Recycling Spaces: Curating Urban Evolution: the Work of Martha Schwartz Partners

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. Life Cycle 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, and changing populations.

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 firms public work, and is illustrated here by a selection of the firms recent and ongoing design projects.

Emily Waugh is a lecturer in landscape architecture at the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and founding principal of Survey, a studio focused on writing, editing, curating, research, graphic design, and communication. Emily lives and works in Toronto, Canada.

Martha Schwartz is President of Martha Schwartz Partners in London, UK and Cambridge, Massachusetts USA. She is a professor in practice of landscape architecture at Harvard University Graduate School of Design and co-founder of the Working Group for Sustainable Cities at Harvard University.