Landscape Architecture: Landscape Architecture: - School of ...

Cooper, Robertson & Partners, Coastal resort community, WindMark Beach, Florida, due for completion 2015
Cooper, Robertson & Partners’ ecologically sensitive masterplan for a large coastal resort community at WindMark Beach preserves the
local dunes, wetlands and marshes and relocates a local highway away from the beach. Employing planning principles derived from the
boardwalk communities along the Fire Island National Seashore (New York) and Radburn (New Jersey), individual house plots face on
to raised boardwalks and have preservation zones to save existing flora. Houses are raised on piers to protect nearby wetland
ecologies and to allow existing patterns of hydrology to remain. Vehicles approach from parking courts located at the rear of plots.
Paths lead back from the beach into the neighbourhoods and surrounding wetlands that will be preserved as parks.
CityPlan 1996. Here, planners linked the central enclave and
waterfront armatures to eight planned high-density suburban
subcentres using regional public transport and bicycle paths
(all set within a green belt boundary). Nor can many American
cities match Vancouver’s switch from a predominantly
automobile city to 40 per cent bike-commuting, with bus,
subway, rail, ferry and foot traffic also cutting down cars. The
Canadian city has also pioneered a ‘smart growth’ regional
planning approach that highlights the local watershed, and
protects the Rocky Mountains forests and the archipelago of
islands that make up the city region, using green belts. The
Economist Intelligence Unit has consistently rated Vancouver
among the top five most liveable cities in the world (it was
number one in 2005). Only Portland, Vancouver’s American
neighbour, comes close with its Calthorpe Associates’ 1990
Metro Vision 2040 plan for a network of transport oriented
development (TOD) corridors set within a green belt, with
dense development clustering around stations along new and
old railway lines. 2
Recombinant Landscapes in the Network City
Recombinant landscapes play a role in the reuse of
downtowns as landscaped residential districts, in the
reconditioning of waterfronts or old industrial areas, and in
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