Month: February 2016 (page 1 of 1)

Read the precise review by Saskia I. de Wit on the symposium “Let´s walk Urban Landscapes. New Pathways in Design Research” published in the current issue of Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA). De Wit reflects on walking as a tool that can be used in all stages of the design process and that had been formative for the design of the symposium of Studio Urbane Landschaften itself. “The mix of lecturing, creating, discussing and reflecting, and particularly walking, dissolved the dichotomy of speakers and audience.”

The European Landscape Convention states that landscape protection, management and planning should be a task for all sectors of civil society. A key challenge is to enable different groups to identify their own landscapes. But how can we identify such complex process of transformation together with people of different backgrounds? The spatial visions designed by Stein+Schultz demonstrate the benefits of expressing landscapes through maps, images and words. There is a special focus on large-scale visions as elements of informal plans fostering creative transdisciplinary dialogue. Find a summary of the Top 5 spatial visions that help to capture the complexity of landscapes:

Top5SpatialVisions

Not everybody attending the conference „Planung in der Status Quo Gesellschaft. Ist Wandel möglich“ (by ARL and DASL, 22.1.2016 in Dortmund) was convinced by Prof. Heinz Bude´s contribution to the debate on changes in society and how planners can influence processes of transformation. I found his talk on atmospheres intriguing, because Bude presented a way to frame the complexity of change. His definition of atmosphere (German: Stimmung) differs from what Gernot Böhme would call atmosphere, but one thing they have in common: Atmosphere is fluid, sometimes unpredictably and planners and designers of urban landscapes are well advised to sense these atmospheres carefully.