Session organizer: Giacomo Dallatorre1,2; Chair: Serge Schmitz1; Rapporteur: Marina Frolova3, Marc Goossens2, Rita Occhiuto2, Gabriele Paolinelli4
(1) University of Liège, Laboratory for the Analysis of Places, Landscapes and European Countryside (Laplec), Belgium
(2) University of Liège, Research Unit for Architecture (URA), Belgium
(3) Universidad de Granada, Spain
(4) University of Florence, Department of Architecture (DIDA), Italy
Session description
Borders of European settlements, villages and towns were, in many cases, influenced by geo-morphological conditions stimulating humans' identifications with living environment and interactions with available resources.
In the broader set of geo-facies’ categories constituent geosystems, especially in Northern Europe, river slopes – and slopes in general – are often under-explored: they have received little attention in literature, apart from geomorphological or hydrological considerations.
As well soil consumption, standards and zoning strategies have oriented territorial development.
In most cases, with little values attributed to river slopes, except, in some cases, for agricultural activities – such as viticulture or fruit production – or, more recently, as nature reserve to be protected or image to be promoted for tourism purposes.
Often observed in oppositional terms, river slopes are seen as a barrier. Yet, they are an essential component of many agglomerations.
Beyond obstacles to urbanisation or administrative borders, river slopes, both in terms of their characteristics, their internal systemic relationships and within the valley as a whole, play and have to play, in future, an essential role.
Beyond green buffer zones, river slopes are the expression of a border dimension ‘in declivity’ and intermediate in landscape continuity that has always conditioned the cultural ways in which the soil is used, modified and rewritten, both by human and by the transformations induced over time by natural agents as wind or water.
Today, river slopes provide opportunities for linking different dimensions in rediscovering ecological network: they are essentials resources in searching a new balance between humans and their environment, as well as ‘places’ of recreation and resourcing for populations, even a place of shelter for the most marginalized ones.
Reversing the gaze from plain to slopes, the session identifies three thematic questions within which it is proposed to move the reflections:
– What roles and significance have reached river slopes within a settlement process designing landscape transformation?
– How to reconcile new values and uses of river slopes overpassing borders?
– Towards what perspective can a river slope idea's construction – or co-construction – move?
We are interested in contributions able to reflect on natural and cultural potential of river slopes heritage, exploring the un-stressed potential of research by landscape design – or description, interpretation and rewriting in landscape’s palimpsests – specifically engaging the following:
– reflecting on phenomena arising from the perception and significance of borders, through collecting and interpreting iconographies and representation of river slopes as symbolic shape of the earth conditioning the ways in which the soil is modified and rewritten over time;
– combining and experimenting site specific description supported by perspective approaches capable of reflecting on and documenting river slope as landscape and cultural conditions of continuity or discontinuity to be rediscovered, through which reconstruct relations between past and future, and thanks to which reveal potentials for innovative design and reinterpretation of the various possible concepts of limits;
– showing case studies and design strategies useful to nourish the process of managing river slopes resources, with particular reference to new interaction between (human and non-human) inhabitants and slopes, as tested hypotheses related to different conditions of habitability.
