Landscape and Agency Critical Essays

Landscape and Agency explores how landscape, as an idea, a visual medium and a design practice, is organized, appropriated and framed in the transformation of places, from the local to the global. It highlights how the development of the idea of agency in landscape theory and practice can fundamentally change our engagement with future landscapes. Including a wide range of international contributions, each illustrated chapter investigates the many ways in which the relationship between the ideas and practices of landscape, and social and subjective formations and material processes, are invested with agency. They critically examine the role of landscape in processes of contemporary urban development, environmental debate and political agendas and explore how these relations can be analysed and rethought through a dialogue between theory and practice.

Foreword:

Murray Fraser

Introduction:

Ed Wall and Tim Waterman

Chapter 1: Landscapes of Post-History

Ross Adams

Chapter 2: Reciprocal Landscapes: Material Portraits in New York City and Elsewhere

Jane Hutton

Chapter 3: Agency, Advocacy, Vocabulary: Three Landscape Projects

Jane Wolff

Chapter 4: The Law is at Fault? Landscape Rights and ‘Agency’ in International Law

Amy Strecker

Chapter 5: How to Live in a Jungle: the (Bio)politics of the Park as Urban Model

Maria Giudici

Chapter 6: Planetary Aesthetics

Peg Rawes

Chapter 7: The Closed Landscapes of Sverdlovsk-44 and Krasnoyarsk-26

Katya Larina

Chapter 8: Rhythm, Agency, Scoring and the City

Paul Cureton

Chapter 9: Publicity and Propriety: Democracy and Manners in Britain’s Public Landscape

Tim Waterman

Chapter 10: The Power of the Incremental: Agronomic Investment in Lisbon’s Chelas Valley

Jill Desimini

Chapter 11: Post-Landscape or the Potential of Other Relations with the Land

Ed Wall

Chapter 12: Activating Equitable Landscapes and Critical Design Assemblages in Bangkok

Camillo Boano and William Hunter

Chapter 13: Agency and Artifice in the Environment of Neoliberalism

Doug Spencer

Afterword: Landscape's Agency

Don Mitchell

Ed Wall is the Academic Leader Landscape at the University of Greenwich, London, Visiting Professor at Politecnico di Milano (DiAP) and City of Vienna Visiting Professor 2017 (SKuOR) for urban culture, public space and the future – urban equity and the global agenda. Ed’s research focuses on the design and theory of landscapes, public spaces and cities. He is the founding editor of the design research journal Testing-Ground (2015). In 2007 Ed established Project Studio. Award-winning projects have been published and exhibited widely, including at the Architecture Foundation, Royal Academy, Biennale of Landscape Urbanism, London Festival of Architecture and the Van Alen Institute.

Tim Waterman is senior lecturer and landscape architecture theory coordinator at the University of Greenwich, and a tutor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He writes for a wide range of professional and academic publications on the subjects of power, democracy, taste, foodways and everyday life.