Browse by title

The chapter argues for a re-professionalising of landscape architecture embracing the tenets of democratic professionalism and serving landscape democracy’s purposes. The authors provide a theoretical overview of Dzur’s democratic professionalism and offer it as a guiding framework for furthering democratic professionalism in landscape architecture. Evidence suggests that landscape architecture has indeed been undergoing a turn toward democratic professionalisation helped along by the theories and practices of community design and placemaking. These two approaches embody the democratic processes and purposes distinguishing the democratic from the social trustee models of professionalism prevalent in landscape architecture. Further evidence is found in the narrative practitioner profiles of a small subset of community-engaged educators who are playing a role in landscape architecture’s re-professionalising. The profiles are part of a larger ongoing research project and provide insights regarding how landscape architecture might continue to navigate towards democratic professionalism in education, research and practice.

How can stories be employed in the community development process in order to better understand, analyse, plan and implement sustainable development and landscape democracy? And how can storytelling move a community from inaction to collective, democratic action? This chapter focuses on the Italian new town of Zingonia to illustrate the relevance of stories as structures of social and communal identity, as a window into a place’s native wisdom, and as tools for urban resiliency. The 1960s Italian community stands as a critical case study of a storytelling-based, participatory approach to community redevelopment. The goal of this digital ethnography is to represent a rich account of the challenges and opportunities Modernist communities face as they attempt to rewrite their core story into one of democratic landscape change.

As global sea levels rise in response to climate change, coastal inhabitants will vacate their communities and seek security inland, with implications for state coherence and governance. Recent work suggests accelerated sea level changes beyond standard predictions, with tumultuous consequences. The present research addresses the question: will ‘future-proofing’ interventions by governments facing crowded landscapes alter democracy as we know it? In the coming century, in one scenario, a subdued but sustained tsunami will produce a coastal surge zone, where seawaters and people are on the move. This contrasts with the interior shatter zone, inland destinations where up to ten per cent of the world population will relocate. Democracy may become problematic in shatter zones not only because of competition for space and resources, but because of significant barriers to entry arrayed against resettlement. Should resulting disorder evoke soft martial law and evermore dirigist decision-making across landscapes, shatter zones will be proving grounds for new democracies, or perhaps post-democracies.

Landscapes are maintained and changed through combinations of actions and decisions which in turn are based on what Hägerstrand has termed territorial competences. Today these competences are primarily linked to individual landowners and users; in modern rural landscapes these are first of all the farmers. Farmers’ landscape practices are to a large extent guided and framed by public policy interventions of various kinds, representing spatial competences in Hägerstrand’s terminology. These interventions are influenced by various kinds of expert knowledge together with common public perceptions and conventions. The aim of this chapter is to analyse the various roles of experts in guiding landscape practices, with a specific focus on the changing relationships between territorial and spatial competences. We present a conceptual framework for analysing the role of experts and expertise in relation to both public policy interventions, individual and collective landscape practices.

Public space has been widely discussed by various disciplines. This chapter examines the spatial condition of parks as public spaces in relation to social ideas. It looks at the relation between political intention and designed landscape, using as an example the post-war modernist Donaupark, a public Viennese park with a strong socialist impetus and the maxim of ‘social green’. How was this idea put into practice and how has its effect evolved until today? In order to examine this relation for Donaupark, the contemporary political intentions are compared with the outcome: the study analyses programmatic documents of the time, the park’s design, its development and its contemporary uses in order to check their conformance.

Over recent years, cultural policy has been applied in the urban environment, turning open spaces into touristic attractions in line with the taste of the ‘outsider’. In many cases, local actors have been forced to move out of the gentrified zones, due to the higher rental prices and the monoculture of recreational uses. This research examines the ‘social policy’, the role of ‘social capital’ in urban regenerations and the forms of ‘bottom-up initiatives’, since they express a democratic perception of urban cultural landscapes and they can inspire a collective, sustainable and productive aspect of urban open spaces. A methodology of reactivating socially and culturally urban landscapes is described, as well as two case studies from the Greek city of Thessaloniki, the first concerning the application of the proposed methodology in the West Wall of the city and the second referring to a realised community garden in the city centre.

The aim of this chapter is to demonstrate a democratic aspect of planning and management in protected and other designated landscapes with a multitude of boundaries and legal frameworks, and highlight the importance of integration actors. In a situation with fragmented institutions, where the actors have different positions and power, the chapter claims that it is of fundamental importance to create a common arena that contributes to seeing the landscape in an integrated way, and not being limited to the complexity of boundaries and singular fields of authority. Based on a study of Nærøyfjorden, Norway, integration actors are seen to play a fundamental role in bringing the different stakeholders and authorities together to find and implement positive solutions/measures to experienced problems at the local community level. The chapter identifies and discusses three major capacities constituting the integration actor: integrity, professional capacity and trust.

In order to make a case for landscape democracy, one would need to acknowledge the political potency of landscape and its universal value. The main axiom is that landscape is a life-supporting system of material and emotional needs and a common resource. Democracy itself is an elastic concept and does not always deliver equality and social justice. Landscape democracy is a complex concept influenced and shaped by multiple variables requiring mindfulness of context and nuances. Yet the main message is that while each situation has to be handled according to specific social and cultural manners, the underlying doctrine must remain an ethical commitment to justice in terms of social equity.