Vera Vicenzotti

City as Wilderness: The Wilderness Metaphor from Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl to Contemporary Urban Designers

Abstract In this text we take a closer look at the development of the wilderness metaphor of the Zwischenstadt, that is, fragmented urban landscapes in Germany. We trace the metaphors meanings back to its origins in the conservative cultural criticism of Wilhelm Heinrich Riehl of the mid-nineteenth century and analyse the different meanings of ‘wilderness’ in todays urban and landscape planners’ positions. Our aim is to demonstrate that the meanings of the concept of wilderness, as well as those of city and cultural landscape, differ depending on the context in which they appear. We point out that different values can be attached to each individual meaning. These evaluations depend on cultural and political patterns and on ones own world view. We apply the insights thus gained to identify three different types of design strategy for the Zwischenstadt used by urban and landscape designers.

Forty years of Landscape Research

Abstract Papers of four decades published in Landscape Research are reviewed in order to chronicle the journal’s development and to assess the academic performance of the journal relative to its own aims. Landscape Research intends to reach a wide audience, to have a broad thematic coverage and to publish different types of papers with various methodological orientations. Cutting across these first aims are the interdisciplinary ambition of the journal, and its overall focus on landscape. These aims are evaluated based upon categorisation of article content, authorship and methodology, using data derived through interpretative inquiry and quantitative analyses. The results tell the story of how Landscape Research has developed from a newsletter of the Landscape Research Group, mainly aimed at practitioners, into an interdisciplinary, international journal with academic researchers as its primary community of interest. The final section discusses the current profile of the journal and identifies issues for its future direction and development.

Aesthetic creation theory and landscape architecture

Abstract In recent decades the landscape architectural discourse has tended to eschew ideas of aesthetics while focusing instead on notions of functional and sustainable design. We offer the view that Aesthetic Creation Theory, whose principal exponent is the philosopher Nick Zangwill, has the potential to redress this imbalance by interpreting landscape architecture as ‘art’. Zangwills account of ‘art’ differs, however, from many other definitions found in philosophical aesthetics: it holds that works of art have aesthetic functions that are essential to them, but also allows that they have other, non-aesthetic functions, for example practical or ecological ones. It thus removes the strict distinction between fine art and the useful arts. After introducing Zangwills theory, we discuss some rival theories of art and then explore the virtues of Aesthetic Creation Theory for the theory, practice, and pedagogy of landscape architecture.

Landscape research in Landscape Research: reflections on a changing field

This special issue celebrates forty years of Landscape Research, with papers by distinguished scholars commenting on a changing field. There are plenty of reasons to use the anniversary to reflect on the history and future of the field of landscape research. Let us briefly recall three dramatic changes over the past four decades and three challenges for the future, before introducing this special issue in more detail. First of all, the academic discourse on landscape has undergone a tremendous expansion since the early days of the journal. The 1970s were a time when new technologies (such as GIS) started to be used in studies of how to represent and manage landscape change. The idea of landscape science as a base for rational planning was brought to the fore to counter environmental challenges. This not only required new technologies, but also theoretical advances. While Appleton (1975) diagnosed a ‘theoretical vacuum’ in landscape evaluation, the discipline was nevertheless achieving progress at the time. If anything can be said about landscape research as a whole, it is that theoretical advance has been unprecedented over the past forty years. However, landscape research is a multidisciplinary field and therefore its history is not only complex, but at times also contradictory. In 1976, in the midst of rational, high modern planning and large-scale development projects, Edward Relph published Place and Placelessness, as part of a phenomenologically inspired discussion of place and landscape, in accordance with Yi-Fu Tuan’s call for humanistic geography (Relph, 1976). The call was a revolt against the quantitative revolution in geography and planning, which had helped to marginalise landscape studies. Alongside humanistic geography and critical studies, a new strand of landscape research started to take shape in the 1970s and gained momentum in the mid-1980s (Wylie, 2007). Then again, other stories can be told, for instance of the long tradition of landscape and garden history, or of the emerging discipline of landscape ecology in the 1970s. From the outset, Landscape Research attempted to address all of these disciplines and themes. A comment by the journal’s former editor Ian Brotherton in a review of the early volumes holds true today:

Zwischenstadt as a travelling concept: towards a critical discussion of mobile ideas in transnational planning discourses on urban sprawl

ABSTRACT This article contributes to the advancement of the critical analysis of transnational flows of planning ideas with a particular focus on debates around urban sprawl. It emphasizes that travelling concepts tend to lose their critical content en route, and explores how they could be revived. Our argument starts by identifying the drawbacks of comparative studies in planning, and suggests an exploration of Edward Said’s notion of travelling theories to avoid these dangers. Chronicling the import of the German concept of Zwischenstadt – which literally translated means ‘(in)between city’ – into the Swedish planning research discourse on urban sprawl, we examine how travelling concepts tend to become institutionalized during their journey. We then explore ways to revive the critical content of Zwischenstadt by first considering translations of the context of travelling concepts and then deliberations on their literal translation, which emphasizes the fruitfulness of a landscape perspective as a critical lens on urbanization processes.

The Landscape of Landscape Urbanism

This article offers a constructive critique of landscape urbanism by identifying and discussing key conceptions of landscape circulating as part of this discourse. After giving an overview of the discourse and arguing the case for a theoretical critique of landscape urbanism, the article identifies three prominent usages of landscape as a concept. These are landscape as building block, as medium, and as imaginary. The article’s main section discusses the problems that arise when landscape urbanists are unaware of the tensions created by the multiple meanings of landscape, and it challenges the implied notion that landscape is an uncontested, unifying model or medium. An exploration of the implications of a naturalized notion of landscape argues that such a conception promotes reductionist approaches to landscape and is based on an ill-defined conception of ecology, while also supporting the trend towards de-politicization and neglecting the aesthetic dimension of landscape. The article concludes on a constructive note by presenting two strands of research in landscape theory that could serve as a starting point for advancing a theory of landscape urbanism.