Coastal Futures Issuu Publication

AA Landscape Urbanism Coastal Futures is the design thesis of Valeria Garcia and Yunya Tang:


Abstract: The project examines contemporary flooding scenarios and the possibility to use coastal erosion and deposition through tidal creek land formations as productive spatial territories. By instrumentalising these landforms, we intend to radically change the economic conditions and future potential of coastal communities in South England.


140926_Coastal Futures_Yunya Tang and Valeria Garcia-2


 


explore the fullproject HERE



Coastal Futures Issuu Publication

AA Landscape Urbanism becomes MArch (16 months) & MSc (12 months)

The AA Landscape Urbanism programme is evolving!

From 2015-2016 it will become an MArch (16 months) & MSc (12 months) programme.


AALU


2015/16 Academic Year – MSc* (12 months) / MArch* (16 months)


Landscape Urbanism explores how the techniques, dynamics and discourses of landscape-based disciplines can be re-appropriated so as to ask fundamental questions about the contemporary city. It explores the ways in which the intersection of physical and social processes and dynamics of territorial formation generates new forms of urban typologies, governance and knowledge. The course combines material explorations of landscape evolution (facilitated by digital simulations) with the development of critical perspectives and studio work.


For the 2015/16 academic year Landscape Urbanism will offer a 12-month MSc* and a 16-month MArch* aimed at a wide range of professionals engaged with territorial disciplines ranging from architects and landscape architects to engineers, urban planners and geographers to explore a cross-disciplinary research by design approach to these practices.


The MSc course develops students? ability to abstract complex territorial formations in order to generate a set of territorial guidelines (Manual) that can be potentially deployed in comparable territories (Atlas). The 16-month MArch produces site-specific design thesis projects that work as an operative test bed to inform the Atlas and Manual of territorial formations. Students? work is based on a combination of team-based studio, workshop and seminar courses. At the end of September (MSc) and January (MArch) the projects are presented to a panel of distinguish visiting critics in order to finalise the design thesis in the form of a book.


* Please note that for the 2015/16 academic year the degree of this programme will change to a 12-month MSc and a 16-month MArch in Landscape Urbanism, subject to approval and validation by The Open University.


If you wish to apply please follow the link below which will guide you through the process.


http://www.aaschool.ac.uk/STUDY/GRADUATE/?name=landscapeurbanism— at Architectural Association School of Architecture.



AA Landscape Urbanism becomes MArch (16 months) & MSc (12 months)

The Riparian Land-Shaping Machine Issuu Publication

The Riparian Land-Shaping Machine is the design thesis of Josine Lambert and Eugenio Darin.

Abstract: Mountain landscapes have been subjected to a relentless conflict between conservative-picturesque attitudes and economic exploitation approaches. The project proposes a strategy that understands the river as a sediment management machine that choreographs newly manufactured riparian landscapes in order to put forward a decision-making mechanism to face the conflicting perspectives with existing social formations.


Explore the full project HERE


josine_booklet_term2_Page_42



The Riparian Land-Shaping Machine Issuu Publication

AA Landscape Urbanism Lecture Series on Geomorphology

All welcome to the AA Landscape Urbanism Lecture Series on Geomorphology 2014 starting next Tuesday 7th October at 14:00, Soft Room, Architectural Association:


These lectures from experts in geomorphology will give an overview of existing methods and practices that describe the active processes shaping the landscape. These are intended to support the development and knowledge of the course in order to fabricate an understanding how these processes interact with human driven environments.


Geomorphology and Landscapes

Andrew Goudie (Emeritus Professor of Geography at University of Oxford)

07 October 2014 14:00 PM

Soft Room

Architectural Association


What were the landscapes of the past like? What will landscapes look like in the future? Landscapes are all around us, but most of us know very little about how they have developed, what goes on in them, and how they react to changing climates, tectonics and human activities. Examining what landscape is, and how we use a range of ideas and techniques to study it, Andrew Goudie a demonstrate how geomorphologists have built on classic methods pioneered by some great 19th century scientists to examine our Earth.


The AA Landscape Urbanism is committed to develop a thorough research by design that explores landscape practices and territorial formations into alternatives for concrete realities and contexts and


Zaragoza



AA Landscape Urbanism Lecture Series on Geomorphology

AALU BOOK, Critical Territories: From Academia to Praxis

AALU BOOK, Critical Territories: From Academia to Praxis
Launch Wednesday 18th June London


Please join us for  the launch of AA Landscape Urbanism Book, ‘Critical Territories: From Academia to Praxis’ edited by Eva Castro, Alfredo Ramirez, Eduardo Rico and Douglas Spencer in the AA Bookshop at 6.30pm on Wednesday 18th June 2014.

Critical Territories records the current state of our practice, theory and teaching of Landscape Urbanism and its development in recent years. It describes the phases and processes through which we have arrived at a distinctive model of Landscape Urbanism and the movement, from academia to praxis, through which this has been achieved. To this end, Critical Territories opens with a series of contributions to the ongoing development of our theoretical perspectives before turning to elaborate, from within the academic framework of the Architectural Association, the work of our students and the agendas they have engaged with in Mexico, Sri Lanka, Dubai and China and the intensive workshops with which they have been involved in Europe. It then turns, finally, to the projects produced and realised by the Landscape Urbanist practice Groundlab, whose work both puts into practice our model of Landscape Urbanism and offers an opportunity to reflect upon its further development.



AALU BOOK, Critical Territories: From Academia to Praxis

AA LANDSCAPE URBANISM BOOK LAUNCH

The launch of the AA Landscape Urbanism ” Critical Territories: From Academia to Praxis” at the AA Bookshop will be announced shortly:



Critical Territories records the current state of our practice, theory and teaching of Landscape Urbanism and its development in recent years. It describes the phases and processes through which we have arrived at a distinctive model of Landscape Urbanism and the movement, from academia to praxis, through which this has been achieved. To this end, Critical Territories opens with a series of contributions to the ongoing development of our theoretical perspectives before turning to elaborate, from within the academic framework of the Architectural Association, the work of our students and the agendas they have engaged with in Mexico, Sri Lanka, Dubai and China and the intensive workshops with which they have been involved in Europe. It then turns, finally, to the projects produced and realised by the Landscape Urbanist practice Groundlab, whose work both puts into practice our model of Landscape Urbanism and offers an opportunity to reflect upon its further development


AALU Field-trip accross Europe

AA Landscape Urbanism set out to explore  Territorial Landscapes accross Europe for its fieldtrip of 2014: The Curonian Spit sand-dunes, Riparian Landscape in the Alps, Po Delta, the Elbe River Floodplains, and Southern UK flood-risk coast as part of the ongoing Atlas of radical cartographies accross Europe. Photos by Anastasia Kotenko and Niki Kakali, Valeria Garcia, Ariadna Weisshaar, Simranjit Kaur, Anji Han,Yi-Chun Kuo, Josine Lambert, Eugenio Darin, Fernando Blanco, Shruthi Padmanabhan  and   Yunya Tang:


DSC_0823 IMG_0409 IMG_2312.


IMG_20140406_195535 IMG_20140407_213842



AALU Field-trip accross Europe

Land Formations Tectonic Grounds

I have an essay titled "Land formations Tectonic Grounds" out soon in a forthcoming book edited by Nadia Amoroso called "Representing Landscapes: Digital"

My contribution is intended to expand on the the role Landscape urbanism on concepts such as territory, land and ground and how the digital is shaping its development in academia especially at our programme at the Architectural Association, here is an extract of the text:


"Land-Formations Tectonic-Grounds

The Landscape Urbanism MA at the Architectural Association is engaged with the idea of landscapes as the milieu for the development of a practice at a territorial scale. This practice is concerned on the one hand with the geomorphological formations of landforms (Tectonic Grounds) and on the other with the actual cultural, political and economic forces that drive and choreograph the social formations of these territories (Land Formations).
The understanding of these concepts as the primeval material to work with, draws knowledge and understanding from fields such as geomorphology and/or sociology, and claims the seeds from where Landscape Urbanism recognises the engines behind territorial production. Territory thus is understood as an assemblage of manufactured landscapes that requires a multidisciplinary knowledge from relevant fields, ever since it is shaped by a myriad of both physical and social processes and dynamics.

Ultimately these territorial assemblages of land formations and tectonic grounds are cultural productions derived from a constant and relentless human and natural activity full of conflicts, struggles, alterations, and shifts, within or outside legal or institutional frameworks. As such they become the result of specific historical processes with political consequences, which lies at the core of Landscape Urbanism territorial practice..."

Alfredo Ramirez , April 2014

Riparian Landscapes

A territorial project for riparian landscapes in European mountainous regions
By Josine Lambert and Eugenio Darin

The relation of human with nature often involves conflicts, particularly in wealthy countries where the carbon footprint continues to grow. The denser the population, the larger the impact on the natural landscape. The Netherlands for example, with a population density of almost 500 people/km2, has been turned into a completely artificial landscape.



Most of Europe’s original natural landscape has to some extent been affected by human interventions. Only the last decades – when significant damage has already been done – a consciousness about the importance of natural landscapes and their value for ecology grows. Fossil fuels get to an end some day and people start to exploit renewable natural sources.


Networks for “green energy” are being developed in different landscapes in Europe; o.a. solar energy in Southern countries and wind energy in the North. Renewable energy might sound as a “nature-friendly” alternative to the polluting fossil energy sources, but it has its drawbacks too. Renewable energy networks can have a negative impact on local ecologies and social territories. These networks can completely alter the landscape with many consequences. Mountain rivers are the source of Europe’s water and hydro-energy networks. Over time human interventions, in order to control and benefit from them, dramatically transformed these landscapes. One of the most significant interventions is the construction of hydropower dams, which contributes to a sustainable energy network, but at the same time physically, economically and socially affects the local territory. Which interventions can be justified, considering the impact they have on the riparian landscapes? Could a new transformation take place in order to integrate the various conflicting territories within one new landscape?
Despite the disparity in national governmental policies, this issue is common to many European countries, as hydropower facilities have been constructed in all mountainous regions divided by national borders.
The focus will lie on the Alps, as it contains the most densely developed hydropower network and comprises eight different countries Dams seriously influence the behaviour of streams and consequently cause the transformation of the riparian landscapes: they hold back sediments, which causes erosion downstream and the braiding of the river to disappear while provoking problems in its deposition in the reservoir. They also reduce the frequency of floods and their intensity in the valley, which is essential for riparian landscapes. 



These territories are gaining an increasingly significant role within the implementation of the new European Green Infrastructure. (European Commission, Green Infrastructure – Enhancing Europe’s Natural Capital, 2013) The importance of riparian landscapes as infrastructural and productive areas asks for a careful approach of the water and sediment management, especially considering the effects of climate change; altering precipitation patterns and melting of glaciers influence the amount and the seasonal flow of water both in the short and long term. Reactivation of the riparian landscape is needed, not only to strengthen the ecological values of a green infrastructure, but also to generate possibilities and opportunities for surrounding territories within this green infrastructure.


Riparian Landscapes

European Sandways

A Territorial Project of European Shifting Grounds
By Anastasia Kotenko and Niki Kakali

Our Atlas represents the possibility of sand movement across Europe. Driven by the wind velocity and direction it shows how the landform could make a path, being forced by landscape geometry either stopped by current land uses. Sand dunes consist not only a fragile environment but also complex ecosystems in transition. Sand dunes stretch the most significant amount of the European coastline.





 They develop wherever there is a suitable supply of sediment moved onshore by tide and they form diverse types of land formations. Their nature is movement, and any human management of dunes, like discontinuation of their flow goes against this nature. Most of the sand dunes environments in Europe are threatened by human activities. Urbanization together with ‘scientific’ ideas of human predominance and total control of natural habitats directly affected these environments starting from 19th century. For instance, recreational pressures have caused the destruction of dunes concerning the giant tourist facilities in the Mediterranean. 



In the process, they have demolished many of the natural landscapes that attracted the visitor in the first place. Along with that, causes of high erosion of managed areas may lie in the management itself, as natural processes are hardly predictable and human decisions are not always following the landform evolution. In all European countries, attention is given to landscape preservation; however, policies and practices in the past have mainly been based on specific ecological and visual landscape qualities but not spatial and political elements of the territory. The conflict of men|dune relation may be in the nature of two – men, applying techniques to stop the dune, and dune which needs to shift and flow to continue it’s lifecycle. On the one hand nature conservations and re-habitation is of vital importance, but on the other hand the restoration of these dynamic drift sand ecosystems can produce land-use conflicts. The movement of sand can generate migration of the ownerships.


European Sandways

End of term Review 28th March Architectural Association

AALU End of Term Review


28th March 2014


32 Bedfore Square, 2nd Floor Back


Architectural Association


Print


With Judith Reiser, Independent Journalist, Urbanist and member of ISOCARP


Gabriela Garcia de Cortzar, AA PHD candidate


Constanza Madricardo, AA Landscape Urbanism,


AALU continues to shape an European Atlas of Radical Cartographies. Work in progress will be presented by each of the teams working on different landforms around Europe and informed by  its social formations. All welcomed.



End of term Review 28th March Architectural Association

Critical Cartographies Lecture by Teresa Stoppani 20th March 2014

Critical Cartographies


Teresa Stoppani , 20th March 2014, Soft Room, 6 PM


Architectural Association



[M]apmaking conventions are based not only on a sensible view of the world but on themselves, on their own historical sense of what counts as a legitimate view of the world. As the geographer J. Wreford Watson writes, “The geography of the land is in the last resort the geography of the mind.”

Catherine Ingraham, Architecture and the Burdens of Linearity, 1998.


Simryn Gill_Four Atlases of the World and One of Stars_2009


The use of the grid in mapmaking offers a rational instrument that is based on conventions in order to fix and to communicate information. At the same time the cartographic grid produces an intentional opacity that can reveal the “project” of mapmaking, otherwise concealed in its apparently objective and impartial presentation. From the impossible bird’s eye views of cities presented as city portraits, to the measured space of the map, the conventions and the “lies” of cartographic representation reveal that the map is in fact a project, that is, the production of a never-neutral critical space. Always partial, mapmaking establishes a relation of difference and of excess with the territory that it re-presents, thus becoming a generative system that is able to produce and incorporate those interpretations, intentionality and transformations that characterize the process of the project. Examples, stories and images drawn from architecture and the visual arts accompany this exploration of critical cartographies.




Critical Cartographies Lecture by Teresa Stoppani 20th March 2014

AA Landscape Urbanism New Website

We are launching our new AA Landscape Urbanism website. It contains the new agenda “A Pan-European Atlas of Radical Cartographies” including the programme research developed over the last years as well as work by current students:


http://landscapeurbanism.aaschool.ac.uk/


 


j+e_sandbars_energy_A0_1


It also works as an AALU online resource and centralised all the social networks the programme is constantly updating. Have a look and please follow us on: Facebook,Twitter, Issuu, Blogger

For the latest news, reviews, events, students thesis and articles and publications by staff and students.



AA Landscape Urbanism New Website

India's Infrastructural Metropolitanism 2012-2013

PROTOTYPICAL URBANITIES: India’s Infrastructural Metropolitanism


 


India’s urban population explosion in the last few years has propelled the emergence of a conflicted/chaotic rapid urbanisation in the subcontinent as well as the implementation of major civil works intending to cope with a growth which needs to be founded both on the creativity of its entrepreneurs, but also on the grounds of its spatial infrastructures.


Landscape Urbanism will engage both critically and opportunistically with the newly planned Delhi-Mumbai Industrial Corridor starting from the North region close to New Delhi. We shall explore the generation of ‘proto-strategies’ for new large-scale agglomerations as a means of critically addressing the phenomena of mass-produced cities. The students will be asked to identify the conditions for their own projects in such a way that they can thread spatial, social and environmental discourses linked simultaneously to the large scale government led idea and the localised response emerging from the found territorial conditions. The whole group of student projects shall conform an alternative mode of spatial development, where the character of transnational infrastructures is used to ground and root a socio-technical alternative for a brand new urban nature.


Check these projects: THE RURAL NEXUS, TOURIST URBANSCAPE



India's Infrastructural Metropolitanism 2012-2013

Beijing Metropolitan Area 2011-2012

PROTOTYPICAL URBANITIES: Towards an Interstitial Ecology


 


China’s economic boom, combined with migration from the countryside to the cities, is boosting a high-speed urbanism that produces new cities in the shortest imaginable time and is completely changing the faces of the older towns. This directional urbanisation, propelled from within the coastal zones into the countryside, has brought even the smallest villages face to face with the phenomena of globalisation and its foreign capital and generic architecture.


 


Building upon a body of research established over the past four years of work in this field, LU has maintained its focus on China’s ambitions to build four hundred new cities by the year 2020 — with 12 million people expected to move from rural to urban locations — as the basis for its brief.  Far from resisting this development, we have engaged opportunistically with the generation of ‘proto-strategies’ for new large-scale agglomerations as a means of critically addressing the phenomena of mass-produced urban sprawl. Our test-bed for this year has been the urban agglomerations around Beijing metropolitan area.


 


Check these projects:



Beijing Metropolitan Area 2011-2012

Yan Tse River Delta 2009-2010

AGENDA Building Building upon a body of research established over the previous two years of work in this field, AALU maintained its focus on China’s ambitions to build four hundred new cities by the year 2020 — with 12 million people expected to move from rural to urban locations — as the basis for its brief.  Far from resisting this development, AALU engaged opportunistically with the generation of ‘proto-strategies’ for new large-scale agglomerations as a means of critically addressing the phenomena of mass-produced urban sprawl. Our test-bed was the urban agglomerations of the Yangtze River Delta — including Shanghai, Nanjing, Hangzhou, Suzhou, and Ningbo — with students focusing on the emergence of three benchmark issues in this area:


• Metabolic Rurbanism: the emergence of ‘desakota’ (urban villages) in which urban and rural processes of land use are combined, and the potentials it presents for the origin of industrial ecologies.

• Tactical Resistance: where generic, top-down masterplanning collides with informally developed urban cores, the potential to locate the fault lines of this dynamic as a space from which a tactical urbanism that is qualitatively informed and territorially specific, might be produced.

• Material Identities: the inadequacy of attempts to provide new urban settlements with an instant ‘identity’, through the application of either vernacular or western styles of building, in the context of ‘post-traditional’ urbanization.


Check these Projects: Dredging Identity, Pro Multiplicity



Yan Tse River Delta 2009-2010

Pearl River Deltal II 2008-2009

Building on previous year’s body of research, LU took again China’s ambition to build 400 new cities by 2020 as the basis for its brief. According to this plan, 20 new cities are to be built each year to contain the huge numbers of people – around 12 million annually – who are leaving the countryside for urban areas. Far from resisting this development, we opportunistically generated ‘proto-strategies’ for new large-scale agglomerations as a means of critically addressing the phenomenon of mass-produced urban sprawl. Our test bed was the Pearl River Delta, where students focused on the emergence of four benchmark conditions identified by our previous research: the underlying dysfunction and creative potential of industrial ecologies in the rapidly urbanising rural hinterland; the rapid deindustrialisation and disintegration of second-cycle city cores; the emerging resistance of traditional and informally grown urban cores to top-down planning procedures; and the terms by which a new sprawling state engages with existing agricultural land. We operated critically, seeking to produce alternative templates of urbanisation based on strategies that stemmed from embryonic processes seeking the integration of cultural tradition, regional ecological systems and economic globalisation.



Pearl River Deltal II 2008-2009

Pearl River Delta 2007-2008

AGENDA China’s economic boom, combined with migration from the rural areas, is fuelling a high-speed urbanism that is producing new cities in the shortest imaginable time and completely changing the face and character of the country’s older towns.

This directional urbanisation, propelled from within the coastal zones into the countryside, has brought even the smallest villages face to face with the phenomena of globalisation, foreign capital and generic architecture. At the same time, the pace and scale of development, particularly in the mega-cities of Beijing, Shanghai, Shenyang and Wuhan, has highlighted the interrelated problems of mass migration, pollution and the loss of arable land. The lack of an overarching urbanisation policy means that there are no mechanisms of negotiation between economic interests, cultural traditions, developmental pressures and existing ecologies. At a larger scale, China risks seeing its urban identity swamped by a generic pattern of indiscriminate urban sprawl.

400 NEW CITIES In 2000 the former civil affairs minister, Doje Cering, formulated a plan to build 400 new cities by the year 2020, to accommodate the migration from the countryside into urban conglomerations. According to this plan, 20 new cities need to be established each year. LU took this formulation as the framework for the year’s research, testing the applicability of our methodology to the limit, then adjusting and reformulating it. The resulting work generated ‘protostrategies’ for new large-scale agglomerations as a way of critically addressing the phenomenon of mass-produced sprawl urbanisation. The test-bed for the year’s project was Pingshan and the brief was the documentation recently provided by Chinese planning authorities, requesting its change of status from county to a new city. We operated critically, seeking to produce alternative templates of urbanisation based on strategies that stemmed from embryonic processes seeking the integration of cultural tradition, regional ecological systems and economic globalisation.


Check these Projects: RURBAN GROWTH, INTERCROPPING CITY



Pearl River Delta 2007-2008

Middle East Agenda 2006-2007

AGENDA The tight relationship between the environment, its natural resources, and the modern history of the Middle East is unavoidable; this simple, albeit powerful equation has, over the past fifty years or so, fuelled a series of major developments with implications ranging from the global to the regional and the local scales. In this case it seems appropriate to extend the characterisation of an ‘extreme environment’ – often assigned to the desert – to embrace and describe also local economic, social and political conditions, resulting in a concoction whose degree of excess and intensity generates an acute state of fragile equilibrium. Despite the environmental implications, human dependence on non-renewable energy resources continues to increase. In the UAE, for example, the oil consumption (per capita) is 1.21 barrels per day per 10 people (ranked 6th of 2070), a growing dependency that has largely annihilated the further development of alternative industries. At the same time, a high population growth, together with the rising participation of women in the labour force, is translating into a rapidly growing national labour force, which, given the limited room for further employment in the government sector, is generating an unemployment trend that has started to increase in most GCC countries. The governments, not oblivious to this fact, are engaging with a sustained pick-up in non-oil growth, exemplary of which is Qatar, committed to invest over $15 billion in R&D.


Check these Projects: RESPONSIVE COASTLINE, LIVING MINE



Middle East Agenda 2006-2007

Sri Lanka Agenda 2005-2006

At 00.59 GMT on 26 December 2004, a magnitude 9.3 earthquake ripped apart the seafloor off the cost of northwest Sumatra. Over 100 years of accumulated stress was released in the second biggest earthquake in recorded history.

It unleashed a devastating tsunami that travelled thousands of kilometres across the Indian Ocean, taking the lives of more than 200,000 people in countries as far apart as Indonesia, The Maldives, Sri Lanka and Somalia. This year we focused on the development of the studio’s work in Sri Lanka. Rebuilding and reoccupation of these areas required careful determination of potential hazard zones to avoid future loss of life and property. At the same time the new sociopolitical configurations generated as an immediate consequence of the local death toll called for a reinterpretation of the traditional pattern of spatial inhabitation, both at the macro and micro scale. The new ground configuration – partly artificially generated by new policies which are responding to the pressure and perceived need to develop tourism – enforced the regional dislocation of underprivileged communities, in the process causing serious concern for their economic future and drastically changing the local human urbanism. We sought to seize the opportunity which presented itself: that of engaging foreign capital while negotiating the needs of the local population to improve their conditions in what ought to become a sustainable regenerative process.



Sri Lanka Agenda 2005-2006

Mexico City Agenda 2004-2005

Mexico city offered Landscape Urbanism the chance to explore ways in which the work of the course could serve to operate in the complex conditions emerging in one of the largest urban agglomerations on earth. The unplanned growth of some of the suburbs has left large tracts of the city devoid of basic services and quality urban space. But at the same time it has laid the basis for new forms of inhabitation, which deal with other processes and infrastructural problems, such as soil subsidence and depletion of water resources. The works of Landscape Urbanism in this year focused on the exploration of voids within a semi-continuous urban fabric, looking for potentials of development and exploring the ways in which local conditions and infrastructural constraints could work as a starting point for new urban organisations. The students studied processes of infilling within the street network, expansions, centralities and connectivity strategies in an exploration of the ways to work within the city fabric. The course combined the visit to Mexico City with the realisation of an on-site workshop, lectures by scholars from the National University and a series of technical lectures from Arup infrastructure. An initial bibliography was provided and further investigation was developed during the course through contact with local authorities, non-governmental agencies, developers, industrial sector practitioners, academic institutions, and members of the local population.



Mexico City Agenda 2004-2005

On the Record - Lecture by Gabriela Garcia

Gabriela García de Cortázar


On the Record


Series: Landscape Urbanism Lecture Series
Date: 6/3/2014
Time: 17:30:00
Venue: New Soft Room



Catalogues, lists, inventories, indexes; atlases, models, maps, plans, diagrams, charts, graphs are all ways of recording what is out there, what cannot be seen with our insufficient vision, and what cannot be kept with our restricted memory. Maps are the preferred tool for recording things in space, and just as any other register, they act through selection, editions and naming – basically, description.

This kind of linguistic capture necessarily encounters problems, and the talk will focus on three: issues of scope (what to capture, parts or wholes; what to describe, surfaces or structures), time (between eternal instant and fickle sequence) and projection (from points of view to the short distance between description and prescription).

Gabriela García de Cortázar is a current PhD candidate at the AA.

This talk is part of the Landscape Urbanism Lecture Series


On the Record - Lecture by Gabriela Garcia