Landscape Urbanism explores the emergence of territory as a field of design praxis. Territory, understood as a political technology, presents an opportunity to redefine this praxis. In understanding practice through territory, the agency of the designer can extend beyond disciplinary confinements - architecture, planning, urban design, landscape architecture and engineering - to reveal the physical and social dynamics at stake in the making of the landscape. Geographic knowledge and practices, such as cartography and geomorphology, are re-appropriated to respond to fundamental questions of contemporary territorial conditions.
In October 2000 the European Landscape Convention in Florence became the first pan-European project with the ambition to define the entire European territory from a cultural perspective. It promised a collective sense of territorial specificity supported by comprehensive studies of charters and tailor-made recommendations. However, the decidedly encyclopaedic spirit of the Florence Convention was trumped by a stubborn reality in which the practices of property developers and perhaps more crucially, a set of labyrinthine policies, were never translated into meaningful systems of space production. Within this rift - between utilitarian and cultural practices of European policies - Landscape Urbanism sought to explore how productive and natural formations can generate the basis for a pan-European project of territories that are neither generic nor iconic, conventional nor touristic. On one hand the course was concerned with the geomorphological formations of relevant landforms and on the other with the actual cultural, political and economic forces that drive their social formations. The primary outcome was the production of a set of cartographies which formed an Atlas of radical cartographies documenting the future of European environments. These cartographies were seen as projective machines with a capacity to unveil the glitches between conflicting systems a stake - tectonic landscapes, political governance, land administration - and thus put forward projects and design intentions at territorial scales as alternatives to their future.
Tom Smith
Douglas Spencer
Gustavo Romanillos
Giancarlo Torpiano
Vincenzo Reale
Dimitra Bra
Howe Chan
Ting-Fu Chang
Lida Evangelia Driva
Xiabin Hu
Da Kuang
Keyin Li
Paulina Lizlova González
Tong Kit Lo
Elena Longhin
Liam Robert Mouritz
Silvia Guiomar Ribot Gil
Difeng Sun
Andrew Goudie
Andrew Fowler
Clon Ulrick
Tom Coulthart
Marti Peran
Teresa Stoppani
Alfredo Ramirez is an architect and director of Groundlab where he has won and developed several competitions, workshops, exhibitions and projects. He is director of the AA Visiting School in Mexico City and has taught workshops and lectured internationally on the topic of landscape urbanism and the work of Groundlab.
Eduardo Rico studied civil engineering in Spain and graduated from the AA's Landscape Urbanism programme. Currently he works within the Arup engineering team and is part of Relational Urbanism. He has taught at Harvard GSD and the Berlage Institute.
Clara Oloriz Sanjuan is a practising architect who received her PhD from the ETSA Universidad de Navarra and the AA. She has worked for Foreign Office Architects, Cerouno, Plasma Studio and Groundlab. She teaches at the University of Navarra and is co-director of the AA Visiting School in Bilbao. She co-directs an AA research cluster Urban Prototypes.
Douglas Spencer has studied architectural history and critical theory. His recent writing include contributions to the collections The Missed Encounter of Architecture with Philosophy (2014), Architecture Against the Post-Political (2014) and New Geographies 6: Grounding Metabolism (2014). He is writing a book titled The Architecture of Neoliberalism, to be published in 2016.
Tom Smith is a landscape architect and urban designer. He was instrumental in the design of the London 2012 Olympic and Legacy Masterplan and is developing the practice of SpaceHub in London.
Giancarlo Torpiano holds an MArch in Emergent Design and Technologies from the AA. His main interests are algorithmic design focused on emergent behaviours, natural structures, structural engineering and computational techniques. He has led workshops on digital architecture in Malta and at the AA.
Gustavo Romanillos is an architect and researcher interested in the spatial analysis of urban and territorial dynamics. He complet- ed his degree in architecture at the ETSAM, and an MA in Geographic Information Technologies at the UCM. His research and teaching activities are being developed in different Spanish universities, Nicaragua and the UK.
Vincenzo Reale graduated in 2010 from the University of Bologna (MA Building Engineering and Architecture) and has been a Euro-chartered engineer since 2011. He holds an MSc in Emergent Technologies and Design from the AA.
