As far back as the 10th century the term 'landscape' referred
to the 'collective aspects of the environment', as J.B. Jackson argues in Discovering the Vernacular Landscape (1984).
But rather than the scenographic art it later became, landscape design was initially
concerned with the production and organisation of agriculture, housing and
infrastructure within its surrounding terrain.
Attendance is free but spaces must be reserved in advance. Details will follow and will also be available on: http://landscapeandagency.wordpress.com/
Today, whilst the 'collective' man-made
terrain of the 21st century also encompasses the globalised movements
of finance, media and digital technology, our most urgent questions still
concern how physical landscapes are produced and organised. As Christian
Parenti and others observe, the present environmental and financial crises have
escalated conditions of inequality, pollution, scarcity, and precariousness
throughout the globe. Seeking to explore the relevance of contemporary thinking about landscape
to such issues, this symposium asks the question:
What agency does landscape possess, as a
means of territorial organisation and creative production, to engage critically with the conditions that
define the collective aspects of our environment?
There is a growing body of
literature, to which Parenti's Tropic of
Chaos (2011) is only the most recent addition, concerned with the critical
analysis of territorial transformation and the models through which its
complexity might be understood. Within this literature can be cited the radical
geography of David Harvey's Justice,
Nature and the Geography of Difference and Spaces of Global Capitalism (1997); the urban political ecology of
Nik Heynen et al's In the Nature of Cities
(2006);
the model of 'social nature' elaborated by Bruce Braun and Noel Castree in
their Remaking Reality (1998);
Stephen Graham and Simon Marvin's incisive analysis of the social and political
significance of infrastructural development in Splintering Urbanism (2011); and Mike Davis's unflinching
documentation of the global phenomenon of informal settlement in Planet of Slums (2007).
Yet
instead of attempting to grasp the significance of these radical perspectives,
contemporary landscape design seems largely content to gloss over its practice
with a discourse about environmentalism and sustainability, whilst remaining
within the scenographic approach through which it has served power elites for
the past few centuries. The most celebrated recent landscape productions - Olympic
Park in east London, Manhattan's High Line, or the cosmological gardens of
Charles Jencks, for example - attest to this fact. Rather than seeking to
locate its own critical agency, landscape design continues to serve the idea of
exerting 'dominion' over land.
General information
Although the symposium is being
held at University College London, it has been jointly conceived and organised
by staff from the following institutions:
- Professor Murray Fraser - Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL
- Douglas Spencer - Architectural Association
- Ed Wall - School of Architecture and Landscape, Kingston University
- Tim Waterman - Writtle School of Design
Support
for the symposium is also kindly being provided by the Landscape Institute,
RIBA Research and Innovation Group, and other professional bodies.
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