Abstract
How parks are to be made in the twenty-first century should certainly be different. This is the inevitable conclusion of the recent significant international design competition for Downsview Park in Toronto, 2000. The purpose of this critical study is to investigate new strategies for urban park design manifested in the proposals of that competition and to explore alternative ways of landscape design that could solve the recent crisis of urban parks. Tree City, the winning entry, and other final entries proclaim that city is park and park is city. In this sense, Downsview Park marks the end of traditional Olmstedian parks and the dichotomy between city(culture) and park(nature). Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau's Tree City will become the model for urban park design in the near future. There are three reasons for this. First, its design is a strategy rather than a form. We can interpret that Tree City is to be developed over time as directed by six strategies: grow the park, manufacture nature, 1000 pathways, sacrifice and save, curate culture, destination and dispersal. Second, it places faith in landscape as a revenue generator instead of a fiscal liability. Third, its implementation is possible with crude installation, requiring virtually no craft. Koolhaas and Mau intend for Downsview to be an environment that is never actually designed but is formed through natural succession, cultural action, and programmatical insertions. Rather than designed objects and formal solutions, their strategy is to allow the landscape to evolve with changing uses.