Urban and Landscape Week 2018: Floworld

Urban & Landscape Week 2018

global dynamics beyond boundaries

Committee: The Urban & Landscape Week Committee 2018: Team: Anna Myllymäki Anna Saracco Berra Şulenur Kılıç Boaz Peters Catalina Rey Danyan Liu Diego Moya Ortiz Francisco Monsalve Cazorla Gabriela Waldherr Iliyana Miteva Mark Slierings Sebastian Gschanes Zuzanna Sekula Text Editor: José Luís Poblete Layouting: Francisco Monsalve Delft University of Technology July, 2019 Polis Julianalaan 134 2628 BL Delft polisdelft@gmail.com +31 (01) 52784093 Support:

EFL STICHTING

ACKNOWLEDGEMENT

The annual Urban & Landscape Week is organised by TU Delft students in order to address interdisciplinary topics beyond the official Master programme.

This organisation and execution was only possible thanks to the collaboration and sponsorship of numerous persons and institutions. In this regard we, the ULWeek committee, would like to express our deepest gratitude to all those that contributed.

To all speakers, students and professionals who participated in this event and contributed with their questions, thoughts and new ideas. Thank you for the insightful lectures, interviews and contest outcomes.

To our sponsors EFL (van Eesteren-Fluck & van Lohuizen Stichting), STuD (Studentenuitzendbureau), NVTL (De Nederlandse Vereniging voor Tuinen Landschapsarchitectuur) and the Department of Urbanism who assisted besides their funding also with stimulating an active knowledge exchange for the present and the future.

To Placemaking Plus for providing a wonderful introduction to our contest and giving the chance for a valuable knowledge exchange between participating students and professionals.

To the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment for their constant technical assistance and for providing us all the infrastructure needed to hold such an event.

To the Urbanism Department’s academic, research and professional staff for their advice especially in the beginning phase. Thanks to you, we could build a network, define our focus and invite inspiring speakers.

A special thanks to Margo and the entire Urbanism secretariat for their continual support concerning all logistical and organizational matters. The ULWeek would have never been possible without you!

Finally, to POLIS and the previous years’ committees for sharing your knowledge and experience and setting thereby the framework for the organisation of ULWeek 2018.

To all, a warm thanks for being part of this event and make it a remarkable experience for all of us.

The ULWeek committee

TABLE OF CONTENTS: ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS FOREWORD: INTRODUCING FLOWORLD: PROGRAM: GUESTS:

1 Steffen Nijhuis

2 Liam Young

3 Alex Wandl

4 Ben Kuipers

5 Taneha Kuzniecow Baccin

6 Robert Kloosterman

7 Elise Misao Hunchuk

8 Ricardo de Ostos

9 Lei Qu

10 Pierre Bélanger

11 Placemaking Plus DISCUSSION PANELS:

1

2 COMPETITION: REFLECTION:

FOREWORD

Urban&Landscape Week (ULWeek) is a yearly organized event by the student association Polis, held at TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment. ULWeek is composed by a series of lectures, seminars, workshops, and debates on the particular topic. It is created as a platform for collaborative and multidisciplinary engagement between students, researchers and professionals within different academic disciplines from within Europe and overseas. It aims to bring together people interested in future developments of the urban landscapes and the built environment and to provide a platform for discussion of creative and technical practices as well as future possibilities.

Each year ULWeek holds the discussion on the different theme chosen by master students as a field of their interests, concern or question. The topic for this year was “Floworld - Urban Dynamics beyond boundaries” as an occasion to explore how human, material and information flows redefine landscapes, cities and territories raising levels of instability and uncertainty at different scales. The invited prominent scholars, practitioners and researchers from different disciplinary fields gave very interesting and enlightening lectures that were followed by the debates about these issues. As the logic of inquiry was diverse, the discussions aimed for creating bridges between different critical perspectives.

Besides ULWeek itself, this year the event was preceded by the Movie&Discussion nights for students an introduction to the problem field. Chosen movies - “Baraka” of Ron Fricke and “Human Flow” of Ai Weiwei, aimed to present the diversity of life, natural events, technological phenomena and human activities as an introduction to the further discussed flows and issues related with them.

This booklet represents Urban&Lanscape Week 2019. It contains a brief description of the lectures, interviews with speakers and held discussion panels, and it presents the outcomes of this year workshop with students’ perspective on the topic.

INTRODUCING FLOWORLD

As UL week team 2018, this year we decided to address the different territorial processes on a global scale, under the prism of the physical, material and immaterial flows that currently weave the planetary urban infrastructure network.

We understand that these processes represent challenges reflected in the diverse issues that face territories from different latitudes.

Thus, flows of migrants, energy flows, financial flows, merchandise flows, waste streams, tourist flows, are intermingled in an amalgam of bodies and means that deterritorialize increasingly fragmented, dispersed, asymmetric and dynamic world geography.

In a disruptive moment of globalization and global capitalism, phenomena such as climate change, growing global inequality and the rise of reactionary movements throughout the Western world amplify the challenges for spatial planners and designers all over the world. In this regard, this is also a time of doubt and uncertainty, rather than traditional answers and solutions. In this framework, we sought this UL week as a platform to discuss the challenges under the contingency of this interregnum. In this way, the event brought together speakers from different disciplines like geography, landscape architecture, architecture, and urbanism, with the aim of presenting varied and even antagonistic perspectives. As well as the speakers, more than 100 students and professionals attended the event from TU Delft and other universities.

Source: https://cartographia.wordpress.com/​category/​charles-joseph-minard/​ Credit: Cartographia. Mapping The World Around You, Archive for the ‘Charles Joseph Minard’ Category, 2008.

PROGRAM

‘Urban and Landscape Week’ is the biggest annual academic symposium hosted by TU Delft’s Faculty of Architecture, Urbanism and Building Sciences. It is organized by study association POLIS comprised of masters’ students from the urbanism and landscape architecture. The event looks back on successful history of eight years, with hundreds of participants and a number of brilliant speakers.

The ULWeek, as it is known, provides a platform for collaborative and multidisciplinary engagement by inviting students, researchers and professionals within different academic disciplines from within Europe and overseas.

The week sees a series of curated lectures, seminars, workshops and debates which revolve around a particular theme in an attempt to understand routes, practices and issues of contemporary urbanism, while trying to find its future possibilities.

The goal of the ULWeek is to bring together people interested in future development of urban landscapes and the built environment together and provide a platform for discussion from creative and technical practices.

Each year the ULWeek formulates a theme based on current or controversial discussions about the built environment by consulting different professionals and students. This theme is the guiding factor around which all the events are positioned.

Speakers:

STEFFEN NIJHUIS

Head of Landscape Architecture Research, Director European Postmaster in Urbanism (EMU), Associate Professor Landscape Architecture - Del University of Technology

Steffen Nijhuis is Head of Landscape Architecture Research, Director European Post-master in Urbanism (EMU) and Associate Professor Landscape Architecture at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment, Delft University of Technology (The Netherlands).

He has expertise in landscape-based regional design strategies for sustainable urban development, research-by-design approaches, delta urbanism, green-blue infrastructures, designed landscapes and gardens, mapping, GIS-applications in landscape planning and design, polder landscapes and visual landscape assessment.

Next to being board member of the Department of Urbanism and Dutch School of Landscape Architecture (DSL), he is member of scientific committees and review boards. He is Editor in Chief of the Research in Urbanism Series (RiUS), Editor of Urban Design and Planning, Editor of Bulletin KNOB (Royal Netherlands Society for Architecture, Urban and Landscape Heritage) and Advisor to NGO’s, governmental and regional authorities. He coordinates methodology courses and is supervisor of MSc, post-MSc and PhD graduation projects. Furthermore he is guest lecturer/professor at Universities in Europe, Asia and North-America.

In his lecture Steffen Nijhuis talked about “Flowscapes: Designing Urban Landscape Infrastructures”.

Flowscapes is two words: flows and landscapes, which is about landscapes of flows. We live in a world of flows: flows of people, flows of data, flows of materials and goods, energy flows, water flows, nutrient flows and sediment flows. All of these flows have a spatial dimension as therefore relevant to the field of urbanism.

Flows and Urbanism The main theme of flows and urbanism is “Flow worlds as challenge and opportunity for Urbanism, an interdisciplinary, multiscale design and planning approach from the perspective of urban planning, urban design and landscape architecture”.

In order to get a grip of flow world or flow landscape, it’s very important

to introduce some concepts like what is “flow”. Here Steffen referred to the definition that “flow” as an action or fact of moving along in a steady and continuous stream.

And flow has always something to do with processes. Process itself is series of actions that produce change and development (through flows).

When we talk about processes, we also talk about structures or better said infrastructures which are continuous physical constructions/ networks that facilitate processes: (1) provision of food, energy and fresh water; (2) support for transportation, production, nutrient cycling; (3) social services such as recreation, health, arts; (4) regulation of climate, floods and waste water. Infrastructure is not only a technical thing but also a structure which creates landscapes.

Therefore we refer to landscape

infrastructure or urban landscape infrastructure. Related to this, urban metabolism is focusing on the understanding and qualification of the inputs, outputs and storage of energy, water, nutrients, materials and waste for an urban region (Kennedy et al.

2011).

system could be decomposed as three main layers: Substratum & Climate (100-500 years), Transportation Networks (50-100 years), Land-use & Urban settlements (< 50 years). While using this model, we can really start to understand the urban landscape as a system.

Urban Landscape as Living System Here we regard urban landscape as living system. Systems are organized, multiscale entities that are composed of elements and their interaction, and consist of structures and processes.

Urban landscape can be understood as complex holistic system composed of interrelated subsystems (cause/ effect) each with their own dynamics and speed of change.

Oriented to the different speed of change, urban landscape as living

Network and Locations The urban landscape as system is a constellation of networks and locations with multiple levels of organization. On the one hand, network are important for interaction, communication and relationships. On the other hand, location is the result of the synthesis of interactions. Here Steffen referred to two cases: 1. Infrastructure as condition for urban development exemplified by Paris at the beginning of the twentieth century. The sewer system steered

and facilitated the development of sewage farms which played an important role in the food production for the city.

2. Amsterdam Internet Exchange (AMX-IX) is the biggest internet hub in the world with several locations in Amsterdam. In Amsterdam-Oost the internet hub is an important condition for the development of the Amsterdam Science Park, an area with 90 companies, specialized in ICT and biology, the Beta Faculty, University of Amsterdam and other scientific institutes.

Landscape of flows The spatial dimension of networks and locations can be referred to as the space of flows and the space of places (Castells, 2000). Flowscapes emerges as a new field of inquiry for design disciplines and opens up opportunities

for shaping architectural and urban form that establishes local identity with tangible relations to the region through designing and planning the space of flows. This new field requires to work with scales, because infrastructures work with scales. For instance, the Rhine-Danube corridor integrates and defines Europe between the North Sea and the Black Sea as normalization of natural watercourse, lateral canal of natural watercourse and artificial watercourse.

Flowscapes as design assignment Flowscapes can be regarded as operative urban landscape infrastructures at multiple scales.

They direct and facilitate urban development, stimulate social and ecological interaction and establish the relation between process(‘flows’) and form(‘scapes’). Urban landscape

infrastructures as armatures urban and rural development.

for ports and waterways. Also energy systems(oil, gads nuclear, wind), their transformation to produce energy, Urban Landscape Infrastructure and their distribution are important Design elements(powerlines, pipelines). â&#x20AC;&#x153;To cultivate the region in such a way that the conditions for the growth 2. Green landscape infrastructures of a living culture are set upâ&#x20AC;?. There Interconnected green space networks are a few approaches to reach that that maintain and develop natural like framework approach, corridor ecosystem values and provide approach and area approach. associated social, economic and aesthetic benefits to humans. Useful Three fields of urban landscape for landscape planning and design infrastructure design: is the concept of land mosaics consisting of green patches, corridors 1.

Transport landscape and matrices. infrastructures Technical systems that 3. Water landscape infrastructures facilitate different modes of What is planned, designed and transportation, energy supply, constructed to manage water and waste treatment and information riparian zones. Important issues here dissemination(telecommunication). are coastal and river management.

It includes vehicular, rail, air systems,

In summary, urban landscape infrastructures are an important vehicle to gain operative force in territorial transformation processes while establishing local identity and tangible regional relationships through connecting ecological and social processes and urban and architectural form. The ability to interrelate systems in design becomes increasingly important, as the complex interconnection of different systems and their formal expression is a fundamental aspect of contemporary design tasks. Urban landscape infrastructure design is a context-driven, multiscale, solutionfocussed, transdisciplinary approach with an essential role for spatial design disciplines as integrators.

STEFFEN NIJHUIS

INTERVIEW

Intro comment of the interview Steffen Nijhuis kicked off the week with an inspiring lecture on flows from a design point of view. The lecture showed a complete spectrum of flows and how to design with them, and was therefore perfectly suited to kick off an inspiring week.

STEFFEN NIJHUIS

INTERVIEW Q: Thank you for the lecture. I’m particularly interested in the green landscape infrastructures because, as we know, there are some kind of infrastructures that can create urban void, and some of them are very hard to deal with. I have a specific example: The high voltage line that creates this kind of urban void. And so, in this sense, I’m going to ask you: how can a landscape architect deal with such a difficult landscape, and also with the restrictions by the government?

A: Yeah the beauty of these kinds of structures is that they are continuous. And in a way, to make a kind of connected system, this continuity is of crucial importance.

Therefore, they become not only a threat, they become a kind of opportunity for urban development, since you have these long stretched structures already, so you can start working with it. So you can have like a positive view towards them from that perspective. Because now they’re treated from a one-dimensional view.

We need to have the energy from a to b, so therefore we need to have these wires for instance, but also for the water it can be the same, for trains it’s the same, for cars it is the same, so we treat them as infrastructures as such. So doing the best thing that they should do: facilitating the process we want them to facilitate. But the view you could develop as an urbanist, or landscape architect, is that it becomes a landscape in itself. So then it’s not only like this facilitating technical structure, but it becomes a landscape structure with qualities in itself. And the interesting thing, I think, since we are trained like that, is that we usually have this integrative approach that we don’t want to facilitate energy flows as such only, but that we also want to stimulate interaction of people, animals, plants.

So then such a structure becomes not only like a technical zone, but then it becomes a zone which can develop as a landscape in itself, and therefore also influence the areas next to it. So it’s not like to say: okay it’s like from

a line to a corridor, but the corridor becomes like a kind of creature which also penetrates its urban tissue around it. Like for instance the Rio Madrid, the Manzanares river worked like that. So that was like: okay, we have a highway to the city, we are going to tunnel it, but it is next to a river. So can we do it in combination with a kind of re-naturalization of the river? And can we make a park structure on top of it? But the effect was that; let’s say the edges of this corridor also became affected, because the real estate values rose, people wanted to invest in their environment. So in a way, from solving the technical problem it became kind of a mechanism, organism, which stimulated the urban development.

And I think that’s the kind of lenses we should develop, because to say: okay, we don’t want to have these wires, we don’t want these canals, it’s kind of a negative perspective, and you want <<wind?>>, it’s simple.

So then you can better look at these potentials and work with it. And they

have great potential.

Q: Thank you. More or less to summarize your lecture, we wanted to ask you as an urban landscape designer: How can we create these interactions between structure and processes to understand the landscape flows as living systems in order to create adaptive, resilient, circular, and meaningful designs?

A: Yes, that’s a big question. But I think it starts with the notion of acknowledging the urban landscape as a system, so that implies that you have tools in place to understand them as systems. And when you understand them as systems, then you see certain relationships popping up, like the examples I showed you, like in the desert of China, you suddenly have this oasis. But it is because of the rivers going through and an irrigation system next to it.

And in fact, a lot of these systems are circular. It is like working through the scales. When you start to understand

these systems from an integrated learn principles which are very useful point of view, you can start working to address future challenges. with them as such, and then you can see that they are circular at different scale levels. Therefore it is very interesting to see that very current topics like circularity usually dwell upon historical knowledge, because in the past it was like that. Because of our far-going specialization we tend to forget it. Like food was produced on the farmland next to your house, and you used the dam to fertilize the land, and when the cow was too old you ate them. So it was kind of like very simple, straightforward relationships, but very important. And as a result of it you get a kind of sustainable unit, but nowadays you see: food is produced on the other side of the world, what are we going to do with the waste? All kinds of social and ecological effects related to it. So the question is, can we learn from these kind of mechanisms, not to go back to history, but to learn the principles from them. And I think there this kind of system view become really important, because these are also kind of micro-systems if you like.

And all these micro-systems together make up a whole landscape. So therefore in the Netherlands we have seven or eight landscape typologies, because they have their own logic in itself, now they interact with their resources and people living there. So in a way the world around us as we see it, the results of these complex systems. So we can delve into it and

LIAM YOUNG

Co-founder of the think tank “Tomorrow’s Thoughts Today” and runs together with Kate Davies the “Unknown Fields Division”. Coordinator of the Master course in Fiction and Entertainment at the Sci-Arc.

With his work that puts together the speculative studies on discovering the ‘Unknown Fields’ that powers todays cities, we were intrigued by Liams understanding of the meaning of nature to have a grip on how he sees the relationship of cities and nature. We were also curious about the way they study architecture in his studio differently than the classical architects and importance of this to him towards the future of architecture.

During his lecture, Liam Young performed his work City Everywhere, a storytelling tour through our planetary scaled city of technology.

Across his presentation he stitched together projects for Unknown Fields that explore the geologic origins of technology with speculative films from his fiction practice that imagine their possible futures.

‘Unknown fields’ is a nomadic design studio that ventures out on expeditions into the shadows cast by the contemporary city, to uncover the alternative worlds, alien landscapes, industrial ecologies and precarious wilderness set in motion by the powerful push and pull of the city’s desires. These dislocated landscapes – the iconic and the ignored, the excavated, irradiated and the pristine – are connected to our everyday lives

in surprising and complicated ways.

They are embedded in global systems that form a vast network of elusive tendrils, twisting threadlike over everything around us, crisscrossing the planet, connecting the mundane to the extraordinary. Unknown fields make provocative objects and films from this expedition work, exploring the dispersed narratives that coalesce to form a contemporary city.

This design studio sets out across unknown territories to explore the landscape that has a critical role in shaping and making the futures.

If we travel behind the scenes of technology, we are to reimagine the networks and systems that produce our world. It is critical that we explore the remote and extreme landscape and territories that are put in motion by contemporary cities rather than

just looking at the single point on a map where that city is geographically located. In his lecture he explores the Post Anthropocene and narrates an atlas of territories and stories that form a city that stretches across the entire planet. A city that sits between documentary and fiction, a city of dislocated sites, of drone footage and hidden camera investigations, of toxic objects and speculative narratives.

For Young, Speculative Architecture, is not about designing buildings.

Instead, it is related to the creation of documentaries and fiction to tell stories about how emerging technologies are changing our spaces and cities. Therefore, this work uses the techniques of fiction, film, and storytelling in order to collect and visualize emerging trends and project them into possible tomorrows. The

projects are real and imagined and are intended to engage with the audience in an extraordinary way in which the technology is changing our world.

It is a story of the Anthropocene and what comes next, it is a story that tries to describe a place, a landscape and a world where we are no longer at the centre. It is about the end of humancentered design and about the ecology of machines that are now producing the planet. It is a talk about a place called â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;City Everywhereâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, a landscape intentionally made, reshaped by, through and for our machines.

Liam Young always starts these stories and begins in the present day to ground the research in the realities of the moment. The strategy is then to exaggerate and extrapolate from this present to imagine the strange

and unexpected futures of our technology that we are wandering blindly into. Architecture can explore the implications and consequences of actual trends, technologies, and ecological conditions. Through the design of alternate worlds we can understand our own world in new ways.

LIAM YOUNG

INTERVIEW

Intro comment of the interview Futuristic narratives allow us to discuss current trajectories into their possible futures. Liam Young has visually confronted us with his understandings of what could come after the Anthropocene, a world where (human) nature has been effectively ruled out by the technologies we create today. This sparked us into asking more about the triangulation between human, nature and technologies.

LIAM YOUNG

INTERVIEW Q: What does ‘nature’ mean to you?

A: ‘Nature’ is a cultural construction.

Nature as we understand it is a pure fabrication. It is shaped by hundreds of years of colonial occupation and assumptions about some kind of untouched world which is based on false words. The icon of nature, the Amazon jungle, is not a jungle at all.

It is actually a large managed garden.

Satellite imagery and infrared analysis have shown that Amazon is an urbanized landscape, which has been grown for thousands of years and it is 40 times the size of the urban sprawl of Los Angeles. It is not natural at all, there are different to species growing near each other as a result of the cultivation of that landscape.

What is relevant to us is that “nature” has always been a construct and it has always acted on by technology or production of technology. And now we have nostalgia for an idea that never really existed in the first place.

In the Galapagos islands, where Kate and I first traveled with Unknown

Fields, we see the intention to curate the landscape toward a particular mindset of what is natural. In order to maintain that, we have helicopters filled with sharpshooters. They kill goats with a headshot because the goats are destroying native plant populations. They drop blue rat poison from helicopters because there is a rampant rat outbreak. They have introduced the Australian ladybug to kill off bugs which are eating native species. The idea of nature is similar to one of a museum, and much of our world is like that. It is this kind of preservation of something that has always been flowing ironically, in the birthplace of the idea that nature was always constantly evolving and changing. I don’t want to say that we should let everything go and just do whatever we want to. But what I rather want to say is that we should have a more sophisticated idea of ecologies and ecosystems. We should see us and technology as a part of that, and not as something being separated from it. Technology and

nature are outmoded terms, they are just different ends of the same continuum. I think that changing attitudes and moving on from the idea of nature, may present new opportunities. Technology can help to resolve some of the crisis.

Q: You state that nature is just a human created term and the process we call nature is constantly shifting.

Why shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t we just go with it and accept this changing environment?

A: I think we need to embrace what nature actually is. It is a set of interconnected systems and the idea is that we should start mapping and understanding those systems. We should not see ourselves as being separate, we shouldnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t see technology or AI as being separate from it, but they are all part of this interconnected system. Therefore, we need to start designing those systems. Once we have mapped them, we need to start understanding them as a new kind of site condition. Sites are not singular

points on a map. A site today needs to be understood as an intricately connected set of conditions scattered across the globe. After acknowledging this we can engineer, shift and start designing for them. I have just launched this new book about the Post-Anthropocene called Machine Landscapes and in it I am trying to talk about an end to human-centered design. I am much more interested in what wetlands-centered design, hard drive-centred design or carbon dioxide centered design might be like.

I think these are much more relevant questions then the shape of a human ass sitting in a chair, or the scale of a tree lined pedestrian street which is generally what human-centered design is talking about. These are really interesting questions for the current and emerging generations of designers. I think these are the questions that directly come out of the idea of interrogating what nature is and starting to design for that new idea of nature in the same way that we have been designing for ourselves

for so many decades.

How important is it for us students to go out, visit sites and collect Q: If we continue this egocentric impressions? attitude towards architectural design as we do now, it will lead us straight A: There are different types of outside towards the end of the Anthropocene? that we are interested in. The first one is the outside of the discipline.

A: Yes, we already had the The classical architect is this strange Anthropocene. We are finished with dinosaur that is really on the margins that. It doesn’t matter what we call of the systems that are making the it, it is just the end of everything that world. To a large extent, an architect we know and are familiar with. We is wasted on making just buildings. are no longer at the center of things; Look at the marquee projects of we haven’t been for a long time. We technology. Things like Bjarke Ingels have already changed nature and and Heatherwick’s collaboration on how and who we are designing for. the Google headquarters, Norman The entities that are really making Foster’s big Apple campus or the our world are not in design journals bubbly architecture of the Amazon and monographs. The architects building in Seattle, these are of warehouses, autonomous ports, just waiting rooms for the Postlogistics and data centers, mechanized Anthropocene. The real architecture is agriculture, are the people that are massive fields of server farms, logistic really producing our cities and to a warehouses, and big data complexes. large extent, these sites and designers These sites are human exclusion are nowhere to be seen. We are zones, they are architecture without flitting about doing someone’s beach people. Ironically the most critical house or another designer chair or spaces in the world are now only the iPhone 12. We haven’t been to inaccessible to machines. Humans are the centre of things for a long time. in many ways contaminants in these I think the current challenges for the landscapes and they really on our very generation of design is to catch up absence in order to function properly. with them and just figure out ways In my book Machine Landscapes I that we can engage in those systems try to catalogue this new condition. that are producing everything.

These are the real systems and we are outside of them, excluded, pressed up Q: You are not a “classical” architect against the windows of empty control and with Unknown Fields, you are rooms, while the machines remake frequently traveling to areas which our world. are strongly shaped through global human behavior.

A lot of people talk about the work

that we do with Unknown Fields in mapping these conditions and engaging with them, as being on the margins of practice. Actually, I think it’s the centre of architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture.

The people of the margins are the ones clinging on to this idea that you graduate from a school like this one to put together PDF portfolios and then you send it off to a bunch of offices and you get a job when you work yourself up, to become an associate, and then a director. You then spend a decade designing a big museum in Dubai and move onto the next one. That’s actually the margins of the profession now. The real core of what we should be doing is getting outside of the traditional idea of the discipline and looking at how we can operate still as architects. How can we be meaningful agents of architecture and design inside these systems that are actually producing the world that we live in, the cities that we occupy rather than just design glittering statements of wealth for a few elite institutions? How can we intervene in the production of supply chains, how can we start to design and be active agents in the production of infrastructure and systems? How can we embed ourselves within the cycles and production of technology so that we are actually talking about and being critical agents in the way that driverless cars have rolled out and or play a role in how drones are introduced in urban areas? I think

that’s much more exciting but also meaningful as a form of practice, to be architects that occupy these different territories. This is not a dissolution of what it is that we do. Faced with the current crises many people in the discipline are trying to fortify the walls and retreat to traditional fundamentals of building making. The expanded form of practice I am trying to argue for is not a dissolution; it’s actually strengthening what we do because it means that we are trying to find a new kind of relevance and a new way of being participants in the forces that are actually shaping and changing cities. That relates to the other “outside”. It is the outside of the institution that we explore with Unknown Fields. With the studio that Kate Davies and I run from London, we go outside of the familiar places that all of us occupy in our day to day lives and we look at the scenes behind those worlds. We don’t take students on the usual architecture field trips to see the building of Rome or Venice, instead we peel back the curtain to look at the conditions that are actually fundamental in making and shaping our world. All the landscapes we go to are integral parts of the city. What Unknown Fields does is to map the landscapes that are either produced by that city or produce the city. So, it is getting outside of the traditional frameworks that we occupy in our disciplines. Moreover, it is getting outside of the worldview, that we occupy traditionally as citizens

and looking at all of these different which you learn about the realities territories that are actually really of the profession, contracts, clients critical in producing the present. and how to protect yourself. It is always the subject that every student Q: If the classic field of architecture is hates. This course is always just a dying out, do you think that hackers distraction from the design studio, and bio-engineers will be the new but actually, it could be the most architects of tomorrow? revolutionary and experimental part of the school. It is where you can A: They already are designers. I honestly ask students to invent and don’t think the traditional form of develop a business or practice model the architect, urbanist or landscape for who they are, or who they might architect will die out. We still have be when they leave school. A lot of Louis Vuitton handbags, and someone architects never engage with clients still designs them and there is still or the clients are not just like “Mom an economy that produces them and and Pops” that have been saving up needs them produced. In the same to redo their house. A client might be way that there still will be the iconic like a massive conglomerate or tech architecture from the star architects companies that are re-engineering and the rich person’s beach house, their entire system. As the nature but those classical forms will just of clients and contracts have a vacuous form of luxury craft and changed, everything is up for grabs, should no longer be heralded as the so we should be seriously asking pinnacle of the profession. I don’t graduates, what kind of designer are think you should have thousands you going to be? How are you going of institutions around the world to make a living? How are you going producing decadent craftspeople to to continue, if you did some really make the jeweled fashion statements amazing research project? How are of capital, which is what we are doing you going to pay rent? And how do at the moment. Instead, we should be you get that work out into the world? creating design programs that are, in What sort of professional are you a pedagogical and educational sense, going to be? What is the model of serious about producing graduates the practice and inventing models? that know how to work in a whole But, instead, we are doing this kind range of different disciplines. I do a of circus. Graduates pin up their lot of talks at schools like this one projects on the wall and a group of and at every school, there is always predominantly men sit in front of this seminar or class that everyone them and talk about what they would does, the year before they graduate. have done differently. In the end, the It is the professional practice class in students are never going to look at it

again, they are going to package it up and put it in their portfolio and try to get a job. This strange dance that we do is just pointless. Whereas, if we value what we are doing, we should be valuing what we do outside of the institutions. We should be serious about finding new ways for us to be relevant and for us to get what we think are very important ideas out into the world.

Q: May I ask, what are your previous students doing now?

A: All kind of things. Some are graduating and going off to be regular traditional architects. I hope that the architecture that they are doing and the things they are talking about it is different because they have completed our program. For example, the person running Eyal Weizman’s Forensic Architecture studio and a number of their team are graduates of Unknown Fields. A group of Unknown Fields graduates formed their own installation and animation studio ‘Universal Assembly Unit’ that do art installations and work with emerging technologies in the entertainment industry. One of the graduates from my program at Sci-Arc in Los Angeles is now working in the visual effects industry and worked on, some big Marvel blockbusters, Black Mirror and the Mars documentary series for National Geographic. One of them works at the Sundance Institute in the documentary funding area

and talks with new and emerging filmmakers about their projects.

One is now a producer in LA for non fiction television and worked on a Netflix-New York Times collaboration documentary series. One student works with the production designer who does all of Christopher Nolan’s films. Another works for a production designer that now builds worlds for big technology companies like Ford, Nike, and Microsoft, applying these techniques of world-building and storytelling within a corporate space.

I could keep on going. We tell stories, and communicate spatial intelligence and architectural thinking to public audiences. We try to engage students in a very active and real conversation about what are the different industries and disciplines and areas that they can apply that methodology within. That is very varied, and we do not have singular paths that people can follow but we try and create an infrastructure and an environment where they can develop their own directorial voices and start to creatively find the places where what they do might be most relevant.

ALEXANDER WANDL

Researcher at TU Delft Faculty of Architecture with degrees in Landscape Planning and Urbanism

Alexander Wandl is a landscape architect and urbanist. He works as a researcher and instructor at the Department of Urbanism, Delft University of Technology. He is specialised in urban metabolism and regenerative design. His most current project is â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;REPAiR: REsource Management in Peri-urban AReas: Going Beyond Urban Metabolismâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;.

In his lecture, Alexander Wandl, the Horizon2020 project REPAiR (Resource Management in Peri-urban Areas) was introduced. He started with a short general introduction about global material flows, which was done to emphasise the relevance and fundamental need of the research project. He also more specifically explained the context, objectives, and current outcomes generated by the REPAiR project.

Alexander Wandl talked about general global relations and material flows while taking into account the current extraction and trade of lithium and other rare metals as an example of these issues. By doing so, it becomes clear that Australia, China, and Chile especially possess the primary resources of lithium for the entire planet and are connected

strongly within the global trade market because of it.

Coming back to the issue of general material flows, the focus has shifted to the so-called â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;circularity gapâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; within the context of the built environment.

He thereby highlighted that in 2015, only 9.2% of all extracted resources were cycled, with the rest being extracted and disposed of. Next, he discussed the current state of waste flows that exist in the global context, its relation to both world values and GDP per capita and concluded that urban wealth influences the metabolism of waste. For example, New York City holds a relatively high GDP, but at the same time has one of the highest waste disposal rates per capita. In comparison, the GDP per capita in Los Angeles exceeds that of New York City but produces less than

half of the waste.

The previously explained problematic context of global waste flows leads to the necessity of a shift away from a purely linear economic system, and towards a more circular one.

Alexander Wandl defines the linear economy as a system that converts natural resources into waste via the production and consumption of goods.

Within this process, natural capital is removed from the environment, and by the pollution created by waste, the value of the natural resource is reduced. In comparison, a circular economy avoids the loss of value, and the net effect on the environment will ideally end up being zero.

The REPAiR project, therefore, aims at implementing the circular economic model, especially in peri-

urban areas. It is a research and innovation project which started in 2016 and is funded by the EU Horizon 2020 programme. Eighteen partners and six peri-urban living labs are involved in the collaboration and elaboration of the project. The main objective of the project is to develop, test, and implement a Geodesign Decision Support Environment (GDSE). This will allow for the development of various integrative spatial development strategies that see waste and related treatment processes as a usable resource. Firstly, the ambitions of this project are motivated by the concept of urban metabolism (UM), which is informed by exploring the roles of governance settings through various territorial and socio-cultural characteristics.

Secondly, the extension of the concept of UM is done by strengthening the

relationship between design (not only of products but also of space) and resource management. Thirdly, the project aims at shedding new light on participatory and sciencebased decision-making by combining both local and economy-wide sustainability appraisals.

In short, REPAiR focuses on how the design of physical structures and their social and urban metabolisms which define them are interrelated..

Issues regarding health, economy, well-being, and happiness are affected by both materials flows and their environmental impacts. By studying these issues, the project can contribute to improving the quality of life in Europe by building a greener society.

Next, three different models of urban

metabolism analysis were explained in further detail. Firstly, there is a black box model, which focuses exclusively on input and output.

Secondly, there is the so-called greybox model that already considers various input and output flow, in addition to the urban metabolism happening inside the box that has been divided into several components.

Thirdly, there is the network model that also considers various input and output flows, but at the same time, it recognizes interrelations between several components within the urban metabolism process. To understand these models, Alexander Wandl presented a system diagram of activities and flows entitled the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Activity-based spatial material flow analysesâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; (ASMFA). The diagram not only included the analysis of the flows of food, wastewater, food waste,

mixed waste, and secondary raw materials, but also included economic activities,. A first outcome of these ASMFA will be an interactive map showing the current diverse waste flows in the Amsterdam metropolitan region.

Finally, the extended sustainability assessment is explained further.

The guidelines, therefore, are a clear methodology for the selection of the impacts, involvement of stakeholders and a holistic approach specifically for the waste management sector. The selected impacts are divided into three groups (multidisciplinary, multisize and multiscale) and again each in three categories. Multidisciplinary impacts are divided into economic, social and environmental, multisize impacts micro, meso and macro and multi-scale impacts local, regional and global.

ALEXANDER WANDL

INTERVIEW

Intro comment of the interview The lecture of Alexander Wandl elaborated the circular economy through the REPAiR-project as a possible answer to an increased global state of uncertainty. The metabolic project touches mainly upon an almost technological depiction of flows. Seeing other contemporary research happening in the same sphere, we were interested on his views from a deeper and philosophical point of view, and the constantly changing understanding of societies role in nature.

ALEXANDER WANDL

INTERVIEW Q: During your presentation, you had mentioned that you found a lot of data about the processes you were studying, but at the same time it was hard to transmit and communicate their impact to stakeholders. Being a researcher used to concrete scientific data, how was the process regarding the management of these different levels of communication for you?

We are currently in the stage of testing different forms and ways of communicating this data out. The simplest way of communication, for now, is to investigate various processes and activities because everybody knows that things are produced and consumed. From these value chains, we then elaborate their flows, masses, and places. This method is called a ‘simple value chain’ A: First of all, we are still in the middle of principal flows and resources. of these processes. Our team works according to the methodology of a Q: In your presentation, you stated ‘Living Lab,’ so this entire endeavour that neoliberalism shapes the way is a co-exploration together with we approach some of the processes the involved stakeholders. During and activities we have in our daily the research process, we first define life. How highly do you value the common ground, then afterwards we importance of a cultural change in build together a common knowledge the management of waste? And, do base and a common vision for the you think design is enough to create future. The data collection we do this change? forms a parallel scientific process apart from the communication A: Well, I do generally think design mentioned above part. So, the biggest is not enough, but it depends on challenge is communicating and which kind of design. The first step translating this data into information to creating change is to get away that the stakeholders can understand. from the terminology of waste itself,

which is a complete paradigm shift.

We now talk about primary and secondary resources and give it a positive value. I have just recently come from a REPAiR meeting in Hamburg, and I realized this again: the state-of-the-art research(ers) still talks about the optimisation of waste management systems and not actual resource management. Secondly, I had mentioned (neo)liberalism as a possible driver for changing patterns of processes of activities, but it does not necessarily lead towards a linear system. You can also understand that a liberal economic system is a system with real prices. But the problem now is that we currently have neither a controlled, nor a completely free liberal system. For example, if one really has to pay for what damage has been caused (in terms of environmental and social impact), then probably a market-based model would function, but currently there exists a â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;neither norâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; situation regarding this issue.

based on the previous question. If we think about waste as a resource in these times of modernity, we also can have an understanding of nature and the earth in terms of transforming it into a commodity. Do you think this paradigm shift from a linear economy and towards a circular economy is enough, or should we try to go beyond that?

A: Well, this is a profound philosophical question! I think what we fall behind on is the separation that exists between human and nature. Are we just a part of nature?

Or, is it a concept that, we, as humans invented and therefore try to protect?

I think we are part of the system, and it would not be possible to make a separation between human and nature. We are both influencers and players, but when looking at a longterm perspective, we are just a little ant crawling within an overall system.

If you believe in this human-nature separation, then you would aim for Q: Now, I would like to go deeper achieving a natural equilibrium, or

a perfect state of nature. But, if you perceive it as an integrated system, then there is no equilibrium, but rather a permanently evolving system. My final question then is, if we humans survive on this planet, we are part of, how do we, as a species, have the quality of life that we want?

For example, the circular economy is just one of many ideas that have been generated to achieve this. Generally, I am a little bit afraid of approaches that try to reduce our ideas and just copy nature, which brings us back to the human-nature separation way of thinking. The challenge is that our human systems are, by nature, sociotechnical systems, and finding a way to make them sustainable is difficult.

I do not think that just replacing our socio-technological systems with a socio-ecological one is the solution, but it is much rather a combination of them. We also need to deal with our technical systems to achieve sustainability, and that is where the circular economy finds its place.

a construct we use. Now, keeping in mind the previous question, the circular economy also uses nature as a resource, but do you think it is enough in terms of values?

A: This raises the classic question ‘Is it enough to have things or to be somebody?’. Personally, I would go for the second scenario, but I also agree with the third one. I am pretty sure that humans, like any other species will disappear at some point.

Therefore, the main challenge is, how long we can make a liveable planet for us as a human species. I do believe that we try to live in symbiosis with nature, but always aiming for the best of our own species. Whenever we try to dominate nature, we are confronted with unexpected externalities, but we also are a quite resilient species as we act, change and react. Nevertheless, I do not think it is an endless symbiosis.

We are going to leave the planet at a certain point; we just have the power to stay longer or shorter depending on how we act. I think, in the end, it Q: I would like to deepen my previous is an ethical question of how we as question, for instance, in the book of humans want to live together on the ‘The social creation of Nature’ Neil planet.

Evernden raises there three scenarios.

In the first scenario, the human is Q: Thank you, Alex, this was a very over nature, so following the human- nice conversation going from the nature separation thinking, in the technical to the philosophical. second one it is human with nature, and thirdly the species of the human disappears. The author states that humans want the first or second option and, in both cases, nature is

BEN KUIPERS

Landscape Architect Chair of the Netherlands Association of Landscape Architecture.

Ben Kuipers is a landscape architect with years of experience in the field. After his studies at the University of Wageningen he worked consecutively for the Ministry of Agriculture, Nature Management and Fishing, he was Head of design of Public Space at the municipality of Delft, Landscape Architect and Advisor for Kuiper Compagnons and Senior Landscape Architect and Manager for KAAP3 before he started his own practice under his own name.

He also serves as an advisor for The Chief Government Architect of the Netherlands and is chairman for NVTL.

In the lecture by Ben Kuipers, the from the land. material flow of agriculture and food production in the Dutch landscape is Over the centuries, this process over presented and discussed. time improved the soil of the arable land by integrating it with organic Dutch landscape is created by material and minerals. The landscape agriculture. created by this system was very idyllic as small-scale pastures formed The flow of materials involving in the lowlands along the brooks and agricultural land use has heather fields. The woodlands would inadvertently created the famous exist on the higher drylands, with Dutch landscape. Over the centuries, farms around the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;brinkâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; and close to continuous processes of manuring available arable land. The landscape and harvesting, which has always was not only just beautiful but also adapted to local circumstances (such included a very biodiverse ecosystem as soil, climate, and fluctuation in that had been created by various water supplies), have resulted in a subtle gradients that exist among mosaic of landscapes throughout nature. However, life was harsh as it The Netherlands. Most of these land took a lot of labor and manpower to use systems were characterized make a simple living. by circularity. There was a balance between the nutrients put in the soil (by using manure from cattle and men), and the harvest that was taken

Dutch landscape is feeding the in The Netherlands had reduced, the world exportation of agricultural products grew at a large scale (dairy products, The invention of artificial fertilizer meat, eggs, flowers, vegetables). made farmers less dependent on their With this exponential growth in bulk cattle. Important minerals such as production, the price of food went Nitrogen, Phosphorus, and Potassium down and became more affordable. could now be sprinkled over the land at any moment. After WWII, a large- Agriculture is destroying the scale land planning program entitled landscape â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Never hunger againâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; was initiated by the Ministry of Agriculture. This Because of circularity, we went initiative involved methods such through and exhausted multiple as land consolidation, re-allotment, resources in every branch of farming. canalizations of brooks, and even The breeding cattle, pigs, and chickens trees and shelterbelts were cut and for meat depend on imported food, removed to increase the output of while their excrement poisons the food. This program was a great success soil. Dairy farming depends on production-wise, and the amount of mono-culture grassland, which is food that the land produced increased without places for birds and herbs. five times more than it did before. Arable land suffers under mono While the surface of agriculture land culturing of land by using herbicides declined because of horizontal city and pesticides that have no place in growth, and the population of farmers nature. Greenhouse cultivation is a

very innovative branch of agriculture that has industrialized the landscape, which is in dire need for energy transformation.

Farmers also lost their autonomy in this process as banks and agricultural industry have taken over production from the individual. Bulk production has been given priority over the The price we paid for mass food quality and taste of food for the production at a low cost is high. consumer.

Who has paid the costs?

The balance that existed before is Biodiversity in the Netherlands has gone. Our country has quickly become been eliminated, and nature has the world storage room of nutrients withdrawn back into nature reserves. that are wasted in the groundwater, Farmland has transformed into barren while the soil is sinking and is ever ecological deserts. The landscape increasingly becoming exhausted. has evolved into endless industrial Industrial agricultural-landscape farmland that has no scale or sense or even industrial wasteland of attraction. The quality of soil has cannot be our future. Even the been reduced, and the level of water minister of agriculture and farmer table has gone down considerably. organizations admit it. On a congress All of our natural resources are being of the national nature preservation exhausted by this intensive form of organization â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;Natuurmonumenten,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; food production. Our health has been representatives of farmers and nature put in danger because of it, even the preservation agreed that nature and air quality around these farms is bad. agriculture should not be segregated

anymore while the minister declared that the only future for agriculture is circularity. So, there is still hope. And luckily a lot of farmers have already started with new ways of farming, based on circularity. I distinguish two trends: biological farming and technological farming.

Circularity farming

by

technological

Farmers are constantly challenged to innovate. First to become more productive on lower costs. Since the government is making more rules, they also innovate to reduce the use and waste of fertilizer, herbicides, pesticides, energy, and water and to improve the conditions for livestock.

Circularity by biological farming For many reasons, biological farming

is becoming more popular. A growing number of farmers want to be more in contact with nature again and have fun in what they do — feeling responsible for a healthy environment.

Luckily there is also a growing number of consumers who want quality food and animal care. This leads to small scale farms, combining agriculture with livestock again. The farmers are also broadening their enterprise.

Next, to the production of quality food, these farmers also produce the ‘experience of farming’, nature, recreation facilities and health care for the elderly and mentally disabled people. And some citizens want to produce their own food; introducing city farming as a new branch.

Near cities, new collectives of citizens ‘hire land and a farm’ to produce their quality food and experience the seasonal life on a farm. This so-called ‘Herenboerderij’ concept

(squatter farm) is bringing circular food production on a short distance of the cities. Important issue is that more and more people are willing (and able) to pay more for their food.

Which is possible while we only spend 11% of our income on food (it was 35% in 1960).

A sophisticated way of circular farming is permaculture. Combining many different cultures and breeding on one farm. Leading to high production without the use of fertilizer and imported concentrate cattle food.

Contribution Architects

of

Landscape

Farmers will still determine the quality of the landscape. Which branch and what landscape do we prefer? Biological or technological

farming? All we can do as landscape architects are designing the framework in which farming can flourish. And which can add order and beauty to the landscape?

Contribution of Everyone The choice which landscape will prevail; the biological or the technological (or which mix) is up to the market. And luckily, that is us too! By making the right decision while shopping in the supermarket, everyone can contribute to a flourishing circular beautiful new Dutch landscape.

BEN KUIPERS

INTERVIEW

Intro comment of the interview Regarding the different forms of agriculture explained in the lecture, we were eager to ask more elaboration on cultural engagement, related to contemporary uncertainty for the future. We were especially fascinated by the notion of permaculture, as an exciting way forward.

BEN KUIPERS

INTERVIEW Q: According to your presentation, the most convincing proposal to improve the Dutch landscape is to support biological farming. According to your data, people can pay more for organic food, but do you think that this assumption applies to food exportation as well?

A: I think we should export less in mass, but more in quality. This is so there is no impact on profit as you can sell less food at a higher price.

Therefore, I think it would be better if The Netherlands becomes an export country in quality food. We do export our knowledge already, but we should stop making the big mass of food while we continue to poison our soils.

On the other hand, food exports are just 1% of the national income, so it is not such a big deal if it decreases.

Q: We are fascinated by your concept regarding permaculture! Could you please explain this sustainable model in more detail?

A: Permaculture is more about a system that works naturally by creating a symbiosis between the roots, the trees, the plants, the bacteria, etc. This system is about how to take care of making a good crop, but also in a way that avoids diseases without using all kinds of chemicals. It is possible that this kind of natural farming requires a little bit more labor when compared to other agricultural techniques, but it makes people happier to do it as it raises their awareness of the environment.

Nowadays, farmers are becoming more like industrial people, and they donâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t like to farm anymore. Therefore, I think that farmers can have a lot of fun if they can deal with the cattle, or being outside, instead of working in an industrialized place that is absent of any respect for the animals.

I think that for the long term that a permaculture system is a far more interesting way of making use of real natural mechanisms, and maybe we need some more academic research regarding this type of approach. We

need to educate people about this new model, and it should be not romanticized. The funny thing is that people have a lot of romantic ideas about farming, but if you go now to the countryside, you don’t see cows in the pastures, and you don’t see farmers as they live in big buildings, and the pastures sit deserted. That is why the concept of permaculture can create awareness for people that live in the city who both have the wrong idea about the countryside and have no idea where food comes from.

but we should also consider them as part of the task. We are seeing it not only a technical challenge but also as a challenge of making a new type of landscape. If we consider these issues, then I am curious about what the next landscape will be. And there will always be a link with the old type of landscape because landscape is a continuously evolving thing. What before was a lake, now an island, and what used to be land, now is a lake! Therefore, there is a continuous process of change, and we cannot stop it even if we wanted to.

Q: In this dramatic scenario regarding the lack of resources and the ill effects Q: Well, thank you for your of climate change, do you have an presentation and your answers. idea of how food flow will evolve in the future?

A: I hope that new convincing landscapes will arise, and not like the “heroic” type of landscapes such as big polders (which are not cozy), but they should have their beauty.

We should be curious about the new types of landscapes we can make,

TANEHA K. BACCHIN

Researcher, Designer with degrees in Landscape Architecture, Philosophy and Geography

Taneha Kuzniecow Bacchin is an architect, researcher and educator.

She is Assistant Professor in Urban Design, Research Leader and Coordinator of Education of the Delta Urbanism Interdisciplinary Research Group at TU Delft. She leads the Transitional Territories Graduation Studio and, together with Birgit Hausleitner, the European Post-Master in Urbanism (EMU) Spring Semester. Her research focuses on the relation between landscape architecture, infrastructure and urban form. Her current projects deal with the changing nature of the territorial project addressing extreme weather and resource scarcity. She is committee member of the International Water Association and serves as reviewer for several water journals. Her work has been funded internationally and exhibited at the Venice Biennale 2002, and 2018, and SĂŁo Paulo Biennale 2013. Her most recent publication is Aesthetics and Politics of Logistics, edited with Hamed Khosravi and Filippo LaFleur (Humboldt Books 2019) and upcoming publications are BioTerritoriality: The Architecture and Politics of Urban Nature, and Adaptation by Design, together with Filippo LaFleur.

In her lecture, Taneha introduces a rather broad concept: extremes and what they mean. Considering them as relevant for the field of architecture and in the sense of creating the conditions to face the uncertainty. In addition, how to deal with it in times of epic extremes - and how that may inspire a new design approach in architecture that allows a change of behaviour in society.

Starting from the question of what kind of urban life we can expect in the age of climate change and also in the age of major political conflicts and economic crises that we are experiencing worldwide, the lecture discussed the possible role of urban design, spatial planning and architecture disciplines in shaping/ affording life. Architecture has always been an environmental

agent since through design, we have changed the environment and it has also changed our vision of being with certain cultural landscapes.

In that sense, the intensity of carbon economies is a design problem.

For example, in the case of Venice, the city has been living ‘by design’ exposed to flood risk since its very beginning. With the conscious choice of being embedded within the complex system of navigation patterns of the Venetian Lagoon and at the same time the strategic access to the Adriatic Sea. Eventually, this led the city to be constantly exposed to the threats posed by water.

Therefore by being located in this specific geography, understanding its specific constraints, Venice displays ‘a planning and design choice’ that historically deals with the condition

of being at risk.

The question is, in an extreme environment, can we, with/ by design, stablish a dialogue/ adapt to extremes?

Urbanization is something that we cannot escape. It is ubiquitous and there is no distinction anymore between what is rural and what is urban. What we see now as designers, architects, and urbanists, is not anymore only the question of the designed space (formal/ concrete dimension of design), but rather of understanding and designing processes embedded within major systems (dynamic/ abstract dimension of design). As designers and planners, we are now invited to learn how to deal with ecology and the changing conditions at sea and

land, with the atmosphere and the changing weather and emissions patterns. It is indeed a question of the way in which we plan, deliver and implement a conscious space.

It is also a matter of concern of the management of these major systems in which we are embedded in.

Therefore, there is a design problem of how to manage and deal with flows, involving the design of infrastructure, and at the same time with the problem of our behavior as citizens.

Regarding the scope of infrastructure, the way we approach territorial use, resource extraction, production and consumption patterns, has to lead to infrastructural projects being the main agents of change in the environment. Therefore, it starts with our consumption desires leading to

specific conditions that we are now experiencing, such as severe pollution, large-scale industrial sites, extreme mining activity, industrial waste, etc.

We must understand those landuse patterns and their consequent negative externalities as a part of our own history (of decisions) of living on earth. Coming from an extreme fracture in the environment, we have hazards beholding us, but at the same time, we have a need for inhabiting, and the need for growing and producing.

Focusing on the link between industrial production, resource extraction, and climate change, we are met with the need of envisioning new ways of urbanization and architectural actions.

The notion of infrastructure in spaces and geographies that can be created can also be redefined. Therefore, what we actually need is to think through relations and systems rather than isolated objects and variables.

Infrastructure must be reconceiving together with the spaces and the materials that regenerate those relationships.

In that sense, design and planning play a critical role. However, it comes down to the question of how we look at these conditions, by knowing that we are exposed to these extremes, not only in physical terms but also in our behavior. The question perhaps is now for us to pause and to look at things and try to envision a different perspective. How should we do things differently? We should be able to have the right instruments

to somehow try to counteract these conditions of being in extremes, and not do it from a naive perspective, but really knowing the level of threats that we are exposed to, and that we are constantly generating in our daily choices.

This means a radical change to the landscapes that we know, how they are now and to accept that we are in need of a radical systemic change, knowing that it might indeed generate a revised notion of nature as part of the urban project. Hence, the need to learn from nature, from its ability to adapt, as a way to evolve our own design practice. So, learning from physical conditions at site, ecological processes and scales could be the provider of a certain operational initial point of departure. If we cannot escape anymore from our own

main influence in nature, how about working towards constructed natures in a way that instead of exploiting and harvesting the environment, we can cultivate it?

To start with, we have to consider the shifting of subsurface and surface conditions and atmospheric regimes in order to deal with climate extremes, pollution, biodiversity and habitat depletion and resource scarcity. These broad systems are constantly shifting between different dimensions and different scales, therefore the need to first understand, for instance, biophysical processes, carbon emissions, carbon storage, nutrient cycles, hydrological cycles, etc., and how can we include them in the making of a new mode of infrastructural design. And from that, the acceptance that there is not only

one possible design outcome, but we might have to adjust the outcome in relation to pairing off different urban problems and urban functions.

Then, we can be open to new urban questions regarding more extremes as the case of the Arctic, where climate change is clearly more noticeable and leading to a completely new geographic condition.

Hence, by dealing with extremes, we are trying to put forward a new condition of settlement living, considering an intensification of dynamics from a point of view of ecology, access to resources and the consequent needed revision of our infrastructure apparatuses. The final question is, how can this be dealt with by design, how it can eventually become a new urban project?

ROBERT KLOOSTERMAN

Professor of Economic Geography and Planning at the University of Amsterdam

Robert Kloosterman is Professor of Economic Geography and Planning at the University of Amsterdam. His research is guided by questions about how the social, economic and cultural transition of advanced urban economies that gathered pace after 1980 has affected cities and why different outcomes have emerged. His current research activities center on new economic activities in urban contexts (notably cultural industries and migrant businesses) and on linkages within polycentric urban configurations in advanced economies. A connecting theme concerns the way different (national or local) institutional environments filter, shape, reinforce or block more general changes. He is the lead partner of CICERONE, a large EU Horizon 2020 research project. He is a Visiting Fellow of the Aston Business School, Aston University, Birmingham.

In his lecture, Robert Kloosterman talked about migration pattern and its impact on the urban landscape.

He starts with a short explanation in history to clarify drivers and context, afterwards identifies different types of migration, next explains the distribution of migration across cities and countries and finally elaborates on the impacts of migrants on the urban landscape.

After 1980, processes of globalization accelerated strongly, which led to ever more connected regions and cities through increasing flows of goods, services, capital, information, and, evidently, people. This, in turn, generated broad processes of sociocultural, economic, demographic and political change. However, these changes were especially visible in the context of cities. Deeply intertwined

with accelerating processes of globalization is the expansion of the so-called cognitive-cultural economy which is characterized by its leading sectors of high-tech, highfinance, high-concept, and high-craft activities. These are all knowledgeintensive activities which are, on the one hand, embedded in local (urban) economies and strongly dependent on agglomeration economies, while, on the other, usually inserted in global production networks. These activities attract high-skilled migrants. Urban economies also comprise a rather different set of activities. Firms and households are now much more likely to outsource activities like cleaning and deliveries. With the growth of cognitive-cultural activities, we thus can also observe a rise in these servile activities in which (mainly lowskilled) migrants are overrepresented.

What emerges, the, is a polarized pattern of insertion processes of migrants driven by the bifurcated job distribution of the cognitivecultural economy. Urban economies are not just about private sector jobs, but also – especially in continental Europe – about public-sector jobs.

These foundational activities like teaching, public administration, police and health care are crucial for maintaining (urban) middle classes.

but nowadays especially Asia and Latin America have been exporting, and, in the case of fast-growing Asian economies, increasingly also importing expats. In marked contrast, servile activities are mainly executed by low-skilled migrants from less developed countries or in some cases, high-skilled workers, when their skills are not acknowledged by the country of arrival. Foundational activities still are often strongholds of the indigenous population and constitute The societal impacts of these crucial middle-class avenues of social migration flows are very much mobility. contingent on the type of sectors, their location, and their specific These relatively broad generalizations development. For example, high- help to explain the distribution skilled expats working in the leading of migrants across the countries. sectors, which Richard Florida has Firstly, flows depend strongly on the called members of the ‘creative class,’ dynamics and shape of the national were firstly migrating exclusively and urban economies. Secondly, from western to western countries, it depends on the institutional

framework which comprise rules and regulations regarding migration.

Thirdly, historical ties influence heavily the distribution of migrants across countries. Especially countries with colonies in their history show this pattern. For example, in the Netherlands, a large part of migrants originates from former colonies, like Indonesia or Surinam. Fourthly, the composition of the population partly determines the size and the composition of migration flows. This refers to chain migration, so if there are already migrants from one group or nation, they tend to attract more from the same.

Now coming to a smaller scale, according to Robert Kloosterman the distribution of migrants across cities depends on three different factors.

Firstly, the urban production system

influences heavily in which city who is going to live. Secondly, the urban housing market determines in which part of the city which kind of migrant is going to settle down. A more intangible factor is the quality of space. Local culture and tolerance shape the choice of the city and the district.

Now concluding the first part of the lecture, it becomes clear, that the result is a polarized labor market in terms of migrants. The next paragraph goes beyond contextualizing and deals with the final impacts of migrants on the urban landscape.

Depending on the type of migration, it influences the range of goods and services offered in the area, the spoken language, the dress code and finally the use of public space. As an example, Robert Kloosterman takes

neighborhoods in Amsterdam. There are some neighborhoods popular for migrants and at the same time for students, and moreover, first signals of gentrification appear. This is often visible through hipster shops next to migrant entrepreneurs. Besides that, the language is spoken and predominant dress code impacts and changes public spaces in the neighborhood. So, these changing systems lead to new emerging dynamics and opportunities.

In summary, both groups in the context of polarized migration affect the urban space, but differently.

ROBERT KLOOSTERMAN

INTERVIEW

Intro comment of the interview With the global polarized migration flows in the local context of cultural and political transitions, and itâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s direct effect on the urban environment, Robert Kloosterman brings to the foreground a missing element in contemporary urban research. However, the element of designing in response to these flows is still unclear. Maybe a perspective on future change might help us towards getting more grip.

ROBERT KLOOSTERMAN

INTERVIEW Q: The first question refers to the different kind of migration you mentioned: knowledge-based, severe and functional. Can you elaborate more these different types of migration by giving explicit examples and explain thereby where they occur?

A: Starting with an example here in Delft: many of the people are highly skilled and come to study, and some of them most probably stay. These kinds of migrants are cognitivecultural knowledge workers, also called the creative class. This context is especially interesting because significant parts come from (ex-) developing countries and now they export high-skilled people to other places. But what we also see in the Netherlands is that when these high-skilled people go to work, many women from Ghana, Poland or other countries come to clean their houses.

In this example, you can clearly see two faces of the labor market.

Q: Do you think this example applied just to the Netherlands, or also to other European countries? Are there variations of this phenomenon in different European countries?

A: This depends partly on the development trajectory of the economy and partly on the migration regime, so if it is open or not. This is not just a matter of the rules and regulations but also dependent on the enforcement of them. Some of these servile workers are undocumented.

If there is a strong demand for labor, then it usually will be met either by a resident or a documented migrant or even an undocumented worker.

The rise in the number of high-skilled workers has driven the demand for servile workers through outsourcing of all kinds of activities. This also triggers a lot of migration from lowskilled workers. However, they might not be â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;low-skilled,â&#x20AC;&#x2122; but they are doing this kind of jobs because they do not have any alternatives.

Q: The next question refers to the different migration patterns in nations and cities you mentioned in your presentation. Can you explain some external influences for migration besides production change in the countries of settlement and origin?

A: One of the main points for the countries of settlement is tolerance.

So if there is for example violence against migrants and this is published in the media, the flows may be hampered. In the countries of origin especially climate change will push migration in the near future. If climate change continues, parts of the globe will not be habitable anymore, and these people will need to move. It will be a tough challenge for Europe to cope with this situation.

A: Well, it is already difficult enough to look ahead a few weeks, but as I mentioned in my presentation since 1980 there has been an acceleration of globalization. This means that flows are becoming larger and their extension increased. Nowadays this is visible especially in technology, so ICT and the internet, but also in a whole set of regulatory changes like liberalization, privatization, and deregulation. Currently, a rise of populist parties can be observed, which goes against a grain of previous decades.

This can result in shutting off the borders and thereby hampering migration flows. Finally, globalization is a human-made process, so it might also be possible to change and turn around. A very recent example of this phenomenon is the â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;AfDâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; party in Germany, which is gaining more and more popularity.

Q: Talking again about the future: can you maybe share your vision about Q: Now if these populist movements the far-away future migration from a will not stop migration flows in the more economic point of view? future, how do you think cities can adapt to that? Can the government

prepare in advance?

A: Governments usually respond in a secondary way. So new housing or neighborhoods will not be built in advance, but when migrants arrive.

They might respond to new ways of migration in these neighborhoods, but I would be very surprised if the government does anything in advance. I guess, many countries and EU-wide will try to decrease migration flows. However, the difference between low- and highskilled will play an important role.

So finally, the future of migration depends if countries and the EU close their border more effectively or not.

In my opinion, you cannot maintain a welfare state, minimum wage and green policies with open borders. We need some kind of population policy.

Taking as an example the green heart of Randstad, if we would welcome everyone, it could not be maintained in the future.

Q: Thank you very much for your interview and your personal insights!

LEI QU

Assistant Professor of Spatial Planning & Strategy - Delft University of Technology

Dr. Lei Qu is experienced in research topics related to urban regeneration and liveability in the context of migration and economic transition. She works as assistant professor at the TU Delft Urbanism Department. In the past 5 years, she has been supervising graduation projects on, but not limited to, revitalization of deprived neighborhoods such as urban villages, historical inner-city areas or post-war districts, where housing and public space could be used as tools to cultivate new economies and improve liveability for all.

Morphological study on the neighborhood scale, city-regional level analysis on socio-economic and spatial transformation processes, policy study on the current development modes and institutional design that could facilitate new ways of planning are essential methods for such research projects.

The urbanization levels of the provinces in China are very different from each other. The economic opportunities in the more developed provinces create regional migration.

The rural migrants that came from the hinterland to work concentrate mainly on the newly formed coast agglomerations, especially in the Guangdong province where Shenzhen is located.

expansion, Shenzhen is even more of an extreme case. It has developed in 30 years from a town that only housed 300,000 people, which nowadays has become a big metropolis of 12 million people. “China speeds, but Shenzhen speeds even faster – a miracle of planning!”. This “miracle” started in the 1980s with the idea to plan for a national level Spatial Economic Zone (SEZ). The national attention was to promote policies to attract Rapid urban expansion in China investment, both from foreign and and the Shenzhen case national investors, which started with the manufacturing industries.

The population structure of Guangzhou and Shenzhen has more Socio-spatial distribution of than 50% floating population. The migrant workers increase in the last 20-30 years is due to interregional migration but is also Although the city has experienced connected with rapid urbanization many rounds of industrial upgrading, processes in cities on the Pearl River nowadays the labor-intensive Delta. Within such rapid urban industries are mostly concentrated on

the peripheral districts of Shenzhen.

Many of the rural migrants concentrate there since there are opportunities to work on the production lines.

However, it is difficult since the city is unable to provide accommodation for them through the official system. The migrants mostly seek shelter in the urban villages, which have become informal settlements, but also the “arrival cities” for the workers. This statement is supported by the analysis of both distributions of industries and urban villages, where the correlation is easily seen.

for the migrants. The typology of these urban villages is very similar to other informal settlements in other countries. Although the physical conditions inside the urban villages are problematic, they are still functioning as affordable neighborhoods where migrants living on low costs can accommodate. Many urban villages are working as “arrival cities” for the migrants, where they can settle down and build up their social network gradually themselves.

Shenzhen from the “world factory” to an “international The role of urban villages in city.” accommodating migrants As the city is trying to re-profile The former villagers built the urban itself, the central part of the city villages on their own land, by is redeveloped with a global city densifying their original homestead image. Knowledge-based service and providing cheap rental housing industries, creative industries are

increasing, while the labor-intensive manufacturing industries are gradually moving out. There is a trend of large urban projects taking place in central parts of Shenzhen, which allow more space for new global functions. These projects obtain newly reclaimed land, but also take existing spaces from the old factories and urban villages, which involves redevelopment of the city.

Affordable housing construction The government is trying to offer affordable housing in the peripheral districts. However, this measure is not enough to deal with a problem of this scale, because priority is given to the local registered population.

On the other hand, these newly built housing areas do not act as arrival cities, where a lot of possibilities are

provided to the rural migrants.

“So, we can see these current urban redevelopment methods still approach informal settlements for the migrants as mere physical entities, and disregard the social relations embedded in these places. Therefore, we think that the challenge for future urban development, in the context of China, lies within the question of: How can we accommodate these many migrants – socially and spatially?”

New ways of planning and design This urgent question needs to be adequately answered, and a possibility can be a new way of planning and design – people-centered approach, area-based approach. Not relying on big developments and actors, who will do large scale redevelopment,

but look more into the current setting of these neighborhoods and see more local actors involved. The accommodation of the rural migrants for this transitional period of the urbanization can still happen in the informal settlements, as they will still act as arrival cities. With more strategic planning and looking closely for the livability issues, the city can create a more inclusive and tolerant attitude towards the urban villages.

LEI QU

INTERVIEW

Intro comment of the interview Given Chinaâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s interesting place in shaping and reacting to global flows we were eager to talk more about the role of the government in shaping and reshaping the urban landscape. Lei Qu introduced the term â&#x20AC;&#x153;arrival citiesâ&#x20AC;? in her lecture, which allows us to conceptualize these unprecedented forms of hyper urbanizations on a more local level. We wanted to ask Lei to reflect more on this relation from policies shaped by the government to the local level. And, given the inevitable rise of informal ways of settling, how the governmental response is then again framed.

LEI QU

INTERVIEW Q: In the presentation that you gave earlier, you stress the process of internal migration in the example of China that is creating rising informalities and two different environments in the cities. How do you see this issue to unfold in the future? Do you imagine these cities to obtain a more homogeneous wave of urbanization overcoming these informalities?

speed and magnitude of migration, the city cannot offer equal standards of services for all those migrants and that is how these informal settlements come to exist. As long as this regional difference exists, the informal settlements will keep playing a role as “arrival cities,” and the two different worlds will still remain. There might be a different scenario only if these cities have reached a more balanced and socially A: If the regional difference and social sustainable way of development and stratification within the city were there are practices overcoming the not tackled, this issue will remain. issues of socio-spatial segregation.

China is still in a transitional phase of urbanization, which leads to Q: As you are talking about the regional difference that we are development, right now the Chinese witnessing now. The more developed government has a lot of power, cities attract rural migrants, as there meaning that it has a say on the is a big difference in the level of distribution of resources, whereas income, but also the workforce in the in other countries the different hinterland provinces is quite higher. municipalities must compete for When this group of people comes to the market. Do you think that this a city like Shenzhen to work, they way of hierarchical planning can first need to settle down, and that counteract on these negativities or if is why I stressed the term “arrival it is conscious about it? cities” in my lecture. Due to the

A: Development per se is not going to solve the problem of urban poverty, as the urban poor also emerges from the competitiveness of urban development, which strengthens the problem of stratification. Planning can and should play a crucial role by paying more attention to social justice so that everyone benefits from urban growth. The consciousness is there but not always gets priority in such a rapid development process in Chinese cities. In areas with less pressure of urban (re-)development, we do see alternative approaches.

For example, the peripheral Dalang District of Shenzhen where 95% of the population are young migrant workers, the local district government made great effort to build social resilience, such as collaborating with urban villages in providing public spaces and facilities.

A: In recent years, the Chinese national government has put forward a lot more policies in order to achieve more balanced development among regions, especially the development of western hinterland and countryside.

For more developed city-regions, policies were made to increase the provision of affordable housing and public facilities. There is a willingness from the central government to pay more attention to the quality of life and not only to the economic growth, but the situation on the local level is different. The municipalities are the ones who have to provide and finance, such as the affordable housing projects, and have to deal with limitations in the budgets, resources, land availability, etc.; while at the same time, economic growth is still their main focus. Therefore, achieving such a balance is a huge challenge of management as well as planning.

Q: Do you think that the government should take more action to increase Q: Do you think that some policies the balance between the regions? from the national government and communities should be aligned with

the local development to create more strategic economic growth, considering that they are not balancing the regional structure?

A: It is very challenging to create a balanced regional structure only by top-down interventions or bottomup initiatives. It is not a matter of choice, but allowing for alternative development modes. For example in the case of Shenzhen, there is already a large number of informal settlements, which play a critical role for the new arrivals. If we can turn the perception of those urban villages around and make them resources for this transitional period of urbanization, the city can gain a lot more. One can even argue that these types of neighborhoods support functioning of the city, therefore no need for extra big investments in ‘affordable housing’, but use what the city already have.

Q: As we understand, you are interested in the integration of different communities within the regional economies and in defining the opportunities they have. In that line, what is the main risk that we would face if we fail to integrate the migrants into our cities?

to adapt to the new circumstances, failing to keep their old ways, which further leads to the emergence of downgraded areas. Therefore, this is a wicked problem, which cannot be solved with just a few interventions, within one scale. As long as there is a regional difference, migrants will be attracted to the more developed world. So, I think, working on different levels with different measures for the rural and urban areas can result in a better regional balance. This already started to happen in China, where lots of research and projects are developed in rural areas, to define alternative ways of development and to enable a different kind of economic growth. So, this is something that both, the central government and the city can take the lead in, promoting balanced growth and incorporating social justice in the planning and development processes. Strategic planning can be a tool for creating balanced growth, paying more attention to livability in different regions, instead of only focusing on creating centralities and growth poles.

Q: Is it also a topic of territorial productivity? You are talking about the government that is trying to make the rural areas more attractive, to release the pressure over the city.

A: The problem is that if we do not act So, is it trying to recognize different on these social problems, these so- models of the development of called “problematic neighborhoods” different regions of the territory? might get worse. There are already multiple examples where cities had

A: Yes, that is why there are more and more knowledge exchange between Chinese and EU countries. When we compare the situation in China to the Netherlands, we can see a more balanced development. The rural and urban areas are very different from one another but are both very attractive places for people to live in. The Randstad was developed as a network of cities that exists without one dominating another. Of course, the idea is not to impose a new spatial model, since the development of cities is past-dependent. However, what can be learned from the Dutch experience is how city-regions can benefit from the growth poles; to generate growth, but at the same time to improve the living quality for all.

Q: The last question of this interview is related to the example that you gave of the Netherlands. There is a highly developed transport network in the Randstad that, of course, is related to the size but creates the opportunity to have different backbones in the system and promotes certain typology of development. However, in the case of China, which is much bigger than the Netherlands, do you see the infrastructure as part of the solution in a balance between rural and urban areas?

A: Improving connectivity is always helpful from different perspectives â&#x20AC;&#x201C; to get equal access to resources and to improve the living qualities

of people. This is a major part of the investment happening in China from the public sector, which we can see improving dramatically in the last 20 years. However, only improving infrastructure itself is not enough. The functional relationship among cities and between the rural and urban areas are very important â&#x20AC;&#x201C; what kind of job opportunities are there for the people; otherwise, the improved connectivity might reinforce the migration. That is why finding alternative development modes is quite essential for creating regional balance.

Q: Thank you very much!

ELISE MISAO HUNCHUCK

Researcher, Designer with degrees in Landscape Architecture, Philosophy and Geography

Elise Misao Hunchuck is an independent researcher, writer, designer, and editor based in Berlin. Trained in landscape architecture, philosophy, and geography, her work focuses on bringing together fieldwork, research, design, and writing through collaborative practices of observation, care, and coordination. Her research in Canada, Japan, northern Europe, and most recently, Ukraine, develops cartographic, photographic, and text-based practices to explore and communicate the agency of landscapes. She is also a member of the editorial board of Scapegoat Journal: Architecture | Landscape | Political Economy.

In her lecture, Elise Hunchuck introduced some recent and in progress work about how we conduct research and design in landscape architecture: “To-date my work has been in an effort to develop a deeper understanding of shifting, changing, and uneven risk – how it is understood, how it can be flattened or erased, and how it can be responded to in landscape practices.

She has been studying these questions through three types of stones in three coastal landscapes: tsunami markers in Japan, sea level markers in Sweden, and drought (hunger) stones in the Czech Republic. Each of these stones can tell us something about the knowledge and cultural production that is both a result of and results in these types of stones and landscapes.

Her inquiries are premised on the

idea that landscapes function both as archives and historiographic texts.

To paraphrase Jane Wolff, landscapes are never given, they are made. In Japanese tradition, there exists a continuity between culture and nature, in so far as the sense of a place speaks directly to the intricate relationships between human and natural forces. This continuity is most clear in the historical practice of naming utamakura–storied places shared through literature and art, they are imbued with geologic history, human history, and cultural meaning.

In 1689, Matsuo Bashō left present day Tokyo on foot for a six-month journey to northern Japan. Along the way, he wrote what would become the most well-known and treasured Japanese travel diary ‘The Narrow Road to the Deep North’. His journey amplified his already acute awareness of the

impermanence of nature, developed through his practice of closely observing, recording and reflecting upon his immediate environment.

Bashoâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s lifetime of traveling and writing about his wanderings engendered an awareness of the value of seeing and documenting; that to name a place is to know a place, and to do so in a place such as Japan is to draw attention to the realities of everyday life in the face of knowable but unpredictable geologic forces.

A stratovolcanic land form, its the largest island in the Japanese archipelago, with almost seventy percent of the island formed by steep, forested mountains and the remaining thirty percent tending toward deltaic or ria coastal landscapes. The geomorphology of the coastal sitesâ&#x20AC;&#x201C;that which makes it most desirable for human settlement also makes it the most vulnerable to geological events and their effects. In the recorded history of Japan, there is a high incidence of large, shallow earthquakes along the northern coast. Earthquakes of this kind are more likely to trigger tsunamis, which are then amplified by the geomorphology of large, low bays and steep mountains.

Honshu is an island that feels alive; the earth, that should be most stable, shudders from below. The ocean moves, desired and undesired, up and over the island. These movements, sometimes discernible and sometimes not, together define a precarious existence, an indelible part In March 2011, the most powerful of Japanese life and cultural identity. earthquake to hit Japan in recorded

history occurred. As the earthquake took place near the North American and Pacific Plate, an undersea landslide was triggered, and the entire Pacific Ocean was displaced. An earthquake tsunami event occurred.

In many locations, the swelling of the ocean was exacerbated by sea walls that were too high or too wide and rather than dispelling incoming energy traveling in the water, the seawalls trapped the tsunami waves and intensified the swells and currents.

when and where to evacuate. But as the days progressed, stories emerged of places where people had escaped significant loss of life.

Hundreds of years prior to the event, in the wake of the 869 tsunami along the same coast and a similar magnitude, communities began to erect stone tablets called tsunami stones. These stones performed a dual function; they are warnings â&#x20AC;&#x201D; markers of the edges of inundation, they indicated where to build, where to flee when oceans rose; and they The loss of human life was not the are monuments, part of a ritual that result of warning systems that did memorializes places and those lost. not work; things worked as they had been designed to. Instead it was the Hundreds of these stones exist along unfortunate but predictable result of the coast and range from a few a series of choices that were made inches to a few meters. The messages about where to build, what to build, vary from stone to stone, with each where to work, where to live, and community utilizing stones as a

memorial and/or recorded predictive In the summer of 2015, I travelled knowledge. to known tsunami stones along the coast to explore these questions. And, These tablets have a pressing current through mixed methods of research, and future relevance that is too I compiled “An Incomplete Atlas of important to simply be a marker Stones,” a visual document as a way of past event. Through my work, I to unfold or see the archipelagos propose that these tables – each like mineral base. utamakura – are part of multivalent knowledge exchange through time and The atlas is organized by stone, space, and as Japan continues to build following the coastline of the Iwate almost 14,000 kilometres of seawalls, prefecture from the north to south they are crucial in establishing an along the Sanriku coast. Each stone understanding that the crisis facing is introduced by its coordinates: coastal landscapes are an ongoing latitude, longitude, and elevation. project and are not limited to the Each stone was erected in response aftermath of emergency. to a tsunami, so the year and name of the tsunami are listed. Each stone is How can we reveal the social and further categorized by its engraving – cultural agency that passes through either as a memorial or as a lesson. fragmented landscapes? How do we untangle the human and non-human The stone is then mapped in relation worlds that we live within? to the 2011 tsunami. The maps are

constrained to a consistent frame, with the exception of the inundation, which leaks out, in all directions, to the limit of the page. Each stone is revealed at a scale related to the human body; first as a specimen, removed from its context in a front facing scaled photograph, and then shown as an object placed into the landscape. Each stone is shown unobstructed, in isolation, so the readers can attempt to find the location of the stone by themselves, just as one would have to do in an emergency. Last, for each stone, two aerial images are presented: one just after the tsunami and one after five years of reconstruction.

significant part of how we have come to understand how the earth moves and how we measure the global sea level and its changes. The oldest existing document containing a piece of information about the level of the Baltic Sea is a rune stone.

The inscription is from Ingrid, who tells us that she had a bridge built.

Over one thousand years later, the stone remains but the water is now several kilometres away. Historical documents and images reveal this ongoing problem along the coast of the northern Baltic: harbors would be built, towns would be settled, and then, over time, the harbours could no longer be reached by boat – the level of the sea, people thought, was This atlas – research, documentation, dropping. reconfiguration, design – is tailored to this type of stone, to this type of This problem caught the attention landscape and to these circumstances. of Anders Celsius, the astronomer, But not all coastlines are the same. physicist and mathematician who Even along the same waterline, for proposed the temperature scale which example, there can be extraordinary bears his name and, Carl Linnaeus, variations. the botanist, physician and zoologist, who formulated the modern system While the stones in Japan indicate of naming organisms. that coastlines prone to fast rising At the time, the displacement of the water, the sea level markers of Baltic was thought to be the result of Sweden indicate very slowly and moving water and so the datum by uneven rising of the land and about which to measure it had to be stable how the earth moves.

– it was marked into that which was supposed to be most stable – the The story begins on the Baltic shield, bedrock, the earth’s crust. But during in Finland and Sweden. The Celsius his travels, Celsius observed new rock is an example of a rock and a lands forming and rocks appearing in landscape studied by the regional previously navigable waters. He was scientific community that is a convinced of a diminishing Baltic Sea

but he needed to measure it in order to prove it so that he could predict it.

Seal rocks are so-called because they are rocks in the sea used by seals to rest on. Celsius realized two important things about seal rocks. First, the top of the stone has to be close to mean sea level to make it possible for the seals to roll onto. Second, since a seal rock is an ideal place to hunt and shoot seals, it was likely economically important and so there were likely to be documents on the ownership of such rocks. He found four seal rocks useful for his purposes – they were mentioned in inheritance documents and bills of sale but in later taxation certificates were declared unusable because they were too high above the water or standing on dry land.

Celsius concluded again that sea level must be falling. One seal rock could be identified and measured, using inheritance and taxation documents and statements from descendants.

He determined that the sea level had dropped almost 1.5 metres in 170 years. This was the Celsius value that he co-published with Linnaeus.

It was only later, when geological time and mechanics became understood and accepted as fact, that earth sciences would provide the framework of knowledge and a network of concepts within which the significance of his observations and actions could be fully understood and appreciated – the sea was not dropping, but the basin of the Baltic sea was rising at an uneven rate.

Others including Charles Lyell and Lamarck would later build on the work of the Celsius stone. The terms of transgression and regression – the problem of moving shorelines – would come from Lamarck’s Hydrogeology (1802), in which he wrote that we can assume every spot on earth has been, at some time or another, below the sea. And from this came the concept and measurement of eustasy – what we commonly refer to as the measurement of the global sea level.

While the Celsius stone tells the story of the movement of land by way of the movement of water; the Deçin stones tell us the story about the movement of water through the land, which is also a story about climate At the same time he cut a horizontal and weather. line - a mean sea level mark - into a former seal rock in the Gulf of Bothnia In the summer of 2018 central with the purpose of addressing Europe experienced an extreme the problem he himself had – he drought: an extended period without wanted to make it possible for future any significant rainfall. Drought generations to measure the water conditions can reveal artefacts decrease with greater accuracy. The previously hidden. For example, the rock is known as the Celsius rock and long rotten wood of a 4500 year old can be accessed today. henge leaves an organic footprint

in the earth, as it retains more moisture than the surrounding soil.

One reveal, however, was meant to indicate and measure drought – these are the marks of the hunger stones, found along the Elbe River in Swiss Bohemia – a geographical region that straddles south-eastern Germany and north-western Czech Republic. More than a dozen such hunger stones have been found in and around the town of Decin (indicated by the red circle), along the Elbe, which flows from the highlands of the Czech Republic, up, north to the North Sea. In 2018 river levels dropped significantly, with many recording stations in Germany recording the lowest levels in their recorded history. The falling river has revealed these hydrological markers, many of which predate meteorological records themselves. The most wellknown of these stones is here, at the edge of the river. These stones were used to record low water levels with a line, a year, and the initials of the recorder. The earliest date currently visible is 1616.

These hunger stones don’t just indicate drought, however, they also refer to the practical difficulties that surround a dry season. In a drought, crops can fail, but ships can also be held at harbour, the river too shallow to navigate with crucial supplies unable to reach their destinations.

This stone is marked with the now famous inscription, “When you see me, you will weep,” though another stone

nearby says “Don’t cry, girl, don’t fret.

When it’s dry, spray your fields wet.”

It is one of the oldest hydrological markers in Central Europe.

Considered on their own, each stone is a hyper localized intervention, intimately tied to the geology of their location. At first we might not think that they are part of a larger system, but in agglomeration, they speak to an emergent, large-scale effect: they tell us about the earth’s unstable mineral base, and the material flows of our environments subject to different forces at different scales.

“The boundaries of the actual are no more fixed and rigid than the elasticity of our imaginations,” Thoreau once wrote, and these stones remind us that all of the ways we understand the world – the models, the knowledge, the words we use – all are constructed. They are forms of artifice and can hide their agency in their making. But they can also be undone, and untangled, and discovered.

ELISE MISAO HUNCHUCK

INTERVIEW

Intro comment of the interview In the inspiring lecture of Elise Hunchuck, she explained her studies on how natural disasters and uncertainty of nature is understood and manifested on coastal landscapes of; Sweden, Japan, and Czech Republic. Her interpretation of how this marking and naming places can give information on how the society knows the place, and the meaning of place in their culture made us curious about Hunchuckâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;s further opinions on landscapes and their relations with human culture, and especially the relationship of humans and coastal lines.

ELISE MISAO HUNCHUCK

INTERVIEW Q: In your inspiring talk, you took us along a journey where we were reminded of the importance of traveling and naming, “To name a place is to know a place,”.

In this context, do you consider this task should be more present in our everyday life, inside and outside of practice?

history, and cultural meaning.

Some of us might know of utamakura through another means; the travel diary. Matsuo Basho, the Japanese poet, wrote and sketched out his sixmonth journey in the travel diary Narrow Road to the Deep North. His journey amplified his understanding of the impermanence of nature, which A: It may be helpful to think of this he had developed through a practice as less of a task and more of a way of observing, recording and reflecting of thinking and being in the world upon his immediate environment.

– wherever we might find ourselves.

There are two aspects to your question. Second, this acute awareness, close First, in my talk, I was grounding observation, and the synthesis of the importance of traveling and the two is something that we are naming in Japanese culture, where encouraged to do as landscape a continuity exists between nature architects, and we could argue more and culture. So far, the sense of a broadly as designers. I would say place speaks directly to the intricate that yes, it is desperately necessary, interplay between human and especially today in light of climate natural forces. This is not meant to be change and the most recent IPCC a romantic kind of observation; it is report. Climate change is something most clear in the practice of naming that is happening slowly. By this, I utamakura–storied places shared mean that although we intellectually through literature and art that are understand that climate change imbued with geologic history, human is happening and is underway, we

tend to not feel it or see it or sense it directly as such. That is, until times of emergency that include extreme weather events like hurricanes or cloudbursts or flooding (obviously I’m not including climate or science deniers like Trump, and so forth, although it’s worth mentioning that Metahaven’s Digital Tarkovsky does wonderful work to read Trump’s conflation of weather and climate against the problem of thinking through the longue durée by way of Braudel).

climate change in the near future but so that we can also simultaneously use those imagined futures to mobilize ourselves and others to counteract and minimize climate change right now. After all, we can’t forget that the IPCC 6 report still allows us a twelveyear window to limit the effects of climate change, as Greta Thunberg so powerfully reminds all of us on a daily basis. And the political will is most certainly there, as Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has shown us. Both of these women are showing us–every day–the importance of knowing and But I do think it’s important to make synthesizing complex information at the connection between how we varying scales of space and time. develop an understanding of our everyday environment with how we Q: Your project is a complete are then able to see slow, gradual reflection on the landscape and how changes in it. Then we can understand it continuously changes. The specific how we synthesize our environment Japanese case of marking shorelines with what we know about climate fluctuation by planted stones has an change in order to project or imagine emotional and memorial function. a future that may be foreign to us. What could you remark about these And all of these steps are necessary particular settlements and their in order to imagine futures so that we understanding of the landscape? do not only design for the effects of

EH: The Tohoku coast of Honshu, where I did the majority of my research, has been hit by a major tsunami four times in the modern period from 1896, 1933, 1960, and 2011. Although many places throughout Japan have been repeatedly destroyed for different reasons including built landscapes, topography, infrastructure, and homes – each time people have recorded the disaster in different ways, leaving records for people to know this place.

The tsunami stones in Japan are an example.

Escape Mapping Project, it proposed and developed a new mapping model, whereby local residents would be asked to evaluate their own residential areas and plot evacuation routes. It is said that it came about during volunteer work when an architecture firm wanted to verify the best evacuation route from a tsunami and was based on the requirement for architects to design safe evacuation paths from large buildings – a requirement in all Japanese megastructures. Route making was designed and deployed In the 1990s, local and national from the building to the landscape. government agencies began to build predictive hazard maps as a response Local residents were invited to to the 1995 Kobe earthquake. Disaster participate in the process, working preparedness groups and engineers on tasks based on their intimate and drew up maps. But the maps were daily knowledge of the areas. Maps designed to forecast future disasters, were then produced that could be and so citizens and residents would used as education material and to have difficulties in reading the maps increase the awareness of disaster – these complex maps would show prevention across each locale. previous and potential flooding over What it meant in practice was that all topography lines and entire cities residents could, in some way, share would be inundated. We are used to their own knowledge and participate maps showing us the current state, in the making of these maps. This and so it was hard for people to deepened disaster preparedness discern the difference between what dramatically and highlighted people’s is now and what could possibly be. The intimate and latent knowledge of problem was simple but fundamental. their everyday landscapes.

The maps failed to communicate the most basic information, like what Q: Within your quotation of Ross route to take to which evacuation Exo Adams, you mentioned that center.

Landscape, if well-documented could constitute a narrative of After 2011, a new kind of disaster human culture. After conducting map emerged. Called the Run and your research, what are the most

relevant ideas you would add to such Q: Do you think we, as humans, have a narrative? to rethink our relation to coastal lines? Especially considering the fact A: Landscapes are never neutral, and that more than half of the world they are always made. population settles within these areas.

Ross Exo Adams drew these complexities out in his essay, A: The short answer is yes. The longer Landscapes of Post-History, and answer goes back to something I said instead of adding to his narrative, I earlier. It is important to make the would like to highlight parts of it by connection between how we develop referring to my practice. I define it understandings of our everyday as an ongoing series of attempts to environments with how we see slow, utilize existing archives and build new gradual changes but sometimes we ones, she strives to reveal landscapes need to imagine fast events–like a by “relentlessly reconstituting them tsunami or an earthquake or a fire– in the immediate present.” and we can do that by imagining or recalling past events that have I agree with Ross that it is through happened in the same space. the careful documentation of landscapes in their materiality and Studying natural disasters is critical the relationships found therein for a number of reasons, with the between resources, infrastructures, most obvious being the damage natural processes, and lives lived that they cause in terms of loss of (human and otherwise), that the life, built environment and habitats framing of landscapes as political (thinking of non-humans, here too). ecologies can, in the same move, The tsunami stones are physical “deliberately outline an activism by markers placed in relation to tsunami which to achieve a certain outcome.” inundation (either at, above, or below For my work along the coast of flood lines) and are often marked with Japan, and now in the Chernobyl information that can tell you more Exclusion Zone, this means utilizing about that relationship and what cartography, photography, film, tsunami they were placed in relation and text towards establishing an to. So, in a way, they can almost be understanding of landscapes and seen as a 1:1 map of the shoreline environmental design as an ongoing fluctuations. But it becomes muddied project in the immediate present, when you look closer, because each and not limited to the aftermath of a stone’s placement and markings are disaster. decided on an ad hoc basis, and can be placed by an individual, a group, a village or a town. So, the logic of the

1:1 map starts to fall apart.

But what these stones do communicate is the certain but unknowable risk that exists in these landscapes.

And they are stark reminders that landscapes are not given or certain.

They can help us imagine, in a very basic way, past or future landscapes that are fundamentally different than the ones facing us.

RICARDO DE OSTOS

Ricardo de Ostos is co-founder of the London based architectural studio Naja & deOstos and teaches at The Bartlett UCL and the AA.

Ricardo de Ostos explores alternative narrative-like scripts through the connection between cultural patterns and the boundaries of architectural frameworks. Together with Nannette Jackowski and their studio Naja & deOstos, the focal points of their work lies in a strong research-based design of adventurous but confirmative built environments. The range of projects ranges from disrupted landscapes to newborn cities. But what they all have in common, is the reconsideration of territorial boundaries and its solid relation to human traditions and technological progress. Their fundamental tool of investigation is the mythical narrative style approach in which they describe the symbiosis of the individual and location.

By means of representative projects of Naja & deOstos, the student works and manifested role models he is describing in his ideas, he sees land from a different perspective rather than a purely physical body

The Mythical Land, as Ricardo de Ostos refers to, is characterized by rites and myths, rather than ownership and law. Furthermore, generational affinity and ancestral bonds form the basis for communities as such.

This idea is depicted by the symbol of the global ouroboros, a circular symbol showing a snake, which is no longer swallowing its tail. As a real and first example of Mythical Land, de Ostos presents the history behind the Aboriginal Canvas, which was created by the indigenous users of the land but had to prove their spiritual importance and ownership to the juridical authority. The canvas was showing a land, which did not exist for members outside the community and tried to convey their way of understanding.

In

the

speculative

project,

Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad, Ricardo de Ostos presents the result of what architecture can turn into when a landscape is faced with extreme cultural and political disruptions, like the current crisis in the Middle East.

Rather than creating a final object, this project introduces a script to the city, which explores the uncertainties that surround our current lives.

Ricardo de Ostos describes it with the words: Although architects typically design for clients, the Hanging Cemetery of Baghdad is not for or about the people of Baghdad. It is located over 4,100 km away from London because about them we know almost nothing.

It is about a city represented and portrayed daily through international TV and newspapers. It is a place almost fictional with the attention The it generates but equally one so far

removed from our immediate physical reality. Consequently, the project or story, reveals itself through the duality of both TV cameras and spectators, searching for an understanding of the colossal suspended apparatus.

Another project that Ricardo de Ostos refers to is done by one of his students. Maja Laitinen’s The Lung of Phnom Penh shows also the close relationship between culture, rituals, myth and the land they are embedded in and how architecture reacts to the link that is fading or that does not exist anymore. In the case of the project, the city’s inhabitants lost the ownership of the ground their homes are located on. The majority of the families were fishermen, but lost their main resource of living, the lake in the center of their community, due to drainage issues. Maja’s

radical intervention proposes a new residential layer hovering above the city’s surface carried by inflatable structures. It is a profound attempt to redefine land property and at the same time, building up a protective coating for the disturbed city.

Ricardo de Ostos projects are drawn towards ambiguous spaces and their creatures. They are addressing cultural, environmental and social problems by using the tools of generating myths through architecture. However, he has a critical view of environmental architecture in a classical sense and wants to include a layer of a more inclusive spirit. With his students, he travelled to disrupted landscapes all over the globe and investigates the meaning of new relationships between the creatures and their desired lands.

These resulting projects explore this complex affiliation by drawing, modelling, and writing and reveal connections in an unprecedented way.

RICARDO DE OSTOS

INTERVIEW

Intro comment of the interview In his talk Ricardo de Ostos explained different studies of Naja & deOstos, and his students. Additionally he described some role models. The studies and role models he chose made clear that his understanding of landscape goes much further than seeing the landscape only as a physical body. We were intrigued by his way of describing the symbiosis of the individual and location by employing the mythical narrative style approach to investigate and wanted to go further about his ideas on the close relationship of culture and landscape.

RICARDO DE OSTOS

INTERVIEW Q: First, I got intrigued by the reference image of the island on Manaus, in the Amazonas. And you told us that this landscape is changing. The water level is rising, and part of the landscape is reachable only by boat.

Parallel to this change of landscape is that people start to see and think differently about it, and a kind of myth is created. I think that the creation of myths is very fast and long-lasting.

As we saw, this is happening very often, but there is almost no eroding of these beliefs in people’s minds.

Therefore, how can we, as designers play with their beliefs or should we even play with them?

A: It is about the understanding of certain necessities of how this culture is important for people. Hence, I think at first, that the creation of a myth and rituals is a very complex subject. But what I am really interested in is, how myths play a role during the time. For example, the Amazonian community who has made this place their home for the last 600 years. It is interesting

to see how the culture of construction has changed. They used to use latex in the construction of buildings. They used to also navigate the landscape in larger extents, not just on the indigenous park. They also have the right to use forest land, which was larger than what it is today. But what is interesting is that these cultures are already in the city, people have been displaced, and they are present in the periphery of the city. There are now people that fix cars or play songs on the streets. What I am interested in for example are projects like we did in the past on the Pamphlet Architecture nº29 for the Princeton Press. The projects themselves try to recapture constructions techniques of indigenous tribes on that area, and through reconstructing architecture, a type of spatial mythology. So we were trying to reconstruct those “malocas”, which were based on one specific exchange. This refers to the construction of the Tucuruí Dam in the ’70s, which creates the rising river level of around 17 meters. In

that case, we are more interested in rubbing those traditions against problematics of today, because then we do not have to think if it is correct to play with that. This comes as an asset, as a new possibility. We can use technologies of the social, but also technologies of construction we can learn with. I think that we can decouple dialectic problematics of morality. The question is, if we should or if we should not. I tend to think of cultures that we can learn from, as e.g. “malocas”. And of course, when we are dealing directly with displacement, I think the question changes. I see a lot of techniques, a lot of practical thinking as contributions to what those cities are. This refers to richer possibilities of how to live in a changing landscape, which is e.g. typical in the Amazon.

A: Absolutely. We tend to think that culture is static, especially when we think of vernacular traditions. In fact, those vernacular, or traditional buildings are part of an adaptation of the environment, but also of an adaptation of their culture. So, when culture is changing, and many cultures have been changing through war, migration, climate change and modernity, also with the implementation of goods, of new routines. One of the consequences that we recognize in the book ‘Scavenger & Other Creatures in Promised Lands’ is really the simple fact that culture is a changing phenomenon. Therefore, I think that there is a lot of people nowadays, in desperate identity politics, that are trying to look at cultures that belong to a place but do not appropriate it.

But before globalization, there was Q: Because of cultural ideas? Or always cultural exchange. Since the imaginations that are growing in Romans, if we look at the European interventions or small changes that history, there is a massive exchange are always adapting? of cultures and of course, there are mechanisms where pre-modern

and modern as well, deal with the impasses or difficult positions through the war. It is a very simple idea that culture changes, but what are the implications of that? The consequence of that is we need to find ways and sensibilities to work with a culture that adds to how we see the city; which is now multiple because we have different people that bring their cultures. I think we need to be more constructive in creating active tools to analyse and propose designs that can incorporate those sensibilities because culture is always changing.

Q: I totally agree, and I have a very particular example of that. When I started my academic studies, I worked a lot with Turkish workers together in Austria, and they were relocated because of several reasons.

They were disconnected from their landscape, environments, traditions, and imaginations. Over the time that they spend separated from their landscape, they started to romanticize this image in their head. When I was talking to them, they always said, “I work here as long as I have to work here, but when I will not have to work here, I will go back. I have this desire to go back to my roots, to my landscape”. So, the question, behind that is that when migration happens and you cannot bring your environment and landscape with you, what are you going to do?

A: I think landscape connects people because there is a memory landscape, where there are stories, objects, artefacts, and music. There is the value to create that landscape. It is important to separate what critiques see as a culture to these people, including myself, versus what they see themselves. There is a future out there, and nowadays, we have a kind of ideological cultural status quo which tends to see those cultures as victims or that they lost something.

In some cases, yes. But I think the important factor is that those cultures are changing, and we need to take the foundational point that part of their landscape is with them. For example, many people said during the Iraq war, that Islamic culture never had a Renaissance, which I have not studied enough to agree or disagree with, but I know that in many other cultures, Renaissance was a reshuffle of traditions in European cultures.

They looked back to Christianity, the medieval culture, the monarchy and they started to question how to create new emancipations from that.

This led finally to the enlightenment of the French Revolution of people losing their heads (literally on the guillotine) until modernity a few centuries after. I think today it’s difficult because we don’t start at an expected and immediate change. But I am interested in what would happen if these cultures became modern, what if some of those cultures are dealing, or responding, or being adaptive to

distant cultures? Therefore, I think there is already a change.

Also, I am very interested in that Renaissance moment where I am not looking to recapture the past, but we are really looking as designers to create responses. And I think the moment when we try to over think that, in terms of the right response for everyone in every project, then we get trapped in the Catch 22, a sense of being trapped in condition of negative outcomes. But as individual responses and accumulations of the body of work of each architect or group of architects’ experiences, I think that it is very important to ask those questions.

mean with speculative architecture, and with narratives, not just to understand the past, but to know that the past never existed statically, that the past is changing now with us. So, if culture is constantly changing, then I accept the idea to have a Renaissance as a fundamental aspect of what we do, especially now with so many different voices in the metropolis. And I am not looking for synthesis, I think that synthesis is not up to architecture, it is more up to urbanism and for people’s desires.

There is a fundamental question when culture and technology meet, there is something new, not necessarily better.

Q: Do you think that there will be Q: And are we able to trigger that a future Renaissances for different Renaissance with our work? cultures based on technology, or is a technology the new culture?

A: I think our work is part of algorithms and sharing, and there A: Well, definitely technology, if is a moment of exchange that is you look at what technology is. It is occurring, that generates minor and bringing accelerated exchanges into larger ways. We need to be careful societies, especially in the last couple with the idea of trends and which of centuries, and especially now in the tends to kind of swallow everything last 20 years of the internet. I think very quick and discard everything that it is my naive understanding of very fast as well. So, I think there are what I said about the Renaissance. amazing people doing work all over In a way, it’s up to us to also create the world, but we need to develop movements, spatial responses, project if there is a Renaissance – cultural responses that are beyond Pinterest retention. How can we as a collective and Instagram apps, and to stimulate retain more of the conversations more in-depth discussion. We look at rather than discard them and seek spatial configurations as we explain for the next thing? In that sense, the what those things are, and what are role of Academia, the role of grants, the pros and cons. That is what I foundations, institutions… it should

be less concern with the next “big theme” and really kind of nurture retention discussions which take time to blossom. Universities, for example, play a fundamental role in those changes. If you look at the book ‘Innovation and its Enemies’

by Calestous Juma, you can find the discussion about how innovation happens and what are the forces against it. Many times, those that are related to the world we had, and those who lost something with the innovation, experienced this sort of immediate displacement. This happens mainly through taxes, tax leverage, as e.g. when coffee and cars came in for example. Therefore, I think it is about the capacity to boost nondesigners and institutions. Finally, it is nearly impossible to change these larger bodies without institutions, which pressure governments, and corporations, and therefore, it will be harder to create change.

Q: There was this disagreement during the discussion about land ownership, and you said that the focus should lay more on land use.

And I can understand because land use was there so much longer before any ownership, like the very nice example of the “canvas” of Aboriginal people in Australia. I see in your work that is also connected to this canvas, that drawing and modelling are fundamental. Therefore, do you think this should be a focal point in all schools? And as a way for students

to express themselves?

A: I think it is important to have diversity, that people are researching differently. I am interested in the pursuit of excellence; I am not interested in the establishment of mediocrity by tradition. Having said that, I think that what we do with these methods is to try to stop the understanding of the culture of the 19th and 20th century in terms of terminology of academics, not to become the prison for designers.

I see students sometimes getting lost or trapped into dualities and misunderstandings which derive from great thinkers. Hence, I think it is very important that they start to think for themselves, that they have guides to synthesize information. For myself, I discovered the tool of drawings.

This allows to design response and additionally, to find out, that the response possibly does not match with the text they wrote. But this mismatch is where the design raises, because if we just believe in text and not design, then we get trapped into this sort of ground door of the speech.

This refers to the testament of the idea of a project. Finally, whatever we build, is going to be use or misuse, and therefore, the idea of ‘land use’, the idea of how to draw this, is what I am interested in exploring with the students. With this approach, we try to establish or understand the sensibilities of cultures, which anthropologists understand very

well, and architects tend to dismiss very quickly. This harnesses slowly the place of tolerance. We constantly project into the future, like a year or two. It is important for the schools to â&#x20AC;&#x2DC;invent termsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;, to try to create their own methodologies and so far, I see very little of that. I see a constant going down on referencing, which is crystallized in the studentsâ&#x20AC;&#x2122; need for references to understand the world of architecture and landscape. We often forget, that we also need to invent, we need to create, and be a challenge of those creations. I think the drawings I showed today in the lecture try to break those ideas of land ownership and try to think about how people are using the land, sometimes in strange ways for us, but we can learn from them and then try to use those sensibilities to create new possibilities for cities and environments where diversity and creativity are dancing partners.

PIERRE BÉLANGER

Landscape architect and urban planner, published several books and projects including “Landscape as Infrastructure” and “Extraction Empire”

Pierre Bélanger is a landscape architect and urban planner with the LANDSCAPE INFRASTRUCTURE LAB who has published several books including “LANDSCAPE AS INFRASTRUCTURE,” “ECOLOGIES OF POWER,” “GOING LIVE,” “RISK ECOLOGIES,” “WET MATTER,” “EXTRACTION EMPIRE.” Collaborative public works projects include the Zakim Bridge Underpass Skatepark in Boston for the Massachusetts Department of Conservation (US), the Ontario Food Terminal in Toronto for the Ministry of Agriculture and Transportation (Canada), YVR International Airport Expansion for the Greater Vancouver Airport Authority (Canada), the Disaster Evacuation Park System in the Artibonite Valley for the Department of Civil Protection (Haiti), and the 2016 Canadian Pavilion at the 2016 Venice Architecture Biennale (Italy).

The current discourse on climate change has failed to acknowledge the territorial sovereignties and political geographies that confront the bounded systems and perceived permanence of the nation-state. The real crisis, if there is one, seems to be in the minds, models, and media of city-centric populations that are more and more removed from means of material production and territories of resource exploitation. Put otherwise, the map is no longer the territory.

This spatial, ontological divide— between metropolis and hinterland— is exacerbated by an explosion of industrial operations and incorporations seamlessly crossing political boundaries and geographic borders. So large, so vast, and so fast is the pace and scale of these operations, they are seemingly impossible to imagine, let alone to represent.

Although the flow and concentration of industrial extractive capital may vary with ‘urban demand,’ ‘technological capacity,’ or ‘discovery of resources’—whether onshore or offshore, structures of political power and systems of social control have remained relatively unchanged and unchecked for the past four to five centuries. In the words of systems thinker Georg Hegel (Philosophy of Right, 1820): “the development of the State into a constitutional monarchy is the supreme product and power of the world today, in which its ideal and unlimited condition has been reached.”

Clearly, the contemporary, colonial condition survives. If then “the problem of territory, and of territoriality, is one of the most neglected in geography and political economy” according to the alter-

urbanist Claude Raffestin (Pour une GĂŠographie du Pouvoir, 1980), how should we re-imagine the current axis and power relations between the metropolis and the hinterland that underlies the contemporary focus on the city and on the state? How do we rethink, resist, and subvert the imposed, imperial binaries between the urban and the rural, the north and the south, the center and the periphery, that are entrenched in misleading oppositions of town and country, property and sovereignty, occupation and inhabitation, settlement and seasonality, civilization and wilderness?

Drawing from the claim by contrarian economist John Kenneth Galbraith (The New Industrial State, 1967) that â&#x20AC;&#x153;capital and power became more important land in the past century,â&#x20AC;? the renewal of the

geopolitical discourse on the territory is fundamentally contingent on the reclamation of land, landscape, and life.

Proposing a contra-colonial lens, this presentation profiles current Canadian states and scales of extraction through three interrelated processes that lie between the colonial conceptions of the metropolis and the hinterland: territorial displacement, regulatory discrimination, and Indigenous dispossession.

Drawing from subliminal symbols and persistent projections of state power throughout the past 800 years, specific references will be made to professional practices and institutionalized disciplines of architecture, engineering, and planning, whose origins reveal underlying imperial motives and whose pedagogical curriculum continue to normalize colonial

systems of spatial inequity through countless standards, surveys, specifications, and signifiers.

Inscribed in this bureaucratic structure and infrastructural grid of banks, prisons, parks, cities, suburbs, highways, dams, mines, pipelines, and reservations (to name a few), these systems represent the engineered slate upon which the Stateâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;and of the Crownâ&#x20AC;&#x201D;exercise their influence and perpetuate their supremacy. Critically questioning the colonial practices of planning, architecture, and engineering, the presentation seeks to contribute a basis for undermining the industrial underpinnings and imperialist hegemonies that lie on, above, and below the surface of contemporary settler-state space whose foundations rely and rest on the perpetuation of spatial inequities, environmental

injustices, and cultural inhumanities.

The presentation will be followed with a series of counter-narratives and retroactive strategies that inquire into the implications and possibilities of unplanning and un-design vis-Ă vis the current colonial structures of oppression.

PIERRE BÉLANGER

INTERVIEW As part of the Urban and Landscape Week a body of post-professional design students engaged with Pierre Bélanger in a conversation that questioned the fictionalized agency of design in current pedagogy and practice. “How do we change the future when we fail to understand the present?” is a major question that prompted further discussion about institutional dogma, curricular & cultural disengagement, methodological disconnection, pedagogical distancing, historical misrepresentation, hyper-aestheticization, dehumanizing technologies, technocratic control, over-engineering, planning overreach, and gentrification, spatial inequalities, territorial injustices, and environmental inhumanities. These underlying perils of design learning— historically rooted in the heteropatriarchy of architecture programs, colonialism of scientific methods, racism of environmental knowledge, white supremacy of teaching faculty, and eurocentrism of planning ideologies—are entrenched in between the paper worlds of design practice and design pedagogy.

In other words, inequalities and injustices. Through an alternative landscape lens, we further discussed an expansive, anti-disciplinary, and geopolitical potential of design through mapping and cartography. As a means to ground existing conditions within territorial conditions, this cartographic practice can unlock different learning itineraries across legal, historical landscapes as well as open different pathways of spatial transformation and ecological intervention that engage the spaces, structures, scales, and systems that lie in between the body and territory where rights to self-determination can be actualized. Like a hypertext markup language, this conversation is presented here as an annotated transcript and record of our exchange.

DISCUSSION PANELS

DISCUSSION PANEL 1

Material flows

ALEX WANDL TANEHA BACCIN BEN KUIPERS DIEGO SEPULVEDA (MODERATOR)

The first panel, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Globalization of material flows, interdependence, and fragility,â&#x20AC;? was focused on the current and evolving dynamics of global exchange of materials and infrastructure under an ecological lens.

Globalization has led to a massive

have ceased to be isolated objects independent of their reproduction.

How can we see a humanly balanced future in this sense? Is it enough with an awareness on the part of the economy, or do we depend on a major paradigm shift?

Our guest speakers discussed

global transfer of transfers and resources from different parts of the globe. This process has generated a high level of dependence on urban centers around the world around raw materials that come from different latitudes. In turn, this global economy based on raw materials extractivism has produced their very infrastructure, invading, and altering, in many cases, remote areas in social and ecosystem terms. Cities

these issues, providing different perspectives from the fields of urban metabolism, landscape architecture, and urban planning. A paramount aspect of the discussion was related to the figure of design, as a potential vehicle to promote societal paradigm shift.

DISCUSSION PANEL 1

Material flows

Diego Sepulveda (DS): I would like to invite the keynote speakers to address the overall question of this session. Coming back to the fundamental essence, what is the essential knowledge that needs to be acknowledged in the face of the complex current conditions that architects, urbanists, and landscape architects regularly tackle? Can you reflect on this question by interpreting from your field view?

Ben Kuipers (BK): I should start by saying that we do not have the knowledge. I think the knowledge is with all the specialists and all the researchers. Bringing this knowledge together to invent new accommodations is up to the designers. I also think that the most critical issue here is to stay away from the word “loss.” People are thinking in terms of losses. We lose our health! We lose our well-known landscapes! Etc. I think the opposite is true, we gain, and we should always think in terms of “gain.” We are

gaining clean air, natural good food, and we should bring these concepts into our designs to seduce people.

Our brand-new future is in winning.

It is not in the question “what do we have to tolerate?” but is rather in “what do we have to gain?” I think it is the most important thing to create change. Because, if we think we have just to tolerate, we are just pushing away the problem. It is like stopping a habit of smoking; we should bring something else better in its place.

DS: So, you propose going for a shift, first by starting to see the issue through the aspect of “gaining,” instead of “losses.” Alex argues seeing it in this way as it reciprocates a new kind of paradigmatic way that can bring other types of thinking.

BK: I think the people must be convinced that we are moving towards a better future.

DS: So, before moving on to a second level. The first step is understanding

and assessing the issue as a “gain,” and afterward being able to work towards a solution. You also say that it is essential that all of us need to understand and communicate with a broad audience of people. To summarize, there first needs to be a shift in openness and knowledge, as there are now new possibilities, and we need to expand on those.

In a way, you are challenging us by sharing your point of view created by your specialization in knowledge of agriculture, metabolism, performative landscape, climate change, and that now our perspective will lay another layer of complexity.

Taneha Bacchin (TB): What comes to my mind is the question “how do we change our intentions?” For example, if we define ourselves by understanding and seeing things differently, we would see the unfolding of this planet as something that provides us with positive opportunities for change. We have more knowledge today. Therefore, we

are more aware of things which will happen in the future. So, we can see how this can influence our intentions and agency in this same parallel. We know better now, with the data that we have collected, but there is still a gap between knowing and changing.

This gap is, therefore, a question of not just having a strong intention to create change, which to the viewer is seen as needed change, but it also requires taking a position in that change as well.

Alex Wandl (AW): I think there is a need to point out that designing and bringing the final product to individual consumers is accepting a neo-liberal dogma and does not look at society as a whole that is capable of making changes. This is my criticism, and I think it is something that we always hear, more specifically in this university. There are around six people who design, but there are 10 million consumers that they design for. Should it, therefore, be as we, as designers, design things, and this is

the way it should happen? Or, should on this topic? we take a step back and allow for society to have a say in the design?

BK: I think we as designers must be optimistic, we must show a direction DS: To summarize this discussion, the towards the future, and we need to first thing we should remember is, as say that the future will be better Taneha proposes, is to change both perpetually. If there is a fear regarding our intentions and focus. And to shift anything, including the future, our focus, it is relevant to recognize nobody will fight for it. So, in that that we can understand and interpret sense, we, therefore, need optimism this â&#x20AC;&#x153;knowledge of complexityâ&#x20AC;? as to move forward. On the other hand, creative designers. Secondly, it is we also need to create a collective crucial to realize that we can also that will make the rules. I think the answer this complexity as a society. first step is to develop and make real Another important point to add is pricing. Because we, as producers, that we have to learn how to work try to make everything cheaper and in multidisciplinary groups, while cheaper. If you have to pay the actual at the same time with individuals price of flying to Paris, or the actual who know different and various cost of eating a steak, then you can be topics. Now, coming back to what easily convinced that you have other Alex said regarding this paradigm options to explore. So, the market of neoliberalism, I would like for us and the available choices are not fair to react to the problem of leaving right now. I think this is one of the things to the consumers. There things that neoliberal policy makers currently exists a free market that should do is to make the market fair, regularly creates supply and demand especially in terms of pricing. We as forces, and the paradigm happens consumers pay small amounts, and accordingly. Ben, what is your opinion we are generally not spending the

whole price for commodities. Another issue to think about would be about the priority of gaining when selling in the market. Do we really have to feed the people of China with what we produce in our little country (The Netherlands) only for short-term gains? Should we even go for deals that are made for the fast benefit?

But in many cases, such as this, in the long term, we lose. We need to realize that long term gain should be our goal and is more important than short term gain.

DS: So, what do you mean is for our professional field, time should also become a factor while thinking about the complexity. Also, for all of us, short, mid and long term should be considered. These should be regarded as not only for the assessment but also for the possibilities. And by designers as people who will change things, deepening the understanding of different systems, and learning how they work is needed.

AW: We need to know the leverage points of these systems. We need to see where the change has an impact.

For this, food chain analysis is such a great example because it goes down to five people, again. And if you check these kinds of systems, at some point, they all come down to a few actors that are important. So, very often the complexity when unraveled opens possibilities to change. What I also find crucial is our fear to change as we saw that in the energy transition for example. We somehow underperformed, because we did not explain it in earlier steps, to explain how renewable energy landscapes will look like, as individual projects. So, suddenly, the whole country hindered the transition because everybody was saying “not in my backyard”. This few leverage points combined with our strength to explain to very various people the consequences can be a solution. As an example, if we say, let’s turn all the food production into an algae-based production model. But where do we grow the algae? Do we

know what an algae pond looks like? and is a result of interaction which is So, these are the discussions where about society. our field can contribute.

BK: Which means we canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t do it on BK: It is also bringing the profit to the our own. If we are far away from the people not only on a large scale but people, they canâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t admire what we do. also in smaller scales. We can give Maybe people will be the ones who the windmills as examples. As soon make it, and we can adjust or help a as you put a windmill and you profit little bit. from it, you can consider the mills in another manner. So, it should be TB: For me, the Room for the River profitable for the people around as is always a brilliant example of this, well, not only for the bigger system. because the leverage was the spatial quality which required separated AW: Everyone should participate in society to contribute. change, in profit.

DS: So, the complexity of the current TB: This idea, when I was talking conditions is challenging us to be able about tolerance, it is acceptance of to understand and reread them. Also, the new landscapes since we are not according to the capacity that we all going to maintain landscapes as we have to be able to design a solution know. that a vast majority of stakeholders can understand. At the same time BK: Maybe it is not being tolerant but being able to design how to measure celebrating the new landscape. That and monitor it is also important. This would be great. is also a permanent goal. So, we are inviting a different kind of approach; AW: Celebration is heavily a process design does not finish; it is a dynamic

tool, a learning process; thus, can be much more biodiversity in comparison redesigned. to a monocultural environment such as a grass field. So, if you are able TB: I also think that, as Alex said, it to increase the amount of green, is a question of equity. We think of different space then you can harness systems, distribution of things which more ecological services, you cope should be within the ethics of delivery, with climate change better, you can a fair distribution of benefits. enhance physical and mental health and so on, so forth. So, it is the same DS: This is the kind of a point of view way as I showed the relation, the that the university also follows. Now wars we performed against sealed we can have a reaction from the spaces. If we can invert the proportion audience. by reducing the number of sealed spaces and rising diversities in cities, AW: I was wondering about the we can have improved the quality of concepts of the ecosystem that the the environment and we can provide Productive landscapes are being amenities. Most of the time when you ecological deserts. Does this mean that evaluate the project that was carried due to this fact, cities are becoming out from this perspective you score places that are opportunities for higher in land price. So, its value nature? Adding to this question; becomes higher. do you have a proposal on how we can make these ecological densities AW: We are already at the point comparative in our market in the that urban systems are far more urban system? diverse than the systems outside.

And it is also interesting that urban TB: This is precisely the idea of expansions do not cost natural areas providing services. In a city, we have nor ecologically valuable areas, but

they cost monofunctional agricultural areas. Another point is, the paradigm shift Taneha pointed out in her presentation, if you think about this continuity of urban countryside landscape, where a lot of urban and agricultural areas and a little bit of nature exist, this is not going to work well from these aspects we are discussing.

DS: It was a very inspiring session; now we are closing. Thank you for your participation.

DISCUSSION PANEL 2

Human flows

ROBERT KLOOSTERMAN ELISE MISAO HUNCHUCK QU LEI RICARDO DE OSTOS LEO VAN DEN BURG (MODERATOR)

The second panel, â&#x20AC;&#x153;Human flows against the boundaries,â&#x20AC;? tried to address the dilemmas related to the process of human flows in an interconnected and unequal world. Refugees, immigrants are challenging the political boundaries of nations and continents, and at

Is this something acceptable or does it illustrate the challenges of the world that we live? What are these challenges?

In this panel, our guest speakers have discussed these topics from their particular lens, by illustrating different logics of inquiry and

the end, the dynamics of several territories. Mobility is constituting an emergent way of inhabiting in the present century due to the social and environmental crisis.

Behind these different flows, we find dramatic or cultural motives, that illustrates the ambivalence of the current world. What are the impacts of these flows, and beyond that, what are the implications and conditions that generate these flows?

professional approaches. The main outcomes of the discussion are related to the importance of design in terms of mapping different societal and cultural process to address the complexity of issues that affect different communities.

DISCUSSION PANEL 2

Human flows

LvdB: As Qui Lei has already stated, her story is quite much in-lined with Robert Kloosterman’s story versus two presentations that add more from storytelling, from embedded knowledge in people’s minds, traditions, etc. I have some questions for them, but I would like to hear questions from the audience first. Who would like to open the discussion? Is there anything you would like to ask the speakers?

complexity as creative designers.

Secondly, it is crucial to understand that we have the capacity to answer this complexity as a society. Another important point is to learn how to work in multi-disciplinary groups and at the same time as individuals who have knowledge of different topics.

Now, coming back to what Alex said on this paradigm of neoliberalism, I would like you to react to the problem of leaving things to the consumers.

As currently there is a forcing market A1: Each of you speaks of migration which creates the forces and the rest as something that is always there, is happening accordingly, what is sometimes up or down, but always your opinion on this? there. I was wondering why we don’t have a buffer for it. Why isn’t there QL: Maybe I will start with these something that can accommodate urban villages because I see them as migration? My question is how you buffers. They emerged because there would see this buffer. is a demand. They were offered by the farmers who are also affected by the DS: To summarize; the first thing is, urbanization process. They have this as Taneha proposes, changing our mindset that they can do something intentions, and our focus. And to about this trend. That is why urban change our focus, it is important to villages emerged very fast in a short recognize our capacity to understand period of time. But if we want to and interpret this knowledge of always offer these kinds of buffer

zones by official planning and develop it, it will take time. Also, we wonder if it can work. Why can the city be developed so rapidly? It’s because of, I think, these informal ways of development.

LvdB: Is that usually the case with migration flows that the actual solutions come from informal organizations or can we trust the government to organize this buffer?

Robert Kloosterman, what do you think?

RK: First thing I wanted to say is that almost every migration turns out to be permanent. People think they will go back but, in many cases, they stay, and their kids get embedded to the new environment, schools. In many cases, they stay anyway. Qu Lei presented it in a very clear way - the urbanization in, for instance, China is unprecedented. Not just base of it but also scalp of it is unprecedented. But when you look at the industrialization of European

consequences; for instance, Italy, in Torino, when the factories expanded very rapidly you could see that the production system was moving with a much faster pace than housing.

I guess it’s also what is happening in Shenzhen; the number of jobs increasing with a much faster rate than housing. That is often a case in the industrialization processes. Still, I believe that the state’s interventions are crucial to contribute to decent affordable housing. Before the initial phase, I guess there is much of informal housing, which was bottomup produced and constructed by the minors themselves. But to create a decent sewage system, water, safety, it cannot be just bottom-up.

LvdB: Elise, your presentation was on epic landscapes, epic stories, epic memories. And also the designs that you showed – they were basically of that scale, of that magnitude. It’s a modest work. I wonder if we can bridge that gap? Can we use pragmatic solutions to intervene when there is a

big sense of loss with people or when are some possibilities that we try deep traditions are on take? What can to speculate, perhaps dealing with designers do in your eyes? some sensibilities like bottom-up or traditions of daily life. But it’s still RDO: I think because I’m interested trying to deal with the idea of the scale in how technology, urban technology of these places in relation to the city is part of the big shift, I’m interested itself. The scale of the surrounding is in those kinds of combinations. a vertical surrounding.

I think that transformation, the culture is something that is changing LvdB: Que Lei, immigrants in China and it’s quite important. There is have in mind many stories, the a range of changes that need to ancient world. You could make an epic be tracked; setting context with design for them. Do you think that anthropologists, setting context with design, the one like Ricardo showed, futurists… I think this is interesting can make people feel like home in a because it can create different sorts city like Shenzhen? of opportunities which are not just bottom-up. Which are perhaps taking LQ: I think that Shenzhen is a very quality and understanding of culture, unique case. Because it’s planned as of practicing, of “how to do things”, a special economic zone of China. from constructions, from “how to This economic development was the make bread in the morning”. And driving force from the beginning. That that is a collective thing. But today is why the migrants came to the city we, of course, deal with scale, as just to look for urban life. They want we saw during the presentations, to get out of the rural area and see there is a problem of scale and their future in the city. And Shenzhen perhaps when there comes the idea offers them this opportunity. I think of volume, it changes in time. There that the driving force was this

economic development. But if you talk about culture then we can compare Shenzhen with Guangzhou, which is also located in the same province.

Guangzhou is a historical city and it has its own culture that can absorb its migrants. Of course, migrants come from the different parts of the country, have their own original culture and identity, but when they enter, they meet with also a strong cultural identity. I think they feel less lost or at least they know where to adapt themselves. While Shenzhen is a place where people can get lost culturally because it has its culture as a fishing village, but it didn’t have a culture as a big metropolis. It’s more like a generic city. That’s why, many Dutch offices have a lot of projects in Shenzhen; everybody is trying to make a design, to create an identity for the city.

meaning of people putting the stone in different places? How would it be for a New Town like Shenzen? How can people make this kind of space more appropriate? Because what you showed was some kind of narrative, it was some kind appropriation of rural landscapes.

EH: I think that this is actually opposite of it. I think it’s inserting an object in the everyday landscape. It doesn’t alter it; it doesn’t change it.

It’s part of the assemblage of things that people…

RK: Might change?

LvdB: I think your question was also related to the newness of Shenzhen, to the large scale of things happening there and the smallest scale of the stones. So, how do you as a landscape architect treat a city like Shenzhen?

RK: I have a question. Elise, what would be your view on Shenzhen EH: I think that my response, after on the urban landscape. Would you seeing all your presentations, would look at the landscape through the be the idea of smaller, bottom-up

ideas and interventions that take hold precisely because they are part of their own, personal culture. And I think that it also speaks to the importance of these smaller, bottomup, not centralized interventions and projects.

and yet urbanists and designers are keep concentrating only on the city.

We don’t have other terms; we don’t discuss other scales, morphologies, and processes. So, I’m wondering, maybe you can comment based on your work Qu Lei. Did different ways of mapping create some problems or LvdB: Immigration is here to stay, assumptions? right? We are going to an era where immigration will remain with us for QL: We used mapping as a tool, a while. What do you think, from with a purpose of education, of your perspective? What is the most course, so that urbanism students appropriate way of dealing with can understand the complexity of migration as a designer? the current tools. That is why the presentation of this booklet on the EH: I would like to go deeper into this Biennale is also the way how we question – do we think that modesty showed our message. Of course, it is and bottom-up is an easier way or is not enough to explain what is going it much, much harder? on. Also, it has its limitations because we concentrated on the current A2: I would like to give the current to status, so without the literature, the other direction… I’m glad that you we are not able to explain what is asked what the role of architects and complex and urgent. That is why we urban designers is. There is a proposed did among others the morphological role of mapping, cartography, drawing study. I think that this is how we can the ground… My observation is that contribute as urbanists. We worked high degree of migration is by the sea together with economic geographers

who have a different approach… and then we need all kinds of expertise to understand the phenomena of a complex city. Of course, we had the historical approach – we looked back into the urbanization processes of China throughout these centuries. We aimed to understand how the country, which came from a long history of agriculture, in such a short period started to urbanize. What does that mean to the social structure, to the culture, and the relationship between urban and rural areas?

LvdB: Elise, what role does mapping play in your work? What are the tools that you find appropriate to tell your story?

EH: What I’ve come to learn, and I am continually learning is that it is not just one tool. It is not just mapping per se in the traditional way. The way to understand all the scales, the places, the stones has in fact, not at all been maps. They’ve been photographs, pavement, a lot of archive working…

All of these materials that we produce around the world are possible to be reassembled to a kind of mapping process. So, you can see I try not to think about the map as a map.

LvdB: Ricardo, how do you start? What are the routines you go through?

What kind of techniques do you use or the ones you ask your students to use?

RDO: I think I don’t use mapping.

Maybe what I’m about to say sounds like mapping to someone, but I don’t think I’ve ever used a mapping.

Usually, we establish the context with the people on the ground, with people, we visit those places, and we try to understand it from the government’s point of view but also NGOs that are dealing directly with the people. We see the way the people from Bangladesh live now versus the way they used. And you see that it is like Brazil that the constitutional arrangements of the houses are similar to what they used to have in the village. But now the

floor is muddy, it’s full of rubbish and they don’t have the sea anymore as they understand all the patterns for daily life. We try to understand how what we see is similar and what are the differences that occur for the spatial organization. Then we have a conversation about scale; the number of people versus the conditions there.

There are always a few questions: “what now?” and/or “what if?” because that’s how we operate. So, I tend to create speculation or to see how those factors will play if they will be simplified or exaggerated. The students don’t pass through the right answer; they pass through what these speculations of these factors together can generate.

framework first to create a coherent narrative. But about mapping – one of the best maps ever made was the map of London underground. It reduces the reality above ground to an incredible level. What I want to say is that every map is a reduction, every statistic is a reduction, so you always have to ask yourself why you have produced these maps and for what purpose. But still, they can be very useful because they are reduced to social reality. But I have a question to Ricardo – I was struck by the fact that the Australian case and the Cambodian case property rights were important. On the one hand, the original population of part of Australia tried to take the property rights in this particular way of mapping, while in Cambodia they LvdB: Professor Kloosterman, how owned the buildings, but not the do you find your perspective? What land. What kind of perspective did kind of tools do you use to get a grip you have on the property rights? on these stories as you are from a completely different line of science? Ricardo: Every time we discuss with students, it is interesting when we RK: To deal with the social sciences you talk about land ownership – I see have to have some kind of analytical students with these ideas about

how we can stimulate new types of ownership - collective ownership, coliving, multiple uses. When you think about certain frameworks, you start thinking about those who have and who have not. However, I prefer the term land-use than ownership as it refers to how people are using the land for generations. Everywhere we go we see the remains of the traditional world, the traditional way of using the land and how they are replaced or are coexisting with contemporary property rights. I deal with that, and I try to use the idea of land-use rather than the idea of property rights.

integration?

EH: I would be interested to hear if anyone from the audience would like to share their experience? To share some thoughts, to create a dialogue.

A4: I would like to speak about Japan.

There is a lot of cities along the coast; there are some that are destroyed or de-placed because of natural disasters like tsunamis. People who moved to the coast, lived there, owned the land, they had to go back to hills. There is the project of Onagawa, where people from the coast were moved back to the hills. It is a very good project as they managed to make a city that is economically quite effective, tourists are coming to visit, there are many shops, but people from Onagawa are not satisfied. They miss their land; they look at the land and say it is not theirs.

A3: I saw your presentations, your different approaches but all of you are working on something really interesting and unavoidable â&#x20AC;&#x201C; the cultural disruption, which is caused by the migration and urban displacement. Of course, in different territories and from different perspectives. I want to ask how do LvdB: Do you think it is in power you envision this future of the culture of Architects or Urban Planners to - culture transformation or cultural bridge that gap?

A3: I think it is possible, but ethically and morally it doesnâ&#x20AC;&#x2122;t feel right. But we must make the decision in terms of the future and make a space for the people even if it is not the same for them.

LvdB: The question is if it is possible to offer something to people that will make their place more like themselves? Or should we limit ourselves just to make space humble and generic?

A3: I think it is vital to create an identity. It is not just about migration, but with immigration, because if you build the flow, like human flow, you have to create a space for that.

LvdB: Thank you! Thank you to our guests. I hope these stories inspired you. Thanks to POLIS for hosting this event.

COMPETITION

COMPETITION

In the era of global disruptions, different movements and conflicts emerge and become increasingly more complex. Human, material and economic flows exceed the national political limits obeying global dynamics that occur at different scales and geographic coordinates simultaneously. By doing this, these processes influence different and uneven realities connecting them in an invisible way. In a world that is decentralized by information, technology, and global economy, urban planners and landscape architects must deal with scenarios of uncertainty and ambivalence, dealing with different perspectives, interests and values in conflict.

In the 3-days challenge, contestants â&#x20AC;&#x201C; master urbanism and landscape architecture students, confronted the question what are the process beyond these flows that are redefining our infrastructures, landscapes, and cities and how can we address these spatial processes in order to preserve environments and improve the quality of life of people?

The main objective of the challenge was to expose the impact of a specific flow and offer critical and innovative perspectives that help us face the challenges that represents for our practice. The participants were invited to create a video narrative that help to enrich the debate and give new lights to our practice. Stills from the video are illustrated on the right page.

REFLECTION

REFLECTION:

What are the lessons learned from this UL Week 2018? What are the challenges and horizons that can be glimpsed after the discussions that emerged among the participants of the event?

It is a clear fact, that we face a series of challenges that transcend the continental and national limits and also redefine our understanding of scale. What we have come to ratify during this week is that these problems demand a new understanding of design practice and the role of design. Planetary urbanization and the emergence of cities as new ecological spaces demand a new understanding of the needs and possibilities that are played in cities. As discussed in panel one, it is important to recognize our points of leverage. That is those margins of inference in which designers and planners we can act and contribute to change. However, this also implies rethinking the logic of involvement of civil society and states beyond the current neoliberal dogma of individual responsibility.

On the other hand, as discussed in the second panel, a second point refers to the recognition of the driving forces of global processes and flows of disruption. In this sense, we understand that these effects are amplified and accelerated in our time and therefore our ability to map and recognize their effects and dynamics becomes key. In this sense, rather than closed responses, the practice of design must move towards the generation of possibilities and processes that can generate new spaces of resistance or coexistence.

All in all, in a moment of global discrediting towards globalization and politics, our practice as designers must be questioned if we want to offer alternatives and different futures.