Research
Microlandscapes - landscape culture on the move

Landscape culture

The research project investigates formation and reception of contemporary European landscape under conditions of
globalization and new media. Focussing the question to what extend different categories of movement influence our environmental perception. In our regard landscape culture is formed by a network of microlandscapes. Depending on categories of human movement these microlandscapes are perceived in a multitude of ways. Different scientific approaches to landscape are as well brought together within our conception.

In the perspective of cultural studies landscape is seen as a construction formed by society and culture. Theorists like John Brinckerhoff Jackson developed from the 1950s on the transdiciplinary approach of Cultural Landscape Studies in the United States. Our project investigates their possible application to the European situation as it regards content as well as methods. Irit Rogoffs' contemporary description of “relational geography” also stands in this tradition and is closely related to the “new cultural geography” recently developing within the environmental sciences.

The poststructural category of difference defines the interrelation between urban and landscape or high and low culture not as a pair of opposites but interlocking and overlapping. In contemporary perspectives (e.g. by Bhaba, Bronfen and Terkessidis) culture is defined as a heterogeneous hybrid conception. As Bhaba takes the definition of an “in between” to emphasize the individual perception and psychic dimension of cultural migrants, Sieverts as an urbanist also takes this term in regard, without a direct reception of cultural theory. In Germany he introduced in the 1990s the concept “Zwischenstadt” to describe urban sprawl phenomena. Recent developments to define a new type of “Landscape Urbanism” as an autonomous academic discipline in Great Britain and Switzerland are showing the redirection to landscape by urban planners very clear.

Space and Mobility

Theories of Space and Place as well as questions of mobility and movement have long been discussed in very different fields of study. In the late sixties land artist Robert Smithson focussed in his text “Monuments of Passaic” on the significance of so called non-sites, residual places in the suburban regions of New Jersey. This was also a main topic of Marc Augés reflections on places and non-places in the urban contexts of the nineties. Obviously these places are requiring a new type of user as well as of reception. Flusser and Deleuze are proposing therefore the “nomad” as metaphor of man and living at the end of the twentieth century. Nowadays the construction of “nomadism” seems to be replaced by cultural migration. But this construction is not at all clear and it has to be questioned what kind of ideologies of mobility and space are conducted with it.

Our project critically reflects the variety of landscape concepts that emerged within the last years and where sharpened by the western discourse on globalization. Such a critique of landscape and mobility has its roots in the thinking of e.g. Schievelbusch, Virilio, Asendorf and more contemporary Boeri and Multiplicity. Our aim is to correlate the analysis of use and reception of certain spaces, either in parades of mass culture, high speed trains or migrant paths, with an anthropological approach to landscape design. Essential part of the research are field studies to constitute an encyclopaedia of connected microlandscapes. Specific strategies are required to analyse such places not only in terms of imagining but of moveability and changeability.

The research should lead to a transdisciplinary theory on “dynamic microlandscapes” and might be a missing link for cultural studies and for landscape architecture in their approach to design theory and reception of space.