Category: Urban planning

Saving The Green City: Srinagar, Kashmir

In 1895 Sir Water Lawrence wrote about Srinagar and the Dal lake: ‘The willows change from green to silver grey and delicate russet, with a red tone on the stems and branches, casting colours on the clear water of the lake which contrast most beautifully with the rich olives and yellow greens of the floating …

Mount Auburn Cemetery in Spring

Mount Auburn Cemetery in Watertown and Cambridge, Massachusetts, was founded in 1831 and became a model for the American ‘rural’ cemetery movement. It was listed on the United States National Register of Historic Places in 1975 and received National Historic Landmark designation in 2003. In an earlier article on ‘A Landscape of Memory: Mount Auburn Cemetery‘, some …

Genius of Place: The National Parks, Olmsted & Landscape Urbanism (Lecture Report)

As part of The Friends of Fairsted Lecture Series for 2015-16 Ethan Carr (University of Massachusetts Amherst) presented a talk on ‘Our National Parks and the “Fairsted School”: An Enduring Legacy’. The 2015-16 Lecture Series is organised in Recognition of the 100th Anniversary of the National Park Service. Tom Woodward (President, The Friends of Fairsted) gave …

Watching the Royals Die: The plight of the Chinar Tree in Kashmir

Greater Kashmir, one of the main newspapers in Kashmir, published the article ‘Watching the Royals Die’ by Jaasindah Mir and Jan Haenraets about the plight of the endangered Chinar trees in Kashmir. To view the full text as Pdf, go to this LINK (790 KB). These royals are the Chinar trees, the booyn, of our Kashmiri land. …

Caracas, Venezuela: The Informal City

The documentary Caracas: The Informal City, directed by Rob Schröder, follows the Caracas-based architects Alfredo Brillembourg and Hubert Klumpner. The documentary is a couple years old (released in 2007), but remains a fascinating sample of the challenges that exist in mega-cities across the world. It shows the informal urban development that can be seen in many developing countries …

Nesting Instincts

This article highlights a winning Art + Habitat design by Atelier Anonymous in partnership with Mike Seymour, and which features in the Spring 2015 issue of Landscapes|Paysages, the Canadian Society for Landscape Architects’ journal. For Barn Owls (Tyto alba), life can be precarious. Indeed, in many areas of the world, including British Columbia, they are threatened or rare, in large part …

A Non-Urban Approach

The World’s Societies have become largely urban; nearly everywhere, land has been occupied or colonized. Where once identity and community were linked to the land and to natural systems, the landscape is being stripped away, new layers added. During this process of transformation, society has become accustomed to an ‘urban approach’: a reliance on interventions that …