About

The Doctoral Network “LANDLABS – Landscape Laboratories: Design strategies for sustainable and beautiful urban landscapes in the Anthropocene” (funded by the European Commission within the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions) operates across six landscape laboratories throughout Europe, exploring new perspectives on the interconnectedness between humans, animals, plants, water, air, soil, and technologies. Through an innovative site-based, research-through-design approach, LANDLABS offers young researchers the opportunity to contribute to the critical and urgent issue of the green transition of cities in alignment with the European Green Deal and the United Nations Goals of Sustainability.

LANDLABS concept

LANDLABS concept

Pertinence and innovative aspects of the research programme

Transdisciplinarity

LANDLABS combines disciplinary aspects (first, the perspective of the project´s guiding discipline landscape architecture; secondly, the analysis of disciplinary theories on interconnectedness) with interdisciplinary integration (joint reflection of six disciplinary theories on interconnectedness) and site-based work in the secondments with societal actors. This sums up to transdisciplinarity – a scientific mode which is highly demanded, yet rarely achieved in PhD programmes

Research Through Design

This method is unique for design disciplines and combines specific design work for a site with the creation of transferable knowledge. It has a lot of potential for complex, conflict-ridden, application-orientated questions, which is often the case for real-world topics such as landscapes. Research through Design is a consolidated and recognised, yet still a very “young” method and LANDLABS offers a rare opportunity to develop this method further in a doctoral network programme

Aesthetics

Working with aesthetics and the sensory experience of the environment is central to landscape architecture and the related design disciplines. Therefore, LANDLABS consciously addresses the concept of beauty although it can be considered controversial in a research context. The LANDLABS consortium considers ideas of beauty and aesthetic appreciation of the environment to be linked to sustainability, e.g. through eco-revelatory design or issues of care and caring. LANDLABS offers its DCs a unique opportunity to explore new ideas of beauty and to develop criteria for beautiful urban landscapes in the Anthropocene.

Background

The Anthropocene and LANDLABS

The notion of the Anthropocene as a new geologic epoch, following the Holocene, has shaken up established Western concepts of nature and landscape (1). If every cubic centimetre on the planet has been influenced by humanity – this is the core notion of the Anthropocene –, the established dualism in Western cultures of nature versus culture has become obsolete (2). In the Anthropocene, there is no nature out there which is unaffected by humans. This notion is connected with human-induced crises such as the climate catastrophe or the mass extinction of species. Many disciplines from science, humanities or arts are currently reflecting upon the consequences of the Anthropocene notion. One surprising result in this debate is the idea that – despite acknowledging the fundamental impact of humans on the planet – the Anthropocene calls for a de-centering of humans, summarized as “post-humanism” (3). This means that – if the classical Western dualism between humans and nature has become obsolete -, new non-dualistic perspectives on the entanglements between humans, animals, plants, water, soil, air and even technical things need to be developed. One key concept in this contemporary debate is the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans (4). It implies a deep understanding of the connectedness between humans and non-humans, thus replacing the traditional Western idea of nature as something outside of humans which can be exploited and littered. This could lead to new sustainable practices which offer possibilities to mitigate or adapt to the effects of greenhouse gases or biodiversity loss.

1 Paul Crutzen and Eugene Stoermer (2000) “The ‘Anthropocene’,” Global Change Newsletter 41 (2000): 17–18

2 Martin Prominski (2014) “Andscapes: Concepts of Nature and Culture for Landscape Architecture in the ‘Anthropocene’,” Journal of Landscape Architecture 9, no. 1 (2014)

3 Rosi Braidotti 2013. The Posthuman. Cambridge: Polity.

4 e.g. Donna Haraway (2015) “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin.” Environmental Humanities 6 (2015): 159–165; Donna Houston et al. 2018. Make kin, not cities! Multispecies entanglements and ‘becoming-world’ in planning theory. Planning Theory and Practice. 17 (2): pp. 190-212; Bruno Latour (2014) “Agency at the Time of the Anthropocene.” New Literary History 45: 1–18;

Interconnectedness and LANDLABS

This assumption of the fundamental relevance of interconnectedness in the Anthropocene is the starting point for LANDLABS. From the perspective of landscape architecture, the discipline which deals with designing landscapes on all scales, this Doctoral Network addresses the questions how interconnectedness can be better understood on an interdisciplinary basis and how such a new understanding can become productive for designing sustainable and beautiful urban landscapes in the future. This understanding is new and innovative for landscape architecture because the mainstream of the discipline still operates from a traditional, dualistic concept which sees landscapes as green, natural counterparts to humanly shaped environments (5). For example, landscape designs which aim for higher biodiversity usually evaluate human impacts as negative and try to disconnect humans from animals and plants as much as possible (“fortress conservation” (6)). A new understanding, following an Anthropocene notion of interconnectedness, would instead critically assess the negative AND positive impacts of humans on other species and would explore the design potentials of interconnectedness among all species, including humans, for higher biodiversity and sustainability. Furthermore, mainstream ideas of beauty in urban landscapes often rely on the same traditional dualistic concept, which can lead to the unfortunate aesthetic exclusion of large parts of the urban landscapes (7). Consequently, care and protection of these urban landscapes are overlooked. This project will develop new criteria for beauty in urban landscapes of the Anthropocene.

5 Martin Prominski (2004) Landschaft entwerfen. Berlin: Reimer, pp. 53-56

6 Jon Hoekstra (2013) ‘Conservation 3.0: Protecting Life on a Changing Planet’, Live Science, 26 July 2013

7 Elizabeth K. Meyer (2008) Sustaining beauty. The performance of appearance. Journal of Landscape Architecture, 3:1, 6-23; Ellen Braae (2015) Beauty redeemed. Recycling post-industrial landscapes. Basel: Birkhauser

It has become clear that the Anthropocene calls for a new understanding of urban landscapes and new methods for designing them, and LANDLABS goal is to train doctoral candidates for these tasks by (1) developing new interdisciplinary theory components and (2) developing transferable design strategies for designing sustainable and beautiful urban landscapes in the Anthropocene through transdisciplinary research-through-design in six concrete landscape laboratories all over Europe. These six sites are a major component in LANDLABS and the doctoral candidates study them intensively. They get regular advice from the associated partners who have a direct planning responsibility for these sites and all doctoral candidates have a five-months secondment with the associated partners.