IFLA Europe launched its 2022 Students and Young Professionals’ Competition ‘Boldness & Beauty’!

Landscape Architects are currently offered a significant leading role in the development of the landscape. Landscape architecture is an area that concretises how we view our environment and that makes our society’s relationship with nature visible.

The aim of design has always been to increase well-being. The 19th century was marked by technological advances and engineers played a leading role in developing the industrializing world. In the 20th century, alongside technology and ecology, humanistic values rose in discourse; aesthetics and social dimensions. Architects took a central role and set out to solve the challenges of the post-war world.

Now in the 21st century it is Landscape Architects’ turn. The element of nature and the post-humanist perspective add to the goals of design, and traditional design processes go hand in hand with a with a greater understanding of the interaction of technology, man, and nature, and their mutual relationships. As the operating environment and the issues to be solved in it become more and more complex, Landscape Architects have the necessary know-how to coordinate different requirements. The focus of design is increasingly shifting from shaping the end result to controlling the entire process, and the Landscape Architect profession provides the necessary skills for this.

Boldness
By raising the profile of the debate, we see that taking on a socially significant expert role requires courage and responsibility. Until now, the formation of our profession has required taking bold action, and now there is a greater need for action than ever before. It is time for Landscape Architects to take on a leading role in the development of the landscape. We ask, under what conditions can we, as Landscape Architects, act more boldly at this moment, and by what means will we redeem this mandate? How can each of us act boldly in our own work and how do we see our own responsibility in our actions?

Beauty
Aesthetics is one of the cornerstones of landscape architecture. There are now numerous new themes on the design table to solve and coordinate. For this reason, it is timely to ask what is the role of beauty and aesthetics in landscape architecture. The skill of our profession to create beauty undoubtedly adds value to projects, but how can we make better use of this expertise? What is the value of beauty in a world of change and crisis?

Boldness and Beauty
By bringing these two themes together, we want to launch an internal identity debate within the profession. Can these boldness and beauty together form the guiding themes for the design of the urban landscape of the 21st century? Through what examples, design projects, and actions can these themes be defined in landscape architecture? Will one come before the other, or are boldness and beauty prerequisites for each other?

By bringing these two themes together, we want to launch an internal identity debate within the profession. Can these boldness and beauty together form the guiding themes for the design of the urban landscape of the 21st century? Through what examples, design projects, and actions can these themes be defined in landscape architecture? Will one come before the other, or are boldness and beauty prerequisites for each other?

To find out more, please visit IFLA Europe Youth competition website 2022 IFLA Europe Student and Young Professionals’ Competition

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LOST LANDSCAPES

Looking at the transformation of landscapes in recent years, we cannot ignore how the speed of the dynamics that caused this, is undergoing a new, strong acceleration.

Scientists, researchers, and scholars describe the current world as one out of control, where environmental, economic, and identity crises are interconnected; although their dimensions are global, they are perceived locally, profoundly affecting the places and landscapes that are an expression thereof.

Landscapes, it is well known, are constantly evolving. Yet, sometimes, such transformations occur improperly - despite their constitutive rules, in a homogenizing manner, causing inconsistent rips and scars - so that they lose their recognisability. “Have we lost our landscapes?” philosopher Venturi Ferriolo asks. This question is not trivial, and it is not so important to answer it as it is to trigger new actions and processes in order to “(...) save local specificities, often no longer recognizable enough to reclaim a dying identity.” (M. Venturi Ferriolo, Landscapes in motion: For an Aesthetics of Transformation, 2016).

The problem of identity is crucial: there is not a single identity for a landscape but multiple ones, and these are linked to social perception. Furthermore, what we consider identity is often the result of a process of ‘reverse filiation’, whereby, “(...) It is not the past that produces the present, but the present that shapes its past.” (M. Bettini, You’ve Got the Wrong Forest. The Fury of Identity, 2020).

Landscape is the “door” to enter that dimension in which memory and imagination meet to give birth to something new: a design process that feeds on an “operating memory” (see. ‘Lost Landscapes’) to nourish its performative nature, far from nostalgia and lament of what is lost.

Opening a reflection on how landscapes change or become something else by cutting the thread that binds them to their origin, letting go of something, losing characters and meanings and sometimes acquiring new ones, entails the necessary consideration of landscape architecture as the attitude of design most capable of interpreting the conditions of the ‘contemporary habitat’.

Landscape Architecture must become the game-changer, essential not only to consolidate, reconstruct and practically conform the Earth’s ecological systems, but to contribute decisively to the transformation of the way we inhabit, produce, and traverse our landscapes.

Its task is to stand as a negotiator between nature and culture, between technological innovation, ecological and poetic imagination, to play a decisive role in reconstructing the meaning andalue of our relationship with the Earth.

Landscape Architecture is a critical practice, a condition in which design becomes action; it is a way of thinking and acting combined. It expresses a professional competence capable of redeveloping living environments through complex transitional processes.

It is the responsibility of Landscape Architects to conduct an action of truth, to bring back the project’s issue in full awareness of each of its aspects: configurative, social, and environmental.

The field of action of the landscape project increasingly concerns the landscapes of everyday life. Those where communities live, work, and transit. The landscapes where it is necessary to metabolize major human-induced transformations, including those related to emerging environmental problems. The ‘Lost Landscapes’ conference aims to activate a discussion table in which points of views, lines of research, and practices of landscape architecture can confront each other around certain capabilities of the project that are put in tension with three thematic areas, but also those landscapes that have the characteristic of not being identified by precise geographical or typological connotations.

Inhabited Landscapes
One inhabits a landscape when one shares in the exchanges that make it intensive. There is a foundational and fertile ambiguity in dwelling landscapes. This ambiguity resides in the suspended dimension between city and countryside, urbanity, and hinterland. It is about new characteristics, no longer rural or natural but neither properly urban, marked by an alternation, an overlapping, and above all an inconsistent co-presence of these states.

It is on these issues that the contemporary attitude of the landscape reveals its potential through the power of rewriting, of acting in networks by points and systems, of assuming incompleteness and discontinuity as part of the outcome.

These contexts often become “reserves” of biodiversity and (considering the new climate and social challenges) can stimulate a new consideration of the city’s open spaces, no longer seen as fragments, but as a ‘system’, significant and meaningful at the metropolitan and territorial scale, waiting for new opportunities for recognition, revitalization and regeneration that could arise from integrated strategies of preservation, management, and innovation.

Landscapes of Production
An important goal of the Landscape Architect is to design productive landscapes that are resilient and capable of providing as many ecosystem services as possible, beginning with a collaboration with the actors who will implement them, first and foremost the communities that live and produce there. Such complexity cannot be solved by simply replacing a pre-existing landscape such as the rural landscape, with a monofunctional landscape such as the agro-industrial one, or mass tourism or energy landscapes. Especially because whenever strong economic interests have affected rural areas, communities have moved away from them and with them knowledge, material, cultures, and ancestral ties that had created those very landscapes in the first place. How, then, can we succeed in introducing innovations without depopulating and causing desertification, but instead enlivening it with new functions?

Landscapes of Crossing
Ecological, infrastructural, settlement, perceptual, social, and economic networks and relationships structure the landscape. Links that are not only physical, but also intangible, evident not only in the present but also as traces of a memory that is projected into the future. Networks that traverse and describe landscapes, connecting places of life (roads and routes for soft mobility, ‘greenways’, ‘blueways’, etc.) whose intangible dimension is the poetic design-key to create new ways of active and dynamic enjoyment of the landscape (i.e., wine and flavour routes, historical-cultural itineraries, etc.).

The design project of the crossing of landscapes and the design project of the crossed landscapes, become a single narrative that connects stories and geographies. The landscapes of crossing are the places where the material and tactile value of relationships is manifested, but that also emerges for their ability to narrate space and time, testifying to the centrality of landscape design in order to construct a contemporary narrative that maintains a thread with the past.

To find out more, please visit IFLA Europe Youth competition website https://iflaeurope.eu/index.php/youth/general/rules-and-regulations

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AIAPP International Conference 12-13 October 2023 and IFLA Europe General Assembly 2023 13-15 October 2023, Naples Italy