Emerging Landscapes

by ytheory

Rahul Paul and I co-presented a paper at the recently held Emerging Landscapes conference at the University of Westminster, 25-27 June 2010.

abstract:

Approaching the processual landscape: relational agri-urbanism in the Pearl River Delta

The processes which constitute the landscape cannot be captured and fixed as a representation constituting an ‘identity’ for landscape. Rather than a terra firma whose identity is amenable to capture and representation, landscape is a terra fluxus. Hence the Landscape Urbanism programme of the Architectural Association has eschewed the position that landscape is possessed of a fixed genius loci from which it might resist globalisation, technocracy and planning. Rather it operates tactically, amidst rather than against the processes of globalisation so as to locate the means through which these might be locally and inventively inflected toward outcomes which are socially equitable and environmentally viable. Key to this approach, the map, the index and the diagram are employed as tools with which to engage tactically with the processual operations of the landscape within, but not for the larger flows and forces within which it is implicated. Exemplifying the use of these methods and the tactical approach of the programme here will be Rahul Paul’s recent project, ‘Relational Agri-Urban Culture’, which, located within the China’s Pearl River Delta region, uses these as the basis from which to generate a new condition for a performative working terrain driven by the cycles of the regional food system.