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:

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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

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.

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/

 

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