LE:Notre Landscape Forum 27 June - 1 July 2023, Nurtingen, Germany
Landscape Forum Stuttgart Region, an international event for advancing landscape knowledge, visioning and collaboration
IFLA Europe is proud to join LE:Notre in organising LE:Notre Landscape Forum 27 June to 1 July 2023.
The Landscape Forum aims to stimulate knowledge building, collaboration and action for local sustainable development, while integrating a European dimension. In accordance with the European Landscape Convention, we understand local landscapes as our common platform for envisioning and co-creating alternative futures. Landscape as a concept includes all dimensions of our everyday spatial environment, no matter if considered as urban, rural or peri-urban.
The landscape forum is addressed to any discipline. This annual European event brings professional, education, research, policy and civil society prespectives together in a local & specific landscape context. The forum contributes a landscape perspective to the New European Bauhaus.
The 12th LE:NOTRE Landscape Forum explores Stuttgart Region and IBA’27 in Germany The Stuttgart Region Landscape Forum supports the discourses initiated by the International Building Exhibition IBA’27 StadtRegion Stuttgart. Within that framework, we will focus our observation on the river Neckar and its tributaries, exemplified by a landscape transect between the medium-sized riverine towns of Nürtingen and Plochingen. Both towns are good examples for the typical spatial features of this polycentric urban agglomeration.
The International Building Exhibition IBA’27 is a 10-years process finishing in the year 2027, the final exhibition year, which coincides with the centenary of the Bauhaus exhibition on the Weissenhof Estate. IBA’27 has set its thematic focus on the concept of the productive city region. What makes IBA’27 specific is that it deals with a highly industrialized region. A region that has already reached a high degree of urbanization. The current challenge for economy, policy, planning and design alike is to anticipate the future of production. On that basis, we need to imagine how future forms of production might transform the given urban fabric. The built reality of Stuttgart Region is a polycentric urban landscape. The modernist idea of separating urban functions has been dominant over decades and goes together with an overall priority to caroriented transport infrastructure.
Industrial production with a strong focus on the automotive sector has been the recipe of Stuttgart’s success. About 17% of all regional employees work in this sector. The story started when Karl Benz and Gottlieb Daimler invented the first automobile in 1886. Since then, regional production has been a guarantor for social balance and the democratisation of wealth, at the price of a highly fragmented urban landscape. Will this ‘production & wealth’ recipe of the past still work in the future, in light of the grand challenges our world is facing? With this competition, we invite you, the next generation, to reimagine the Stuttgart Region as a productive landscape in a decarbonized, regenerative and climate responsive world. In that sense, we would like to expand our idea of production from industry to the social, environmental and cultural dimensions, implementing practices that advance landscape democracy, the right-to-landscape, and the well-being and health of the most diverse people and communities. All dimensions come together in a local landscape and need tangible responses on the ground.
Why Stuttgart Region?
Stuttgart Greater Region today represents one of the most productive landscapes of Europe, not only in economic terms, but also with regard to the social and cultural opportunities it generates. There is growing evidence that the citizens of Stuttgart Region appreciate the quality of their local landscapes, provided in particular by a remarkable regional green network, the so-called Landscape Park Stuttgart Region. This quality has developed into a very relevant location factor, backed up by a restrictive regional plan.
However, pressures on unbuilt land, primarily agricultural land and forests, and on the remaining open spaces scattered across the region’s polycentric settlement system are constantly increasing. These sustainability challenges are typical ‘wicked problems’ evolving in a multipolar system of external driving forces, local interests, values, practices and ‘locked-in’ situations determined by past decisions, investments and, of course, ownership structures.
Transdisciplinary landscape transformations for wicked problems In this context, both the Landscape Forum and this competition aim at introducing ‘landscape’ as an inter- and transdisciplinary discourse platform. In that sense, we understand ‘landscape’ as a method for bridging disciplinary and sectoral divides and for advancing knowledge. We welcome interdisciplinary student teams willing to explore collaborations that go beyond the traditional-and much welcome-collaboration between architects, planners, landscape architects, environment experts and communities to promote sustainable development goals connected to public health, future economies, well-being, local identities and nature. Addressing the wicked problems of our time requires extensive collaboration across paradigms, epistemologies, and knowledge, and a shared commitment to bridge the gap between academia and civil society to envision democratic landscape transformations across scales and geographies.
More information available on https://forum.ln-institute.org/landscape-forum-stuttgart-region/
