This thesis explores the complexities and tensions between the contemporary profusion of ecological design rhetoric and the contested histories of material urban landscapes. A specific set of ecological ideas underpin the field of ‘landscape urbanism’: an approach to urban design associated with a group of designers emerging from the University of Philadelphia in the 1990’s, and more recently the Harvard Graduate Design School (GSD). Making claims towards self- emergent systems, processes, networks, grids, and matrices, landscape urbanism tries to dissolve any ontological distinction between landscape, urban ecology, and infrastructure. This thesis looks to unsettle this claim by developing a ‘critical landscape perspective,’ and four subsequent typologies of landscape––topology, topography, wilderness, and playfulness––to foreground the inherent and often playful duplicity, tension, and complexity of urban landscapes.

It employs an investigative aesthetics method–– ncluding walking urban transects, interviews with ecologists, designers, and artists, aesthetic analysis, and archival work––along the River Lea, London, focusing on sites such as the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park and the Royal Docks. I engage closely with material urban landscapes to foreground how landscape urbanism mobilizes managerialist and technical renderings of ecology which exists in tension with site- specific, material landscape histories and imaginations. I suggest that this designerly imposition is inseparable from a broader ecological constructivism under the so-called Anthropocene which demands to be situated under the political remit of human intentionality.

Highlighting the tensions that exist between and within the curation of atmospheres and processual forms, my thesis will show that landscape remains a mode of ordering and staging space via the use of perspective and affective atmospheres. By re-engaging with the intricate intellectual history of landscape within cultural geography, and contemporary explorations of aesthetic and affective tension and complexity, I conclude by suggesting that landscape must be reasserted as a mode of critical urban analysis; a heuristic lens uniquely capable of capturing tensions between scale, temporality, and power so pressing in the contemporary moment