#1 Abstract
“Inevitably, when we imagine our future, what are we as humans always concerned about?” I often find myself asking this type of question. Growing up watching fantasy comics, Si-Fi films and surrealism paintings, these personal interests and experience has shaped my way of thinking and how I perceive the world. As a student of landscape architecture, when I project those ideas and questions into the world of landscape, it transforms to: “Facing rapidly dwindling nature, what attitude and perspective should we adopt when moving towards the future?” The reality is that over-urbanisation of our planet undoubtedly has led to a social and ecological failure from abandoned places to empty cities. Then we started suffering from the consequences of nature’s destruction. It became our constant fear that nature began threatening us just like the way we are threatening nature. “Where exactly went wrong?” You might ask. Is it the so called “effective” and “successful” way we have been transforming land? Or is it the human perspective way too dominant that we ignore what is happening around us?
in these theories, which is being applied to multiple practices. The third chapter shows how practices in different fields are engaging with this action in detail. In the end, this document also shows how I approach my research project in my master study, focusing on re-inhabiting an abandoned post-industrial city in China. This atlas encourages a futuristic way of thinking towards the unsatisfied reality, a path that develops from personal interests to perhaps a generative design thinking. It will not exist merely as my individual journey, but also aims to be an ongoing guide for posthuman landscape.
[ROAMING; GAZING]
“We are living in intellectually troubled times for landscape architecture. Part of the reason for the awkwardness in the present debate is not only due to imminent environmental degradation, but also to the rapid degeneration of our own symbolic understanding of nature.” Just as Christophe Girot addressed, the issue is that the way we inherit the perceptions of the landscape from our ancestors cannot keep up with the newest findings of our connections with nature. We as future landscape architects are responsible for realising a renewed relationship between human and nature. I believe that this has given birth to a new approach - landscaping in a post-human world will help us re-build a cultural and ecological harmony.
LANDSCAPE IN A POST-HUMAN WORLD
This volume of atlas records my personal journey (so far) through the lens of post-humanism in landscape architecture. Throughout this journey: discovering, unpacking and linking my work, practice as well as academic theories has become my approach to formulating a new understanding or a framework towards landscape in the post-human era. Starting from my interests and my ways of discovering landscape, this journey has begun. In the following chapters, a series of precedent studies using images, diagrams and my reflections on how we should understand the post-human landscape, then researching what theories can facilitate us developing a framework, through these findings. The third landscape (1992) sets up a base understanding for the space unattended by man and ruled over by natural evolution, Terrain Vague (1995) further evokes the potential of the wasteland. (Re)Inhabiting as a technique rooted
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[(RE)-INHABITING]
[STORYTELLING]
[TRANSFORMING& VISULISING]
The Verbs - My Design Approach
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