Landscape Metropolis
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Experimental walking can be used to identify particular places, design strategies and spatial visions for urban landscapes. Walking designers can explore sites and, in particular, their temporal dynamics and atmospheric particularities – both essential elements in making particular places. This article illustrates the benefits of this method, using the changing German city of Freiburg as an example.
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The Barranco de Tremps is one of many valleys in the vast hills of the region of Aragón, in the northeast of Spain. A barranco is a natural watercourse created by excessive rainfall, visible only as a dry river bed in summer. Such watercourses and riverbeds are no longer present in this valley.
Today, the valley is full of olive and almond orchards surrounded by pine forests. Summers are increasingly hot and without rain. Since the advent of the tractor in the late 1980s, the soil is ploughed more often and more deeply, and there...
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This article explores the intersection between the indiscernible forces of urbanisation and the materialisation of architectural form. Taking the design of architectural concept for an Accessory Dwelling Unit (ADU) at Råå in Sweden as an applied research project, the article argues that new techniques are needed to analyse interactions between artistic intentionality and indiscernible forces, and to critically evaluate their impact on the form of buildings and places. The ADU is an emergent building type. Dubbed Unit C at Råå, the ADU was designed to be attached to a neo-classical villa....
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This visual essay explores the translation of complex environments through representations with attributes that are summarized as ‘interdimensional’. These attributes are not yet elaborated, but the term emphasizes that these representations integrate different dimensions of experiencing and understanding various spatial scales and temporal perspectives. The process of producing these representations requires the Landscape Architect to encounter, investigate, and communicate life, materiality, and processes in an approach that values attentiveness and creativity.
The...
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In the contemporary metropolitan landscape of Rotterdam, the open landscape spaces that once surrounded the city have been reduced to components in a hybrid field. When the polders were still expansive, with an omnipresent horizon, and big skies, they were depicted extensively by the Dutch landscape painter Henk Chabot (1894-1949). Chabot is the Rotterdam painter of an oeuvre that is associated with angular, realistic expressionism of many layers of paint in hard colours, who painted heavily emphasised skies over poor countryside, or monumental portraits of refugees or farmers. For...
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Many studies have addressed landscape preferences in rural settings, identifying key aspects and elements of the visual landscape important for people’s appreciation. Information about these characteristics of landscapes has then been used as bases for indicator frameworks linking measurable indicators to landscape aesthetic theory. However, there is a need to expand and develop these frameworks to be relevant for assessment of metropolitan landscapes. Nine key concepts, identified by Tveit et al. (2006) and Ode et al (2008), in existing frameworks for visual landscape assessment,...
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Rapid urbanisation and sprawling growth have become constant hindrances to nature in most developing countries. West Java is the most populated province in Indonesia under rapid urbanisation. In this rural area of the province, however, there is a traditional Sundanese hamlet called Kampung Naga that has succeeded in cohesively cohabiting with nature. This article discusses how the interaction of water, ecology, and anthropo-systems influences the spatial layout of the village, forms its cultural landscape, and shapes people’s social life. In addition to its sustainability, this article...
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In order to improve their professional activity, fishermen have developed special methods and procedures for organising the space of their maritime territory. This article presents some of these practices, based on the specific case of the fishing community of Póvoa de Varzim, a town on the north coast of Portugal. Over the years, each fishing family has developed mental maps of the “seas”, creating original names to identify certain places and their different characteristics, while simultaneously producing a remarkable intangible heritage. Together with the productive transformations...
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The heterogeneity of the contemporary metropolitan landscape has led to a multiplicity of intermediate spaces, in between and within the different tissues of the metropolitan landscape. These interstices can provide favourable conditions to be transformed into gardens. What design instruments can be discovered for these gardens to address the characteristics of the interstice? And what is the value of doing so? In this essay three contemporary examples are compared, which explicitly address the different metropolitan landscapes in which they are located.
Paley...
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On January 2016, a joint consortium of the Flemish and Brussels Chief Architects published Metropolitan Landscapes. Espaces ouvert, base de développement urbain/Open ruimte als basis voor stedelijke ontwikkeling. Based on the assumption that open spaces have the potential to spur and structure future urban development and surpass administrative boundaries, Metropolitan Landscapes presents research by design, authored by four prominent design firms with the intention of jumpstarting conversations about a shared spatial vision for the fragmented territory of Brussels and its periphery. In...
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This paper explores directions for a more-than-human conceptualization of urban space. We present five ‘multispecies collages’ for Marais Wiels (Wiels Marshes) in Brussels. This brownfield, inhabited by a wide range of animal species, has been the subject of various construction plans and debates over the past 20 years. In the article, we will first argue that the existing imaginaries for the site, as propelled by the designers and policymakers, fail to acknowledge its multispecies complexity. Such blindness can be linked to the analytical frameworks and representational methods...
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Oslo Hydropolis is a running landscape and urbanism design studio at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design that investigates how water can play a socially, ecologically, and economically active role in shaping life in the Oslo region. Historically a water-rich area, weather extremes and seasonal abnormalities question the functionality of cultural landscapes in the Oslo region, which is characterised by rain-fed agriculture in the soils of limited valley areas. Excess and scarcity of water—flood and drought—are exacerbated by the uncertainty of climate change, but even more so by...
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In June 2018, professionals and scholars, from various fields dealing with public open spaces, put politics up for discussion. In the conference series x–LArch at the University of Natural Resources and Life Sciences, BOKU/Vienna, issues are raised that are relevant for the profession of landscape architecture and have a direct impact on our environment, be it urban or rural. In the 2018 conference entitled ‘Park Politics’, practitioners and academics were invited to present findings and projects in order to gain a range of perspectives from...
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Park politics is the subject of critique by the landscape architecture profession. This article explores the politics surrounding the parks realised in Oslo in the 1920s and 30s, which was critiqued in a book by some of the most prominent landscape architects in Norway at the time: Vår tids hage [The Garden of Our Time] (Aspesæter et al., 1939). The book reads as a commentary on the development in Oslo during that period. This study uses contemporary books by the key policy makers as resources for the ideology of these parks and aims to show how the actual park politics in Oslo were...
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Qanats have played a vital role in underground water extraction since ancient times based on the community-based water management schemes in Iran. Due to recent urban sprawl and development pressures, qanats are progressively abandoned and degraded in the cities and are considered as endangered assets. To be sustainable, in addition to physical maintenance, the ecological and social aspects of qanat management systems, as the main characteristic of Urban Water Infrastructures in Iran, also need to be taken into account. A review of the traditional participatory management systems in...
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This essay explores integrating experimental graphic methods into the design process to engage with more-than-human worlds. It is based on the graduation project ‘RE-Peat: Different Futures for the Peat Polders, a Social-Ecological Landscape in the Netherlands,’ which aims to transform degraded peatlands. Through various representation techniques, such as hand-drawn perception drawings and Gaia-graphic representation, peat is positioned as an actor and a design tool. Such methods aim to foster environmental sensitivity and holistic design ideas, acknowledging the needs of both...
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This article investigates how experimental forms of urban mapping can reveal the particularity of places in non-standard urban situations with the intention of moving beyond the reductivism of still-dominant modernist modes of mapping and associated forms of planning. In order to do so, it reports on the emergence of a methodology involving transect walks, with the purpose of mapping the peculiarities of cultural landscapes. The study is located in cities and communities in the Arctic that are undergoing rapid transformation and are in urgent need of new conceptual approaches capable of...
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Urbanization presents profound challenges to environmental sustainability, characterized by the depletion of green spaces and the degradation of urban ecosystems. Acknowledging the pivotal role of urban forests in mitigating environmental degradation and enhancing urban life quality, cities are increasingly adopting participatory approaches to afforestation. This paper explores the relationship between research and the practical implementation of urban forests, emphasizing the significance of constructing a robust network of stakeholders.
The case study selected is the research...
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This paper expands on the term ‘urban forest’ through spatial historical research and via the concept of Forestscape. The city of Delft in the western part of the Netherlands is taken as a case study, with the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries as the sample period. Based on a methodology examining the spatial history of Delft from both a processes and a patterns perspective, we identify six tree planting practices or ‘afforestation events’. These plantings were integral to the early modern cityscape to the extent that the spaces in which they were planted were...
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Identification and assessment of strategies for the conservation and multifunctional development of green open space in the urban fringe of European urban regions is a challenge to both the academic and the real life world. Within the EU funded research project PLUREL – Peri-urban land use relationships – ‘Strategies and sustainability assessment tools for urban rural linkages’, we developed a methodology for international comparison of regional strategies that considers the policy context at supra-regional level. This methodology helped to explain the reported impacts of strategies. For...
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Since its first issue, SPOOL has used the term ‘landscape metropolis’ to address urban formations beyond the traditional city that – despite their increasing ubiquity - still lack in-depth attention from the perspective of aesthetic appreciation, designerly concepts of development, guidelines for planning and governance, and design theoretical apprehension. The prefix ‘landscape’ is used to describe attention to these topics through the lens of landscape architecture, and offers, we feel, some novel potentials: in considering the metropolis as a cultural phenomenon that is constructed...
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The article addresses the theme of ‘particular places’ in the contemporary landscape metropolis by focusing on the temporal, climatic and geographic specificity that determines each place as unique. In particular, it explores how design can support the appreciation of a ‘particular place’ by enhancing the readability of its temporal, climatic and geographic constituents through an engagement with local weather phenomena.
The article considers the capacity of design to foreground the particularity of a place by connecting to its weather through a critical reading of SLA’s...
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This article explores the agency of representations to open up perspectives in more-than-human landscape design processes. It follows and investigates the approach of re-representations—multimodal assemblages that narrate landscapes as zones constituted by specific socio-material processes. Methods of research through and on design are combined: students’ experiments of designing with representations were set up in a landscape architecture design studio at the Technical University Berlin in the context of a deeply changing wetness regime in Lusatia, Germany. These design methods are...
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The demand for green spaces in highly urbanised, metropolitan cities is well documented. However, adjacent to or surrounding these densely populated urban centres are extensive areas of newer suburbs, where land use and public space demands differ from those found in large urban cities. Though dependent on the age of a suburb and its associated societal changes, the demands made upon suburban green spaces are changing. However, little research has focused on ageing suburban park systems, which today may be managed by multiple administrative entities.
The development of a master...
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In the thread Landscape Metropolis, SPOOL addresses the interrelation between urban, infrastructural, rural, and living formations as a dynamic, intertwined, and layered landscape structure. Triggered by the profound changes of the Anthropocene, the complexity of the metropolitan landscape asks for reorientation when addressing physical space as well as spatial investigation and theory, in terms of aesthetic appreciation, designerly concepts, guidelines for planning and governance, and design theoretical understandings. Spatial design responses to this growing complexity...
