Recycling Spaces: Curating Urban Evolution

Cities are constantly evolving: Growing, shrinking, diversifying, sprawling, and densifying. Each phase of evolution brings a unique set of challenges to urban areas for how to remain vital and healthy for long-term sustainability. One of the most important questions facing urban centers today is how to keep people attracted to live in, invest in, and participate in the city. Recycling Spaces focuses on these questions broadly through conversations with experts in the fields of landscape, economics, and urbanism, and specifically through the work of world-renowned landscape architectural office, Martha Schwartz Partners. The selected projects focus on four critical urban conditions of the late 20th and early 21st century city:Dying city centers Depleted resource landscapes and affiliated towns Non-existent urbanisms Changing populations.

In Recycling Spaces, the work of a world-renowned landscape practice, Martha Schwartz Partners, demonstrates the active role of the designed landscape in curating the evolution of healthy and sustainable urban centers. The book explores the potential of the public realm to answer some of the toughest questions facing 21st-century cities: How to breathe new life into dying city centers; how to creating meaningful neighborhoods in rapidly growing urban areas; how to add economic and social value to depleted resource landscapes; and how to adjust to the constant changes in the urban lifecycle. Through conversations with experts in the fields of landscape architecture, economics, and urbanism, and a selection of recent projects by Martha Schwartz Partners, this book offers a comprehensive picture of the role of public space in the long-term sustainability of the world’s urban centers and an optimistic approach to the future of our cities.

Martha Schwartz Partners breathes life into cities and neighborhoods by creating spaces that that make people feel emotionally connected, engaged, and invested in the long-term viability of the place. Places that resonate with people are sustainable places. This expanded notion of sustainability, is the basis of the firm’s public work, and is illustrated here by a selection of the firms recent and ongoing design projects. Readers will be exposed to much of this work for the first time and will be able to explore some of the issues raised through the projects and through written pieces by experts on topics including:An expanded notion of sustainability The role of the urban landscape in the sustained health of the world’s cities Landscape as urban infrastructure The aesthetics of sustainability Why do people choose to live in cities?

What qualities make them attractive Projects from the book can be found in some of the following locations:
Grand Canal Square, Dublin, Ireland Exchange Square, Manchester, England St. Mary’s Churchyard, London, England Village Green, Castleford, England Winslow Farms Conservancy, Winslow, NJ, USA Power Lines, Gelsenkirchen, Germany Geraldton Tailings Landscape, Geraldton, CanadaCentral Park Monte Laa, Vienna, AustriaThe Greek City of Edessa: Search for a Sustainable Future, Design Studio Abu-Dhabi Corniche Beach, Abu-Dhabi, United Arab Emirates Jumeirah Gardens, Dubai, UAEMesa Arts Center, Mesa, Arizona