S13. Planning with an “undisciplined landscape”
Organizers: Mattias Qviström, Andrew Butler
Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences, Uppsala, Sweden
Session description
This session aims to forward an interdisciplinary discussion on the capacity of landscape planning to address the unprecedented, wicked, and “undisciplined” socio-environmental challenges we face today. Inspired by the diversity of landscape planning approaches throughout Europe, through this session we will explore the flexible nature and the potentials and pitfalls of landscape planning as a means for tackling such undisciplined issues.
One general theme that calls for attention is how and to what extent landscape can act as a catalyst for innovative thinking and behaviour that transcends disciplinary and administrative boundaries, going against the grain of the silo mentality, which characterises modernity. Is landscape a “boundary object” through which diverse actors can collaborate without a common ground? Or does the potential capacity for rethinking planning derive from its pre-modern history? Does the integration come forth through everyday practices? Or is the claim to be integrative a smokescreen covering a colonial concept that “naturalises” a given colonial order? We welcome a variety of turns on this topic, as long as landscape as a planning concept is set in focus.
A second theme concerns the planning practice. While integrative models have a long history within academic discussions on landscape planning, they usually have to face a siloed administration and planning practice. Comprehensive approaches are not easily integrated into the compartmentalized administration and law of modern societies, and as a consequence, landscape has frequently been marginalised as a decorative or luxury aspect within planning. In this session, we are as keen to learn from detailed accounts of failures as of success-stories.
Ironically, landscape research tends to be almost as siloed as the conventional planning we critique. In this session, we hope to draw together academics from landscape science, political ecology, landscape theory and planning theory to gain richer insights into the conceptions of and practice in landscape planning.
We would like to address landscape planning in its many guises in order to develop a deep yet nuanced critique of what landscape planning is, what it has been and what its future could entail. Hence, we invite participants from diverse disciplines to contribute to this interdisciplinary session.
Topics may include but are not restricted to:
– Landscape history
– planning history
– conceptual studies of landscape planning
– ethnographic studies of planning
– landscape planning practice from diverse contexts.
