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

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Structuring the Concept of
Landscape: Product, Process and
Idea.
Philipp Rode
University of Natural Resources and Applied Life
Sciences, Institute of Landscape Architecture,
Peter Jordan Straße 82, 1190 Vienna, Austria
(e-mail: philipp.rode@boku.ac.at)
Abstract
This paper discusses landscape as a multi-layered
concept and proposes a three-dimensional approach
to better understand the complex meaning of
contemporary urban landscapes. The first dimension
focuses on the material manifestation of landscape
– landscape as product. The second dimension
highlights the societal and natural forces, which
produce the landscape – landscape as process.
The third dimension puts cultural values and
meanings up for discussion – landscape as idea.
This concept was employed in eight case studies
carried out in post-socialist Sofia / Bulgaria.
Structuring the analysis of the case studies along
the three dimensions presented above brings
forth a differentiated view onto landscape. One
that is generated from within the landscape.
The analysis focuses on the mutual conditionality
of landscape elements and urbanised structures. It
reflects the ongoing processes of transformation,
which produce fragmented, heterogeneous and remote
urban landscapes. The cultural meaning of those
landscapes has undergone a process of designification
but also of reinterpretation by those considering these
landscapes as their valuable everyday landscapes.
Therefore, the structured multi-layered understanding
of landscape allows for a differentiated design
approach to ‚meaningless‘ landscapes: one
which employs the specific, anaesthetic
attributes of those sites as their qualities.
Key words
Concept of landscape, post-socialism, negative
space, cultural meaning, everyday landscape.
Introduction
Recent debates about the future of the urban environment
focus on landscape as a central element. The
introduction of the term ‚Zwischenstadt‘ by the German
urban planner Thomas Sieverts (Sieverts 1999) presents
contemporary urban developments as mutual processes
of expanding urban structures and the infiltration of urban
areas by undeveloped left over and vacant areas (see
Bormann et al 2005: 134). The dichotomic concept of city
and landscape has, thus, been disintegrated, urging the
search for a comprehensive conception of landscape.
Landscape is to serve as a super ordinate meaning on
the regional level, while anaesthetic (see Welsch 1990)
residual space is to function as a medium of intermediation
between the isolated elements of suburbia and the
fragmented landscape on the local level (see Hauser /
Kamleithner 2006: 33).
Landscape has been described as a complex term in
literature. Sauer points to landscape as space, that is
composed of physical and cultural elements, made as
concept of ‚Gestalt‘ of a spatially defined habitat (see
Sauer 1925). Its perception but also its actual physical
manifestation is interlinked with specific socio-economic
frameworks, turning the perceived and developed landscape
into a societal construct, which represents specific
fractions of society, as Cosgrove explicates. The significance
of these groups is articulated in their imagined
relation to nature and their social position to the external
nature (see Cosgrove 1998: 13ff). Thus, the constructed
landscape has a direct relation to constellations of
power, patterns of representation and the imagination of
external nature. On the individual level, the experience of
landscape is based on a process of interpretation, which
depends on both social appropriation and an ‚aesthetic
component‘ in the concept of landscape, as Kühne describes
(see Kühne 2006: 61). Aesthetics hereby is rather
seen as beauty, containing subjective and cultural values
and interpretation.
This leads to the question of how to understand the
fragmented landscapes of contemporary urbanised environments
as meaningful elements as they contrast the
Arcadian ideal of landscape. Furthermore, the question
remains, how those undeveloped spaces, which comprise
on the one hand traditional elements of landscape
but hold attributes as vagueness (see de Solá-Moráles
1995), uncertainty (see Cupers / Miessen 2002), ephemerality
(see Qviström / Saltzman 2006) on the other
hand, which do not fit in the conception of static and
defined ‚Landscape Two‘ (see Jackson 1990) can be
integrated.
Material and methods
Eight case studies have been carried out in post-socialist
Sofia to provide information about the attributes and
states of selected sites, which are considered as undefined
open spaces in the urban environment. Those sites
have been detected along urban dérives, which were
roughly following the specifications of the Situationists
(see Sadler 1998), as the decisions on the routing were
predominantly made on site, responding to the attraction
of place. These dérives have been analysed psycho-geo-