L’eredità di Michael Hough, Massimo Angrilli

I met Michael Hough on July 3rd, 1998 in his house on Cornish Road, Moore Park, Toronto, which I recognised immediately as it was the only one which did not have a grass covered front yard, in the place which was a vegetable garden and apple tree.  I had contacted him by e-mail before leaving for a study trip.  I was preparing my PhD at the campus in Waterloo, and during our conversation, in which he accepted to be an external tutor for my thesis (Urban Green Networks) I had the occasion to better understand his vision of the relation nature-city, a symbiotic relation, in which one does not exclude the other, as he clearly expressed during another interview: “ecology is urbanization and urbanization is ecology”.  Hough introduced Canada to the principles of Regional Planning and to that of the integrity of drainage basins, as well as insisting that cities be considered urban landscapes.  Considered by many as the pioneer of Canadian landscape architecture, in 1965 Hough founded the Landscape Architecture program at the University of Toronto, where he had taught since the early 60s.  His main interest in landscape concerned, in countertendency in that period, the city and overcoming the aesthetic approach of urban design, incorporating important urban ecological and biological principles in the project, together with concepts of strategic planning.  Already in 1984 he wrote, “As a high-cost, high-energy floor covering, the lawn produces the least diversity for the most effort.  As a product of a pervasive cultural aesthetic, it defies logic”.(1)  His literary production has become essential reading in many university programmes, both for students of landscape architecture and for those in planning.  Books like “The Urban Landscape” (1971), “City Form and Natural Process” (1984), “Out of Place” (1990) and then “Cities and Natural Process”(2) (1995) have contributed to forming the base for a new approach that makes the mutual dependency of the city and nature the basic principle of urban design.  One will find in these books many of the concepts which have today become widespread.  Just to mention one, the interest in the spontaneous dynamics of nature in spaces left by decommissioned and long abandoned industrial plants have led to the forming of islands of biodiversity, or, using the definition of Gilles Clement (from a period much more recent that Hough’s research), of a third landscape.  One can unquestionably attribute to Michael Hough the role of forerunner for theories like Landscape Urbanism and Ecological Urbanism among others.  In the book by Charles Waldheim(3) the essay by Elizabeth Mossop “Landscapes of Infrastructures” mentions Michael Hough as one of the first to attempt to develop the confrontation between ecology and city, “Michael Hough’s City form and natural process […] attempted the development of theories and methods applying the understanding of ecology and natural process to a more sophisticated conceptualization of cities and urban process, and Hough’s ongoing work has continued to develop strategies for the application of ecological ideas in urban design”(4). Michael Hough’s heritage is to be sought in the design principles whose aim was to bring together urban development with the conservation of natural processes:  the first principle is the need to go back to understanding, above all by those who plan the city, natural processes, like the water cycle, the behaviour of rivers, the evolution of vegetation, the urban climate and translate this understanding into elements that generate the design.  Another principle concerns the need to increase biodiversity in cities which Michael Hough understood and theorized much earlier, promoting a diversification of species to be introduced in open urban spaces, taking as an example spontaneous landscapes originating in abandoned sites colonised by vegetation, where nature has managed to develop following its own vital cycles and where the evolution of forms is less bound to human intervention.  Linked to this, Michael Hough supported the principle of the visibility of the processes that support life, processes often obliterated by anthropic intervention, as in the case of rain water that flows along road surfaces and is then channeled, with its load of pollutants, to bodies of water, producing a worsening of the quality of the water in rivers.  This visibility becomes more concrete with more interaction between urban plans and natural processes.  Starting at a certain moment in our history, following the introduction of technological simplifications, this has been totally ignored.  For Hough environmental conditioning was not a set of limits to be overcome – taming streams, cutting down woods and levelling hills – but details to be integrated into the project, potentially to enrich it.  Hough was aware of the need of reforming our models of urban design, certainly not in the pursuit of bucolic utopias, but rather to act on the body of existent cities making them compatible with the natural processes that take place within them.  His search to go beyond the approach of Ian McHarg, which is based on the destination of the land as a function of the compatibility of the environmental vocation of the area, led Hough to maintain the role of green infrastructure, natural corridors and areas to be understood as multifunctional structures on which to base future development and the ecologic requalification of settlements, this was a conceptual innovation that allowed us to move from thinking of urban green areas as decorative to considering them functional, attributing to green spaces new roles and functions which would guarantee the correct functioning of the city’s natural processes.

Parallel with his activity as a researcher and professor, Hough was also intensely active professionally, working for many years as a consultant for several institutions, above all in the period 1972-1978 when David Edward Crombie was the mayor of Toronto.  Crombie involved him in the Royal Commission on the Future of the Toronto Waterfront and then appointed him as Chair of the Environmental Work Group to plan the Don River, this experience is documented in the book “Bringing back the Don”, which was awarded the prize for Planning Excellence which is given by the Canadian Institute of Planners.

Today much of what Hough preached over the course of his long career has gained or is gaining widespread acceptance in many cities, including Toronto.  There, more and more often, one encounters front yards sown with wild flowers, while in municipal offices concepts such as “urban ecosystem” have become frequent.  Toronto has invested much in re-naturalizing vast areas of its parks, setting out to restore autochthonous plant species and create a vast wetland (about the same size as seven football fields) south of the viaduct of Bloor Street.  The objective of which is to reduce pollution in the lower Don valley.

Michael Hough elaborated ideas and theories over his fifty years of professional and teaching activity (from Toronto to Harvard) that have contributed to changing the characteristics of landscape architecture in Canada, now more interested in natural processes that occur in cities and more willing to change its own planning paradigms in favour of taking on more responsibility, a landscape architect who is less concentrated on the aesthetic canons of urban design and more attentive to ecological and social issues.  This, far from trends and fashion, but strong in his solid idea of landscape architecture, is what Michael Hough embodied and contributed to create and is the heritage he has left us.

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NOTES AND CITATIONS

[1] Michael Hough, Cities and Natural Process, Routledge, New York, 1995

[2] Though “Cities and Natural Process” is a reissue of “City Form and Natural Process” the work that Michael Hough did to update it, rewriting many parts, including new case studies and eliminating parts he considered outdated, has given to the volume greater communicative clarity making it his most widely read work.

[3] The Landscape Urbanism Reader, edited by Charles Waldheim.

[4] Already in City Form and Natural Process [...] Hough develops theories and methods that orient the understanding of ecological and natural processes to a more sophisticated conceptualization of the city and of urban dynamics, continuing with successive works to develop strategies to apply ecological thought to the urban project.

 

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