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      THE INCREASING PROMINENCE OF LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES IS UNDENIABLE, DUE IN NO SMALL PART TO THE WIDESPREAD ATTENTION TO ISSUES OF SUSTAINABILITY AND THE SENSE OF URGENCY THAT ACCOMPANIES

      our current environmental problems, which are now understood in a global context. Landscape’s centrality to addressing these issues—the form of future urban settlement, and the importance of ecological and recreational networks to guide such settlement—is becoming more apparent to those outside of the field, which has helped reestablish landscape architecture in the significant position it previously and deservedly enjoyed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. However, such increased visibility of the discipline has been accompanied by a narrowing comprehension of its full cultural efficacy, due to the ways in which the terms “sustainability” and “ecology” have been uncritically adopted as the primary justification for the contributions that landscape architects make to the built environment. Certainly, landscape architecture is a “practical” discipline that engages the myriad social, political, and ecological realities that constitute our landscapes; however, landscape architecture is also a “projective” or imaginative discipline because it envisions the intersections among those realities in critical or challenging ways by making places that are unique, expressive, and experientially compelling.

      Two recent developments have overshadowed these latter concerns. First, a turn in the profession that emphasizes “ecofriendly” or “green” design has resulted in a set of predictable responses to environmental sustainability, such as green roofs or constructed wetlands. The prominence of this utilitarian approach to function has eclipsed questions about how such approaches engage the equally relevant social, experiential, and symbolic functions of landscape. And second, academic discussions concerning “landscape urbanism” have gained traction

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