UNISCAPE - LANDSCAPE IS WHERE THE DISCIPLINES MEET series of online webinars
LANDSCAPE IS WHERE THE DISCIPLINES MEET
Landscape in Action: Applying the Landscape Principle
The 2023 WDM Series
aims to explore the challenges and experiences of applying the landscape principle in various professional contexts and arenas. The holistic sentiment and theoretical sophistication of the landscape paradigm, and in particular its implicit commitment to transversality, present real challenges for practitioners, decision-makers and citizen-participants. In this series, we want to interrogate and problematize the roll-out of the landscape paradigm as experienced by different disciplines and professions, and to examine its uneven
penetration. What sorts of challenges does the Landscape Convention generate for your discipline/profession, and how are they being met?
The first event in the series will take place on 23 March 2023 17.30 (CET) | ZOOM entitled WDM 1_23 Lecture | Moving Horizons. A landscape manifesto
Moving Horizons, design praxis through soil transformation. A Landscape Manifesto by Vittoria MENCARINI, Ph.D, University of Ferrara; Ravenna Public Administration, Natural Area Office
General subject Area | landscape architecture; landscape theory; landscape observatory; landscape ecology
Abstract | Moving horizon was born as a doctoral investigation that moves across research and design dimension. It explores the relationship between landscape design and soil transformation, focusing on the mutual effects and potential disciplinary developments aiming at structurally linking the two fields.
The soil is one of the most complex biomaterials on Earth in continuous exchange with the terrestrial systems. With humanity today being Earth’s primary geomorphic agent, the quality of human life and the earth’s environment had never depended more on soil management than it does today.
The starting assumption is that, the soil is a condition of inherent shifting in landscape evolution both in physical and semantic relationship.
The value of soil as an element of planning and design lies in handling live and dynamic physical matter. From being ‘background’ for the built environment, the soil transformations become the ‘foreground’ both in landscape design praxis and in theoretical implications, by embedding the soil as a palimpsest in reading and writing the landscape. The framework produced by this assessment has been condensed in 10 propositions, collected in form of a Landscape Manifesto. A first application of Moving Horizon approach has been developed and tested in the Ravenna Climate Change Adaptation Plan (Italy), by identifying a planning procedure capable of integrating territorial adaptation measures to climate change.
The result is not the proof of a theorem but the discovery of an unexpected point of view. The Moving Horizon approach implicitly criticises traditional landscape practice’s seemingly uncritical reproduction of stereotypical ‘aestheticised’ images. It is not a question of rejecting or abandoning a formal and compositional language, but rather of
encouraging a view that favours investigation and observation of reality in its different stratifications offered by embedding the soil as a palimpsest in “reading” and “writing” the landscape.
Keywords: landscape design, soil, adaptation, planning.
More information on https://www.uniscape.eu/event/online-lecture-wdm-1_23-moving-horizons-design-praxis-through-soil-transformation-a-landscape-manifesto/
