Landscape Metropolis
76 Items
All Items
-
In Germany, the fall of the Iron Curtain led to the extensive withdrawal of allied troops stationed there, as well as the reduction in number of the German armed forces. This process was accompanied by the repurposing of formerly restricted military terrain in both urban contexts and the countryside. Post-military landscapes are full of traces of former usage and comprise a heritage that ranges from their earlier civilian history to their militarisation, from past to recent conflicts. This paper focuses on the remembered and forgotten narratives of these fascinating sites and relates...
-
he present research aims to explore a method of landscape reading and analysis through traditional water systems. Throughout the collection of local knowledge about water management in two opposite parts of the world it is possible to learn how natural resources have been used in local communities for hundreds of years to generate resilient, circular and multi-functional water and land management. In order to create a base knowledge to provide lessons for today’s urban challenges, we have analyzed two traditional water systems: The Xinghua...
-
The construction of Belo Monte Hydropower dam has resettled riverine communities from their homes to the outskirts of the city of Altamira, kilometres away and disconnected from the river. Resettlement can be a threat to both women and men’s adaptation in the new environment, whereas the lack of in-depth studies regarding gender policies and local traditional communities can create even more obstacles for women. The disconnection that stems the resettlement from these individuals has resulted in the loss of their spatial identity and livelihood. This situation caused local traditional...
-
The ground is both the surface occupied by urban development and a physical media – soil – in which plants grow. Since housing density is a mechanism by which to maximise a site’s financial yield, construction covers the real ground. Consequently, the soil is provided to residents in containers on terraces or balconies. However, the properties of natural ground and simulated ground are different, affecting gardening activity and the kind of material and spatial outcomes resulting from it, the synthesis of which is called “the viridic” by the author. Gardening has health benefits for...
-
In the city of Kranj, Slovenia, three former medieval defence towers were redesigned as public spaces. The three interventions are positioned and discussed within the frame of small-scale interventions, specifically as urban acupuncture. First, small-scale interventions are looked at as an approach to designing open space, and parallels with landscape approach are presented. Second, the Three Towers project is discussed, focussing on the relationship it establishes between the city and its context. As the city is built on top of a conglomerate canyon, the interventions open up the slopes...
-
Danish visual artist Kirstine Autzen portrayed Superkilen as it is in Summer 2017. For Autzen, photographing a public space means taking in impressions, and at the same time making images that convey these impressions in a strictly visual manner: grabbing the camera precisely when someone or something does something. Autzen states that photographing in itself is a kind of analysis. She traversed the area several times, waiting for the opportunity to photograph a specific situation with, for instance, the right light or passers-by, and in doing so, she starts to feel...
-
If the ambition of the Flemish territory is to become more forested, then an approximation is needed between forest and urbanization processes. Forest expansion can only be realized by developing a new understanding between forest and urbanization. This article discusses urban design explorations that stimulate a spatial transformation grafted on the forest as a structuring element of the Western Witness Hills of Leuven, through the ‘forest figure’. The forest figure is explored as a concept able to incorporate and mould urban and forest ambitions into a workable spatial frame.
-
In this issue of SPOOL Landscape Metropolis #6, designerly and discursive work on gardens in the metropolitan landscape is explored. The focus is on the garden as a theatre of landscape in the metropolis, where the city-dweller can stand face to face with natural processes, the longue durée of evolution and natural growth, silence, and open skies, as the counterpart to the excess of the urban programme. This notion of the garden as a theatre, a stage on which landscape and growth are performed, is explored by taking a closer look, spotting those places that merit attention in the vast...
-
13-32This essay explores critique as a specific instrument to evaluate and discuss artistic products, and argues that the relatively young discipline of landscape architecture could profit from further developing criticism within this field. Based on the work of Carroll, a theory on critique is provided, focussing on the aspect of ‘grounded evaluation’. An overview of the media in which criticism operates is given, including social media. Using examples from art and architecture, the role of criticism in landscape architecture is described. In so far as there is a ‘recipe’ for a critique, the...
-
The presented strategy reflects on the theme of sustainable urban regeneration, focusing on the importance of the role of public spaces in creating liveable cities. The theoretical background of the strategy deals with the changes taking place in the fields of public art and urban rehabilitation methodologies. The parallel drawn between the evolvement of the two fields leads to the introduction of a method which integrates public art interventions into the process of urban rehabilitation. Public art interventions become platforms that enable people to take an active role in creating and...
-
In recent decades, most rural-urban fringes in the Netherlands have seen substantial urbanisation. Urban expansions at the rural-urban fringe have formed complex hybrid landscapes consisting of residential areas, commercial zones, agricultural land, recreational and nature areas. In certain regions, urbanisation is rather compact and concentric, whereas others show dispersed and polycentric morphological patterns. Based on quantitative and qualitative spatial research, this article analyses recent urban developments and urbanisation patterns along the rural-urban fringe in the...
-
To date, the scholarship of landscape architecture has ignored the evolving research on green gentrification, which studies the mechanisms behind the social aftermaths of urban environmental improvements. The paper uses a case study analysis to prove that landscape architecture practice shares with other planning professions and policy makers the responsibility for the displacement of residents following environmental improvements. The paper analyses the inclusion of social structures, social justice, and the social impacts of projects in the professional discourse, scholarship, and...
-
During the 1970s, before and after the international oil crisis of 1973, some European architectural periodicals were critical of standard construction methods and the architecture of the time. They described how architects and engineers reacted to the crisis, proposing new techniques and projects in order to intervene innovatively in the built environment, using energy and natural resources more efficiently.
This article will provide a critical analysis of the role of architectural magazines of the time, describing the technological innovation of the Trombe Wall in Europe. It...
-
The editors of this themed issue of SPOOL place the discussion on the possibilities and impossibilities of criticism within the field of the design disciplines at centre stage. We are especially interested in how criticism can make an active contribution to taking a position vis-à-vis what we have called, in earlier issues of SPOOL, the contemporary condition of ‘the landscape metropolis’. Criticism is an important means of reflection on the creative processes and interventions that are part and parcel of this landscape metropolis. It throws light on particular projects by describing and...
-
Traditional hydraulic milling was the main productive activity in the Sierra de Cádiz (Andalusia, Spain), as evidenced by the existence of 85 mills spread throughout the region. Although the date of their construction is unknown, the first documentary evidence of their existence appeared in the 16th century. In the 18th century, a more comprehensive account of the set of mills in the Sierra was drawn up thanks to the Ensenada Cadastre. The majority were operational until the mid-20th century, albeit with some difficulties. The disappearance of this handmade trade has led to the...
-
In cities of increasing density, public space is under pressure from both commercial and non-commercial interests. Private installations in public space, such as kiosks, pavement cafes, advertising, and parklets, influence its usability and appearance. Based on the assumption that such installations can also alter and define the inclusiveness and accessibility of public space, the authors argue that the process of granting permission for and regulating the design and positioning of such installations is not only an administrative decision but one that is connected with planning...
-
By contrasting three ongoing research projects along with complementary arguments, this paper explores mediating practices from environmental art and architecture perspectives in the context of industrial forestry and Sweden’s ‘green transition’. The general discourse on ‘green transitions’ significantly amplifies the cultural and economic values of forests within and beyond Sweden. This amplification turns forests into reflexive entities that compel broader value revisions, challenging the extractivist character of modern urbanism. An example is the recent public debate in Sweden about...
-
401-418The European Landscape Convention implies a requirement for signatory states to identify their urban landscapes which goes beyond the traditional focus on individual parks and green spaces and the links between them. Landscape ecological approaches can provide a useful model for identifying urban landscape types across a whole territory, but the variables relevant for urban landscapes are very different to those usually addressing rural areas. This paper presents an approach to classifying the urban landscape of Vienna that was developed in a research project funded by the Austrian...
-
In an age when it is becoming increasingly apparent that disturbed sites (or any other sites for that matter) can never be fully managed, nor can their future development be entirely predetermined, this paper looks at disturbed sites’ landscape as a complex and metastable system. While it deals with disturbed sites in particular, more broadly it aims to encourage a general re-examination of landscape design that relies on the world in harmonious balance and the experience of visual pleasure, which, according to long-established structures, may please or offer timeless experiences...
-
This essay reports on a ‘living lab’ approach to develop a new understanding of below- and above-ground ecological processes as the foundation for robust urban forest habitats. This experimental approach includes a series of design and implementation projects in the city of The Hague, the Netherlands. In contrast to mainstream greening projects led by local governments, these experiments enable urban trees to form more robust forest-like systems by creating a symbiosis between soil (organisms), trees, plant communities, and species. As implemented reference projects are limited, a...
-
This issue of SPOOL elaborates a designerly perspective on urban forestry. Evidence has increased rapidly in the recent years to confirm the agency of trees and urban forests to cure a number of ills besetting urban societies. An expanding range of disciplines, in varying and novel combinations, are turning to an urban version of forestry to re-configure green (and grey) infrastructures, re-write neighbourhoods, re-purpose derelict territories and re-vitalize disparate peripheries. As such, in the face of the growing number of challenges facing cities globally, we see that urban trees...
-
The supervision of water systems in many countries is centralised and taken over from local water management collectives of ‘water workers’ by governmental or other water management institutions. Communities are literally and figuratively cut-off from ‘their’ water systems, due to the increase of urbanisation and industrialisation. On account of water management, humankind changed from communities of actively engaged water workers into passive users. In so doing, crucial knowledge about how communities created, maintained, and expanded ‘living water systems’, such as rice terraces,...
-
In the urgent context of climate adaptation, enhancing representational and design tools within the landscape discipline is crucial for building a comprehensive understanding of the natural processes driving phenomena in hazardous landscapes. Moreover, the context of the more-than-human paradigm poses new challenges. If we view water, soil, and rocks as lively processes and nonhuman actants—agents with their own agencies and rights—how can mapping practices help us better understand, interpret, and recognize their processes, movements, and...
-
Increasingly celebrated, often without questioning, “green architecture” calls for a substantiated discussion. This article explores how design critique can contribute to the thinking and practice around green architecture, particularly green facades, which are growing in number and significance. How can green facades be critically discussed, beyond the dominating glossy project presentations and quantitative measurements of technological and ecological aspects? This article studies the green facades in the architectural competition, Oluf Bager’s Plaza, 2016, in Odense, Denmark, using...
-
Wildwood Plaza (Robin Winogrond, 2013) reclaims a tiny, residual forest fragment on the city’s edge, transforming it into a recreational space with the power to act as catalyst of the forest imagination. Due to the unique characteristics of forests our imagination has the ability to transform even the most mundane woods into a moving experience. Wildwood Plaza searches to reinterpret these characteristics to become not only rational recreational spaces, but ones in which the immersive, poetic character dominates the experience. The innovation of the project lies in the new interpretation...
