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

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12 Urban landscapes need great ideas! Julia Werner STUDIO URBANE LANDSCHAFTEN, Faculty of Architecture and landscape science, Leibniz University of Hannover, Herrenhäuser Str. 2a, 30419 Hannover, Germany (e-mail: julia. werner@freiraum.uni-hannover.de) Abstract The interactions of urbanization, globalization and climate change lead to new large-scale spatial structures referred to as urban landscapes. They are uncertain, extend beyond administrative boundaries and their developments are unpredictable. They require a fundamentally new perspective and mode of action to deal creatively with their complexity. With its integration of intuitive, rational, emotional und body related knowledge and the resulting idea-generating force, designing is just such a mode of action and a way of gaining insights. However, rational-analytic orientated large-scale planning usually remains quite far removed from a design approach. Nevertheless, it is required to interrelate site inventory with searching for ideas from the outset. Initial ideas aid in “untangling” complex spatial interrelations and provide a decisive “navigation” while searching for productive impulses in terms of relevant (research) questions and further ideas. Therefore, the essential step is to express a spatial whole in an initial picture in the shape of sketches, models or mappings. It is the ability of intuition to enable something to be grasped as a whole, even when information is incomplete. It takes a particular setting that encourages creativity and allows empathy. This paper describes both, an integrative approach to (large-scale) design with a visual-intuitive initial access to deal with complex urban landscapes, and also its practical application within a design workshop. Key words Urban landscapes, large-scale desiging, designing with spatial complexity, creative design access Introduction Worldwide, complex problems such as globalisation, climate change, water dynamics or multicultural living characterise today’s spatial developments – whether at local, municipality or regional level. The traditional polarities between city and country have almost completely dissolved and open, uncertain, complex spatial phenomena that extend beyond administrative boundaries have emerged, which I call “urban landscapes” [1]. The urban ways of life of modern humans are no longer limited to city areas; they now penetrate into the deepest “rural” areas and are reflected there spatially. Complex urban landscapes can no longer be captured using traditional urban, regional or landscape planning strategies and instruments, rigid area jurisdictions and limited discipline perspectives and to a large extent they resist planning and regulatory control. “If the planning disciplines wish to retain the right to exercise an influence on future [spatial] development, the development of a suitable repertoire that reacts to the altered parameters is overdue” (Bormann et. al 2005: 42). Complex spatial developments require a fundamentally new perspective and mode of action in order to take these altered phenomena and productively create a sustainable future. “With regard to the urban-regional dimension of spatial planning, there is a glaring need on the part of those involved to improve their knowledge, concepts and abilities” (Stein 2006: 11). We are looking for a mode of action and a way of gaining insight that understand complex spatial interrelations and are thus able to “creatively use and shape complexities to secure the future of humankind “. (Vester, 2002: S. 8). The article assumes that designing is just such a way of gaining insight and acting. In particular, it deals with the idea-generating power of design and shows how grasping complex urban landscapes in their entirety is possible and why it is necessary, especially at the beginning, for the finding of ideas. In addition, a particular setting that allows emotions and encourages creativity is necessary for such a process. The symposium entitled “Research by Design” at the STUDIO URBANE LAND- SCHAFTEN [2] demonstrates how the design approach discussed here can be used to gain initial access to a topic or a space. Designing – the creative pathway to complexity In his essay “Designing as a way of life” the philosopher of science Hans Poser writes that designing is fundamentally “the thinking up of a promising and feasible possibility […] aimed at bringing about something new” (Poser 2004: 563). Leaving aside for a moment its meaning in the professional context, design is a fundamental human activity that takes place in our everyday context: designing is a creative skill that each one of us possesses. We plan and design our everyday activities in all their functional, material and emotional as well as social and aesthetic dimensions without describing these processes as designing. Most of this occurs intuitively as a subconscious process. Ideas follow one another often imperceptibly and sometimes something (unexpectedly) new emerges (Seggern & Werner 2008a: 35f.) As such, designing can be understood “as the creative capacity of human beings to take an active role in the evolutionary shaping of the world” (Seggern 2008: 69).
13 In “creating” disciplines – irrespective if engineering or landscape architecture – this process is described as designing. In the German-speaking world there is however a rather strict distinction among the spatial disciplines between planning and designing. Designing usually begins on lower, spatially accurate levels of scale once the (overall) planning has formulated the objectives, programs and procedural specifications. As such, design has been and is regarded as “only” a “shaping” process rather than at the same time a fundamental mode of action that, through the feedback of graphic insight, is able to generate knowledge of the future. Due however to their exclusive concentration on rationalanalytic methodology, the fields of spatial and regional planning have long neglected the use of design approaches to shaping their subjects because “regional planning at the scale of the urban region [...] is still not regarded as a design task“ (Sieverts 2007: 12). Now ideas, statements and illustrative visions of the extensive shaping of a space do not necessarily emerge from the normal planning process of analysis, identifying objectives and developing programs. Sieverts writes elsewhere that “design in the context of highly complex urban landscapes must become more than just an instrument of implementation of individual programs within abstract spatial-constructive structures” (Sieverts: 2008: S. 261). Therefore it is imperative, however, that large-scale planning becomes a design task. The process of designing always draws on both intuitive and rational knowledge, combining emotional and personal with objectively reasoned components. This applies equally to the search for ideas during the design process itself, and to the evaluation of the results. In scientific and planning contexts, the knowledge gained through intuition, emotions and bodily experience still attracts little attention and even less recognition. Although it has been accepted that this knowledge is an essential factor in creative processes and thus a factor in design, its meaning and relevance remain unnoticed and as a consequence its potentials stay largely under-utilized (Seggern & Werner 2008a: 39). Conversely, disciplines such as the neurosciences, research on creativity, philosophy or psychology have clearly recognised and acknowledged the relevance of these forms of comprehension and show that “creativity is based on a ‘fusion of intuition and reason‘” (Salk 1985). In contrast to a linear-analytical approach, which attempts to apply conclusions drawn from the individual to the whole, intuition is capable of directly comprehending something as a whole – even in the presence of too much or too little information – and of making complex decisions based on that (Hänsel 2002, Gigerenzer 2007). Why do I consider the intuitive ability to grasp something as a whole so essential for designing complex urban landscapes? Grasping urban landscapes as a whole Vester, a pioneer of cross-linked thinking, formulates that there is still a strong reluctance to “even acknowledging complexity at all [...] attention is focussed rather on the individual aspect, the immediately comprehensible, instead of on the superordinate interrelations and that relationship between things that extends beyond the individual parts” (Vester 2002: 16). As a rule, neither cities nor regions have ever been planned as wholes. Nevertheless, it is crucial to grasp and express them as wholes. This is the only way that enables firstly, the specific promotion of an urban landscape’s overall development and secondly, the productive application of individual measures to this development. Otherwise, the respective individual measures remain the rationally understandable decisions of official planning, but their integration into an overarching whole is lacking. My decisive thesis is therefore that particularly intuitive consideration of the whole is needed if productive steps in designing large-scale urban landscapes are to be taken; these will then be of benefit to the whole. Ironically it is actually impossible to comprehend the whole although grasping urban landscapes as a whole is a pre-condition for being able to design ideas from these complex conditions. An initial step is to find a deskriptive term for a whole. Describing large-scale spatial structures as urban landscapes is already such a designation, a perception that converges to form a whole and also a step with which we humans are intimately familiar; we use it with every description of a holiday destination. Landscape emerges to form a whole from a (usually subconscious) combination of an area‘s multifaceted elements (whether produced by nature or by human beings), its history and its culture. Perceiving something as a landscape is inescapably bound up with an emotional involvement and landscape usually has a positive connotation (Franzen & Krebs 2005); its perception is always associated with one’s owns feelings: It is therefore an important and conscious step – as taken by the STUDIO URBANE LAND- SCHAFTEN – to describe complex, large-scale spaces as urban landscapes, a prerequisite to then be able to grasp them more specifically as wholes. In this context whole should certainly not be confused with complete: neither a “complete” inventory nor fixed far-sighted “complete” overall area planning are possible. It is much more about “comprehending realities intuitively, in a way artistically, on the basis of patterns that include fuzziness” (Vester 2002: 8). The essence, the character of a space must initially be approximated through intuitive analysis, through creative initial access. There are many ways to do this which must be newly designed or adapted and draw on a repertoire each time. In designing, Papers
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