[World Changing]: I'm somewhat in love with The Greening of the City, Jane Jacobs' latest essay....
Jacobs goes on -- by way of discussing sprawl as a by-product of the cheapness of suburban parking and a agro-business planning mindset ('Look at them: monocultural housing tracts, erected on ever-larger scales, like so many endless fields of cabbages...') -- to say that landscape architecture is not only more organic and vibrant than most other branches of planning, but is at the forefront of a much wider movement to redefine the relationship between the built and the natural...
'In a sense, today's urban landscape architects are picking up the revolutionary view of nature that dissipated more than two centuries ago, but this time around they are viewing mankind and nature as partners, with nature as the senior partner and human beings the apprentices.'
Jacobs' The Death and Life of Great American Cities -- written more than 40 years ago -- was one of the seminal books that nourished our work at Institute for Local Self-Reliance ten years later -- and is still worthy and significant today.
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