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

TILL, Monroe Center for the Arts Watershed and Energy Management Plan Phase One, 2006
This temporary garden at the foot of the Palisades has a vegetated screen wall, a restaurant terrace, lawn, and a fountain made by
scoring the industrial concrete floor with tiny rivulets. Other artefacts from the industrial structures are reused as benches. On
summer evenings this space is used for outdoor film screenings.
Unlike rural immigrant populations who carry with them
knowledge of how to reinvent their urban environment,
lifestyles are marketed to intracity suburban refugees. The
Hoboken West Coast watershed offers a lifestyle based on the
urban ecosystem approach, where the highest- and best-use
development practices are joined with a belief that urban
development can help connect people more directly to natural
resources. For most new migrants, a change of address
requires only a minor adjustment due to the repetition and
recombination of familiar urban elements such as strips,
malls and downtown leisure and cultural districts. The
integration of responsive environments into amenities aims
to offer greater transparency, legibility and agency into the
consumer development model. Development is not just a
process of addition, but rather reveals the multiple hidden
sites and time scales that would allow new residents to
process, in the time they have available, all the information
necessary to effectively interact with the complex dynamics of
the urban system as a whole.
Patch Dynamics and Resiliency
Patch dynamics is a core concept in contemporary ecosystem
science that seeks to explain complex systems within which
biological components – including humans – interact with
physical environments over time. 1 Scientists develop models
based on theoretical frameworks within physical limits in
order to test core concepts, such as at the Hubbord Brook
experimental forest in New Hampshire, where small watersheds
on nearly impervious granite slopes have been monitored for
the past 40 years. 2 This process of monitoring small watersheds
has been transferred to urban models in the Baltimore
Ecosystem Study (BES), a long-term ecological research project
funded by the US National Science Foundation. By transferring
ecosystem science concepts and models to cities, the
researchers sought out the translation expertise of designers.
Urban patch dynamics models involve the identification of
patch areas based on distinct land-cover compositions.
Defined by patch boundaries, these land-cover signatures
modulate the flows of people, information, materials, water
and nutrients. Patch dynamics is the operation between these
patches in time, and as an urban design model it is a way of
understanding the heterogeneity of the contemporary urban
landscape. The BES patch dynamic approach overlapped with
current work in modelling the temporal patterns of phase
change in urban design, 3 and an interdisciplinary team was
created to develop a patch dynamic urban design model based
on both the small watershed and human ecosystem
frameworks. Working with plant scientists Steward TA Pickett
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