Landscape – Great Idea! X-LArch III - Department für Raum ...

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insider approach, and that embody “the ability to shift scales
[...], to design relationships between dynamic environmental
processes and urban form” (Corner, 2006: 24).
The question of scale seems to be fundamental both
for the goal sustainability (in terms of dimensional range
of impacts on resources, population involved in sustainable
life styles, scales of intervention) and for the interpretation
and the design of landscape (in terms of geographical
size of the areas, scale of detail, relations with the
observer’s position, range of ecological effects) [Fig.2].
Fig. 2: Scales of sustainability in urban landscapes
scale of urban and site design. A prominent question is
the non-linear, or even contradictory, relation between
the common numerical indicators of sustainability and the
reality of the urban landscape [Fig.1].
Nevertheless by now it seems that –in studying and
projecting urban landscapes–the application of numerical
indicators does not ensure by itself the achievement of
the goal of sustainability.
Town planning parameters (tree and shrub density,
soil permeability, green public spaces standards, levels
of land consumption etc.), landscape ecology indicators,
statistical indexes related to urban policies (number of
private cars, pedestrian areas, cultural liveliness, use of
bioclimatic building techniques, waste recycling etc.) and
aggregated indicators (Ecological Footprint, Selfsustainable
Local Development Index) are useful consolidated
indicators, but each of them has a view on a single
dimensional scale (the building, the city, the region or the
national scale) and on a single time of collection (and
they are often gathered at different time/date). Besides,
institutions holding the data may be biased towards certain
types of data, causing inaccuracies in data collection
and display.
Assuming the need of “exploring alternative models
for understanding the sustainability of systems [...] in a
more responsive learning mode” (Dahl, 2008: 42), the
research will try to assess if and how numerical indicators
could give way to those methods of “understanding
sites by means of fieldwork analysis”, trying to investigate
the “unlimited number of scales” in which a site exists
(Pollack, 2006: 130) and considering landscape as the
medium through which contemporary cities develop and
communicate themselves, encouraging more or less
sustainable lifestyles (DETR, 2000:53).
The research starts with an overview on the various
methods of studying urban landscape used in those disciplines,
such as landscape architecture, geography, geoanthropology
and landscape urbanism, that combine a quantitative,
analytical approach and a qualitative, analogical,
The research has since now collected the interpretative
keys of urban landscapes which are commonly used in
the above mentioned disciplines to describe and interpret
the spatial configuration of the urban settlement,
the architectural body of the city, the legibility of urban
spaces, the presence of natural elements in the urban
hierarchy and the different uses and users of urban
spaces. Besides, these interpretative keys have been
critically related to consolidated targets of sustainability
(derived from the sets of the Expert Group on the Urban
Environment of the European Commission, the European
Council of Spatial Planners and the European HQE2R
project) and they are now being tested on various types
of projects and practices of urban transformation (postindustrial
sites redevelopment, brownfield remediation,
new green infrastructures, management of urban fringe
areas, etc.).
Nested scales in urban landscape
In the investigation of the sustainability of urban transformation
through the lens of landscape, three features are
emerging.
First of all, the feature of multiscalarity or, better, the
presence of nested scales in the structure of urban
landscape, as introduced by Henri Lefebvre and recently
suggested in the discipline of Landscape Urbanism (Pollack,
2006: 129). In the diagram [fig. 3], the private scale,
the medium or transitional scale and the global scale are
deeply interrelated and internally differentiated: hierarchies
of scales do exist but they are not fixed or singular.
When bringing into action this Lefebvre’s diagram in the
work of reading and projecting landscapes, it appears
that “the potential of a project to operate at different scales
relies on a designer’s investment in representing the
elements and forces that exist or have existed at those
scales, as a precondition for designing ways to foster
interdependencies between them” (Pollack, 2006: 130).
With this nested scale approach, the study of existing
Fig. 3: Diagram of nested scales (adapted from: Pollack, 2006)
Papers