Capturing particularities in the metropolitan landscape

SPOOL: Criticising Practice – Practicing criticism, 2018

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 this article, we examine the methodology and definitions put forth by Bureau Bas Smets & List, explore the historical context that has rendered the landscape approach so promising in Brussels, and perform a thematic and critical reading of the four projects and their underlying rationale. These projects demonstrate the potential of landscape to engender novel territorial solutions. However, by choosing to ignore competing spatial claims and tending towards a techno-managerial rationale based on infrastructural and ecological systems, these designs raise questions as to the capacity of the landscape approach to deal with ever-present socio-political concerns in Brussels.

2020

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 metropolitan territory. Consequently, this is how we invite our readers to read this issue of SPOOL – by giving attention to the particular, while establishing links between one particularity and another, and to the overarching whole.

SPOOL, 2020

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 metropolitan territory. Consequently, this is how we invite our readers to read this issue of SPOOL-by giving attention to the particular, while establishing links between one particularity and another, and to the overarching whole.

In common literature the relationship between urban planning and landscape architecture has retrospectively often been described as an antagonistic one. The impression can be gained that only recent projects re-discover the importance of existing natural features as guiding design themes, and that earlier generations ignored them in favor of grand urban schemes. Architectural hardware against green software. Tabula rasa against incremental change. Starting from this hypothetical premise of two contradicting philosophies, the authors decided to dwell deeper into the historic context and to investigate how existing landscape systems have had a major impact on masterplan principles, informing a built reality that could otherwise have taken a different form and turn.

ACE: Architecture, City and Environment, 2020

For several decades, the notion of landscape has been instrumentalised by various fields of study and with the most diverse views and interests. This is a notion that brings together all the features of liminal spaces, areas characterised by their mediating nature. The success and rapid extension of the concept of landscape, however, has not yet seen a similar development in the methodological field nor is it achieving sufficient consensus to be applied to the administrative scope. In this contribution we will adjust our reflection around the idea of historic urban landscapes, highlighting the need to address the “change management” approach demanded by 21st-century cities. To this end, we shall delve into some new urban management initiatives, in which the “prosumer citizenship” is beginning to be a key element in the construction of the identity of the spaces inhabited. In the same vein, the scope and content of the emerging discipline of tactical urbanism will also be discussed, paying special attention to the limitations of “design thinking” in historic city centres; areas affected by environments that are frequently problematic, where the complex regulations of individual or collectivetutelage that cultural assets require come into play.

Built Environment, 2018

This paper discusses how landscape transformations and uses redefine the features of urban and non-urban (sub-extra-urban, or rural) contexts in collective imaginaries, and their role as a key element in planning policies. More specifically, the study investigates landscape transformation processes by discussing changes in the perception of the territory among inhabitants and visitors. As argued in this paper, due to its use as a cultural, economic, and political tool, landscape strongly in fluences territorial marketing strategies and individual living choices, contributing to the rise of new issues on the urban question. This argument is based on research into the social perception of landscape in the mountain area of Montagnoli, near Madonna di Campiglio, in the Trentino Province (Northern Italy), where a project for a water storage basin for artificial snowmaking caused significant material and cultural changes to the territory. Using this case study, the paper discusses the role of nature in the evolution of the founding myths of an urban environment.

Routledge eBooks, 2015

Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2016

at Austin ''Landscape as Urbanism'' is written as the culmination, so far, of an evolving process which has, during the past 20 years, produced the idea that Landscape can and should be the foundation for the urbanism of the twenty-first century. This process has included articles, exhibitions, and symposia producing articles, some of which have been adapted to be part of this book. Its direct precedent is titled ''The Landscape Urbanism Reader'' edited by the same author and published in 2006. At the time, 10 years ago, this edited volume included a number of articles written by authors which continue today to contribute to the general idea of landscape as urbanism in the new book. Landscape Urbanism, the neologism most often used for the main idea in ''Landscape as Urbanism,'' has been articulated by a number of academics and practitioners but has eventually become concentrated in the Graduate School of Design (GSD) at Harvard University. As a General Theory, ''Landscape as Urbanism'' is presented as an acting idea among other recently proposed in books such as ''Ecological Urbanism'' (Mostafavi, 2010) and ''Projective Ecologies'' (Lister and Reed, 2014), also published by the GSD. The relevance of ''Landscape as Urbanism'' for those of us who have been educated in Landscape Architecture during the first 16 years of the present century is certainly outstanding. ''The Landscape Urbanism Reader,'' for example, has been used almost like a textbook by numerous programs in the USA, and ''Landscape as Urbanism'' is posed to be a welcome addition to the ongoing debate pertaining how to respond to a world where most of the population lives in urban areas and social and environmental crises are unfolding. Landscape Urbanism, the neologism, has been a contentious proposition in the context of the current trajectories of urban design. These are addressed in the book. Currently, one of the most effervescent debates is the opposition between Landscape Urbanism and the ideas revolving around New Urbanism. Landscape Urbanism is footed in the conviction that, in the current contemporary urban condition of the western world, suburban areas have and will continue to dominate the urban realm. New Urbanists advocate for density, intensity, and, many claim, a nostalgic pre-car-oriented urban form; Landscape Urbanism advocates indeterminacy and an infrastructure capable to accept process, succession, and change. It is probable that this duel will go on, even more so with the publication of this book. Landscape Urbanism looks at issues which have not been of the attention of other urban design movements. Of particular note is the focus on post-industrial, post-urban, or postinfrastructural sites. As exemplified by a number of brownfield projects, such as the Freshkills Park in Staten Island, or the re-emergence of the City of Detroit, or the reuse of large airport sites, the revelation of the capacities to reoccupy these spaces by hand of Environment and Planning B: Planning and Design 0(0) 1-2 ! The Author(s) 2016 Reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.nav