Recycling Spaces: Curating Urban Evolution

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 centres. 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 centres; how to creating meaningful neighbourhoods 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 centres and an optimistic approach to the future of our cities. 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. 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.