In his influential 1963 treatise Cities, the great landscape architect Lawrence Halprin wrote, “The city is man’s greatest work of art.” For Halprin, landscape architecture provided an approach to reclaiming the urban environment, and he made ambitious use of it in scale, function, and design. In addition, “movement and its rhythmic structure,” he wrote, brought cities to life—nothing was inanimate.
Though present-day practitioners are dealing with forgotten and neglected spaces rather than urban renewal— characterized by aggressive large-scale site clearing that, at its worst, consumes entire extant neighborhoods—Halprin’s work provides context for understanding the current efforts to reclaim cities through the public realm and create beloved civic spaces.
For example, Halprin’s linear, acre-long Skyline Park in Denver, Colorado, constructed in the early 1970s as part of a broader urban renewal…
