduring," these essays written by" "a multidisciplinary group of practitioners and scholars illustrate specificity, context, agency, and networks of actors and actions in the re-making of the contemporary city."