In an age of glossy architectural visualizations and slick photography today's media is
saturated with images of projects mummified in their ideal untouched and unused state. Every
design and technical publication on landscape architecture tries to teach us how to do things
based on best practices. Rarely do we see a landscape project that has been in use for five or
even ten years. To counterbalance this status quo it is time to review and scrutinize the
Sh*tscapes : typical mistakes in the design of our public realm. This publication is a
compendium of a hundred failures made in the design construction or maintenance processes of
urban landscapes. Looking at these unsuccessful examples the authors propose simple and
practical solutions aimed at preventing common mistakes predicting future scenarios and
averting or accepting failures.
