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Urban Landscape Perspectives explores how landscape terminology can be usefully brought into the urban debate. The articles are by scholars who have a particular interest in and experience of the city project at various operative scales. They include theoretical reflections on the landscape as an eminently project-like figure. The book describes new methods and approaches dealing with the contemporary environment, whether it is from the point of view of the city or the landscape.
This book explores new forms and modalities of relations between people and space that increasingly affect the life of the city. The investigation takes as its starting point the idea that in contemporary societies the loss of our relationship with place is a symptom of a breakdown in the relationship between ethics and aesthetics. This in turn has caused a crisis not only in taste, but also in our sense of beauty, our aesthetic instinct, and our moral values. It has also led to the loss of our engagement with the landscape, which is essential for cities to function. The authors argue that new, fertile forms of interaction between people and space are now happening in what they call the ‘i...
Landscape modelling integrates the differing perspectives of the many disciplines that deal with the landscape. It is motivated not only by the desire for scientific understanding, but also by the real-time demands of 21st century postindustrial society, which include the twin imperatives of stabilizing damaged ecosystems on the one hand, and finding effective ways to use the landscape on the other. The discipline has the specific goal of designing and assessing future scenarios of landscape development, while not losing sight of its past history, both ecological and socio-cultural. This book encompasses the interrelated disciplines of geography, landscape ecology and geoinformatics, and by ...
In the present age of migration, the influx of immigrants from distant lands leads inevitably to the spatial and social restructuring of cities and regions. It is often accompanied by fears of and hostility towards the newcomers. Nevertheless, in Europe, North America and Japan this influx of immigrants is essential to economic growth. How can immigrants become accepted members of the society of their adopted country? How can strangers become neighbours? What alchemies of political and social imagination are required to achieve peaceful coexistence in the mongrel cities of the 21st century? What philosophies and policies have made integration successful in Canada and how can it be translated into European context? The book tackles an important contemporary issue – the social integration of immigrants in a large metropolis – by way of the detailed case study of one Canadian city. The book provides a large political and legal context which makes this case study comprehensible and inspiring to readers outside Canada.
This book explores the relationship between the sciences of representation and the strategy of landscape valorisation. The topic is connected to the theme of the image of the city, which is extended to the territory scale and applied to case studies in Italy’s Umbria region, where the goal is to strike a dynamic balance between cultural heritage and nature. The studies demonstrate how landscape represents an interpretive process of finding meaning, a product of the relationships between mankind and the places in which it lives. The work proceeds from the assumption that it is possible to describe these connections between environment, territory and landscape by applying the Vitruvian triad, composed of Firmitas (solidity), Utilitas (utility) and Venustas(beauty). The environment, the sum of the conditions that influence all life, represents the place’s solidity, because it guarantees its survival. In turn, territory is connected to utility, and through its etymological meaning is linked to possession, to a domain; while landscape, as an “area perceived by people”, expresses the search for beauty in a given place, the process of critically interpreting a vision.
This provocative collection of essays challenges traditional ideas of strategic s- tial planning and opens up new avenues of analysis and research. The diversity of contributions here suggests that we need to rethink spatial planning in several f- reaching ways. Let me suggest several avenues of such rethinking that can have both theoretical and practical consequences. First, we need to overcome simplistic bifurcations or dichotomies of assessing outcomes and processes separately from one another. To lapse into the nostalgia of imagining that outcome analysis can exhaust strategic planners’ work might appeal to academics content to study ‘what should be’, but it will doom itself to fur...
'Trading zone' is a concept introduced by Peter Galison in his social scientific research on how scientists representing different sub-cultures and paradigms have been able to coordinate their interaction locally. In this book, Italian and Finnish planning researchers extend the use of the concept to different contexts of urban planning and management, where there is a need for new ideas and tools in managing the interaction of different stakeholders. The trading zone concept is approached as a tool in organizing local platforms and support systems for planning participation, knowledge production, decision making and local conflict management. In relation to the former theses of communicative planning theory that stress the ideals of consensus, mutual understanding and universal reason, the 'trading zone approach', outlined in this book, offers a different perspective. It focuses on the potentiality to coordinate locally the interaction of different stakeholders without requiring the deeper sharing of understandings, values and motives between them. Galison’s commentary comes in the form of the book’s final chapter.
The book is a collection of essays exploring the potential of multimedia to enrich and transform the planning field. By multimedia the authors refer to a broad range of new information and communication technologies (from film and video to digital ethnography and the internet), which are opening up new possibilities in planning practices, processes, pedagogy and research. The authors document the ways in which these ICTs can expand the language of planning and the creativity of planners; can evoke the lived experience (the spirit, memories, desires) of our 21st century mongrel cities by engaging with stories and storytelling; and can democratise planning practices. The text is epistemologica...
Urban planning is a complex field of knowledge and practice. Through the decades, theoretical debate has formed an eclectic set of possible perspectives, without finding, in our opinion, a coherent paradigmatic framework which can adequately guide the interpretation and action in urban planning. The hypothesis of this book is that the attempts of founding an autonomous planning theory are inadequate if they do not explore two interconnected fields: architecture and public policies.The book critically reviews a selected set of current practices and theoretical founding works of modern and contemporary urban planning by highlighting the continuous search for the epistemic legitimization of a l...
The book proposes a set of original contributions in research areas shared by planning theory, architectural research, design and ethical inquiry. The contributors gathered in 2010 at the Ethics of the Built Environment seminar organized by the editors at Delft University of Technology. Both prominent and emerging scholars presented their researches in the areas of aesthetics, technological risks, planning theory and architecture. The scope of the seminar was highlighting shared lines of ethical inquiry among the themes discussed, in order to identify perspectives of innovative interdisciplinary research. After the seminar all seminar participants have elaborated their proposed contributions...