Lindholm

Gunilla
Sweden
Dept of Landscape Architecture, SLU, Box 58, SE-230 53 Alnarp,
Gunilla.Lindholm@ltj.slu.se

To Be Found: The Urban Landscape

Conceptions of landscape and the landscape of conceptions
To google a phrase or word is usually a fast way to get an impression of the most common meaning
(-s) of this phrase or word. Urban landscapes though, is not that easily found or captured, although
there are actually some meanings to be found; photographers motifs (skylines or super-realia),
ecologists structures of biodiversity and certainly the landscape architects parks and gardens; but
for some reason, these fragments leave me unsatisfied. Landscapes should not be delimited to
fragments; in my understanding they are inclusive and continuous. Trying Wikipedia there is no entry
urban landscape, but it is mentioned e.g. under the entries urban design, urban ecology and
urban planning. So we are apparently working in and with the urban landscape in different
professional ways, without having either common or specific explanations of the concept. There is
certain vagueness about urban landscape that seems to be inevitable, but which may be
problematic when it comes to communication and agreements on urban landscape and urban
landscape change.
Landscape is one of the few concepts with merely positive connotations. Even when we talk about
waste landscapes, derelict landscapes or even dystopian landscapes they have this aspect of
artistic scenery that take us away from smells, cold, hunger and privation, to a sheer visual and
aesthetic level of contemplation.
Landscape in this sense is a reductive concept, extracting the visual properties and the geometrical
relationships as reality. Landscape is, on the other hand, also one of the most inclusive concepts
we have to point out, label and describe our surroundings. Deriving from intentions to communicate
on the experienced life world, to signify a physical context, more or less defined by borders of
some kind; its cohesive abilities have made it of excellent use as metaphor; e.g. a landscape of
ideas or the business landscape of the 90ies. In the field of urban planning, however, it is more
appropriate to understand the concept of landscape, not as a metaphor, but as a representation, in
linguistic as well as in a visualized meaning. The point in using landscape to represent an entirety is
in a way to elaborate on the gap between the signifier and the signified; to be able to move back and
forth between what is expressed as the landscape at the level of representations and what is
experienced as the landscape at the level of what is represented.1
The notion of landscape functions especially well for to handle a complexity as an entity. The word
landscape is used as a medium, by which it is possible, orally or in writing, to keep together a
manifold of flows and stabilities, organisms and their surroundings, natural and cultural processes,
conceptions, aspects, potentials and expectations as a whole! In this way, one landscape is made

This gap is also what the landscape designer works with.

comparable to another landscape, one alternative with another alternative, one vision of the future
with another vision of the future.
Within the academic landscape discourse, lets call it landscape research; distinctions are made
(roughly put) between landscape as scenery, landscape as territory and landscape as everyday
practice. Simplified, the scenery is the landscape of architects; the territory is the landscape of
planners and the everyday practice is the landscape of anthropologists and sociologists and also
their subjects of studies, the spatial preconditions as well as the spatial productions of urban life.

Fig 3 Landscape as (from left to right) scenery, territory and everyday practice

This paper discusses urban landscape conceptions, out from the notion that these conceptions
influences how we live our urban lives as well as how we as professionals deal with the urban
landscape in planning, designing and managing the urban environment, the human habitat. The
presumption is that such a discussion could clarify communication on urban landscape change. To a
discussion between different interests concerning urban land use, private and public, for business
and for common needs; a further understanding of different urban landscape conceptions can
contribute with contextualization and spatial connections.
Urban planning, landscape conceptions and urban landscape ideals
Landscape planning seems to be a contradiction. The vagueness in how we understand the
landscape is logical, regarding its unpredictable dynamics. We can plan for and design activities,
structures and objects within the landscape, but since the landscape is produced both from nature
and culture, both from intentional additions and arbitrary occasions and developed both for
constructive and destructive reasons; the composition, the landscape, is never just the sum of its
planned and constructed parts, but always more. Discovering contingencies is part of the landscape
experience. The landscape is furthermore always mediated through different lenses of
understanding; thus it may be more accurate to talk about a sociomaterial frame2, imbued and
overlayered by many different meanings3, than trying to reach for an explanation. This is elementary
knowledge (or rather taken for granted, without reflection) of e. g. landscape architects and
geographers; professions often found as urban planners; although rarely applied in planning practice.
Urban planning is a multidimensional activity and urban landscape change embodies complicated,
cooperative chains of events. Yet, every inhabitant and visitor to a large extent experiences the
2

Sociomateriality is coined by Norweigan sociologist Dag sterberg (1998) to signify the material aspect of
urban surroundings, not measured in a value-free way, but closely related to social situation and potentiality.
3
For different interpretations and exemplifications see e. g. Meinig 1979, Jones 1992 or Turan 2009.

urban landscape as an entity, as her / his environment and habitat. In turn, how you conceptualize
your habitat will affect your choices of approach; individual choices that taken together determine
the direction of urban development. In order to achieve a sustainable4 urban development we
therefore need to deepen our knowledge about the constitution of the urban landscape as a whole
and how it is affected by planning procedure as well as by other actors and events.
Especially important is in this respect the shift in orientation implicitly proposed by the landscape
notion towards social interaction and reconfiguration over time. While the landscape earlier has
figured as an aesthetic means to cover or veil social conflict, it is today often employed in order to
expand a limited set of formal urban questions as to include also a broader spectrum of social and
cultural challenges (see e. g. the architecture competition Le Grand Paris). While ecological values
and environmental management are connected to nature protection and technical solutions,
landscape is a composite concept, including per se the three basic sustainability pillars (economy,
ecology and social justice). An even more important argument for using the landscape concept in
planning is the accepted notion of the landscape being characterized by its inhabitants and not out
from professional, scientific or political categories5.
However, the issue is more complicated than to ask a number of inhabitants about their environment
and then compose their stories together and call it the landscape. To replace one categorization
with another would in this case certainly mean a widened and to an extent different conception of
the urban landscape than the earlier, but not necessarily better or more informed.
The purpose of urban planning is to deliberate on different territorial interests, public and private.
The planning rhetoric is arguing from a technical rationality (forming the infrastructure) and an
economical rationality (quantifying the resources). With an ongoing debate on the future of the
urban landscape, these rationalities will then be challenged also by landscape rationality.
Influential historic ideals for the urban landscape, such as Howards Garden City (1890) or Le
Corbusiers Ville Radieuse (1922) are earlier examples of landscape rationality. Yet, even though
they represent discursive bench marks or canonical emblems of comprehensive thinking, they are at
the same time examples of landscape rationalities that presuppose a certain functional ratio or
relationship between the parts and the whole. This also clarifies the fact that these lingering models as ideal and as historical experience constitute complexes of intentions and constraints within a
historical and political field of forces. When Frank Lloyd Wright launches his Broadacre City 1932
exclaiming that this is not a city It is a landscape! he also deliberates landscape from its scenic
duties and turns it into a rhetorical vehicle and a political manifesto. Decentralized in organization,
claims Lloyd-Wright, it is self-sufficient in supply, republican in constitution, and populated by auto mobile citizens. Furthermore, *c+entred on the homestead, the single family house, this new
spatial rationality expresses its vitality in the strongest of ways. Broadacre sprawls, asserts Lloyd
Wright, introducing growth metaphor, which in a planning context still has great impact (Lloyd
Wright, 1932).
Even if we no longer conceive of Lloyd Wrights sprawling landscape rationality as sustainable, but
rather as a threat level, it is at the same time a rationality that incorporates an alterable,
4
5

Even without claiming to know the meaning of sustainable, this sentence is still valid.
See the European Landscape Convention, Council of Europe (2002).

environmentally oriented and infrastructural whole. If on the one hand todays ubiquitous urban
ideal has higher ambitions of sustainability, it has on the other hand largely abandoned the ambition
to encompass extensive, complex and also large scale dynamics. Instead, the prevailing ideal in
contemporary planning could basically be expressed as The Compact City (European Green Paper,
1994), reflecting the attempts to reduce complexity through the construction of a graspable and
delimited object, thus also leaving larger spatio-temporal movements and historical or systemic
fluctuations aside. Concurrently, this lack of large scale concern has given rise to the development of
neo-structuralist models where the urban landscape instead is being reduced to an issue of urban
networks or multi-core regions, and in this sense also strongly connected to infra-structural
management (ref.), instrumentally securing the interaction between economical (building), social
(public transport) and ecological (nature preservation) concerns.
Both of these strategies are insufficient, however, in relation to a more composite approach to
sustainable urban development. Too strong a focus on urban density will inevitably leave important
regional issues, such as the urban-rural relationship and the production-consumption cycle
unattended. Accordingly, large scale infrastructural solutions may secure the general functioning of
society but is most probably an inefficient approach when it comes to approaching the qualitative
aspects of an urban everyday.
Consequently, landscape rationality in urban planning is not a quick fix, but may still as an
imaginary and working concept constitute a relevant platform in dealing with complex
spatiotemporal systems, bringing into consideration not just short term solutions at hand, but also a
broader range of yet unsolved societal issues.
Landscape deficit and landscape trends
There is an increasing tendency to holistic views, integration and synthesis in visions and
planning documents, often taking a point of departure from sustainable urban development and
based on dialogue, collaboration and participation. For the dialogic development work to be
successful it is also in need of professional development, compatible with the dialogic work and with
a base that supports holistic, integrative viewpoints as well as learning processes. Landscape
rationality is a tentative concept for this holistic view, potentially handling both qualitative and
quantitative environmental factors of urban development situations. Having said this it is also
important to state that this has nothing to do with to characterize, categorize of define the essence
of the urban landscape. On the contrary focus should be kept on language and visualizations; how
the urban landscape in visions and planning documents are represented, and how these
representations affect the possibility to manage and communicate complex contexts. Having said this
it is also important to state that the intention with to focus on language and visualizations is not to
find the right answers or the good pictures. On the contrary, focus on representations means to
keep an open mind for still another aspect and also to accept, include and (to some extent) handle
the forces of power and land use interests that will sneak into the discussion.
In the ESPD (European Spatial Development Perspective) document it is stated that Spatial
development issues in the EU can, in future, only be resolved through co-operation between
different governmental and administrative levels. (European Commission, 1999, p 7)). This kind of
agreements are more easily undertaken in politics than in the practices within the social systems,
where rigid instrumentality is one of the answers to a demand to be just to the single citizen and
4

possible to control by the elected politicians. Thus, the very system for societal activities antagonizes
interdisciplinarity and cross-sectorial thinking, which is expressed on the one hand in excellent
sectorial and disciplinary works, but on the other hand as a deficit in collaborative and
comprehensive thinking, including a deficit in concepts such as landscape, generating new kinds of
inclusive, integrating ways of fulfilling the goals for urban planning on different governmental and
administrative levels.
Alongside with this deficit concerning landscape thinking within the societal planning apparatus,
there is however a strong tendency for increasing use of landscape visualizations and landscape
conceptions. Within the professions linked to spatial planning is shown an increasing
interdisciplinary approach (Hillier & Healy 2008) and landscape urbanism as a planning concept has
become a subject of international interest (Waldheim 2004, Lindholm, 2008). More evident,
however, is the landscape trend in fields connected to the representation and interpretation of
urban life (Hellstrm Reimer 2009). Finally, even landscape research and landscape architecture;
academic and professional fields linked to rural connotations of the landscape concept; are going
urban, searching for new forms of landscape understanding, emancipated from the renaissance
landscape painting as well as from territorial administrative categorization (Turan 2009, Munck
Petersen 2010), thereby clarifying that a change in a sustainable direction cannot be delimited to
technical innovations, but must to a great extent also affect our routines and organization, as well as
our very modes of thinking. Globalization, regional growth and increased commuting have in Sweden
forced municipalities to involve the countryside in their comprehensive planning. Having been a
blank space, it is now presented as a recreative and urban-economic resource (County Council of
Skne 2009). Furthermore, the European Landscape Convention could, through a Swedish
ratification, render to landscape issues a stronger general significance in planning procedures,
potentially changing the way landscape is conceived in the planning context6 (Swedish National
Heritage Board 2008, Jones et al 2007).
Landscape change and the change of urban planning
An analysis of contemporary planning research and planning practice thus provides arguments for
paying a much stronger attention to the landscape concept, as a catalyst for co-operation and
relational understanding. At the same time, the increasing need for landscape thinking constitutes a
starting point for a theoretical and historical overview of former tendencies and models. Having
played an important role within early planning theory, the significance of the landscape concepts
decreased during the decades after WWII and has thereafter continued to play a concealed role
(Taylor 1998). Instead a more process- and procedure-directed theory on planning (Faludi, 1973)
grew stronger. From around 1980, the political turnover of social power in Europe resulted in a more
intense collaboration between public and private sectors and activities, which (together with a strive
for democratization) influenced planning in a discursive and dialogic direction, leading up to the
communicative turn in the 1990s (Healy, 1996).
6

The proposal on a Swedish ratification of the European Landscape Convention includes the following suggestion for a
change in the Swedish Plan- and Building Law, Chapter 1 1: This law aims at, regarding freedom of the individual,
support a development of society with good and equal living circumstances and a landscape perceived as a good and long
term sustainable living environment, by the people in todays society and by coming generations.(Swedish National
Heritage Board, 2008)

One point of departure here is to understand these differences as to a certain extent simultaneously
coincidental, parallel and collaborative. The use of the concept landscape rationality (thereby
extending the usual terminology of planning theory) in this respect provides an opportunity to
scrutinize visions and proposals, not just out from functional, aesthetical and environmental aspects,
but also from utopian, procedural and discursive perspectives.
By focusing on language usage and visualizations; I. e. how the urban landscape is represented
linguistically and visually, possibilities are created to try unexplored aspects of collaboration and
generative spatial potentials. Through such a discursive approach the planning procedure and its
intrinsic rationality is actualized also from a perspective of power, whereby the questioning of
professional landscape representations will constitute the methodological base line.
This reasoning concerning the development of landscape rationality in urban planning is linked to the
urban landscape also in terms of technical and economical development. The globalised economy,
together with the rapid technical development within communication technology as well as the
industry of media and entertainment, has created new conditions for the research and planning of
the urban landscape. Characteristics like propinquity, proximity and connectivity are all landscape
criteria which unlike earlier more formal or functional spatial categories, like room, distance and
accessibility (Amin, 2006), are dependent on composite landscape imaginaries.
To elaborate on forms of understanding, together with different perspectives of the urban
landscape; trying to explain the integrative nuances, reinforcements and weakenings, in relation to
how this urban landscape is represented, in planning and policy documents; thinking modes and
methodological reasoning can be used from semiotics and rhetoric as well as from discourse analysis
and theories of agency.
A developed semiotic approach to urban landscape studies will add to the possibilities of a more
complex linking of materiality, representations and experiences (Turan 2009, Sandin 2009). From a
semiotic point of view, as well as in the agency perspective, the notion of landscape rationality, as
a means to connect pieces to a whole, provides a thought figure within which to deal with linking and
relationships, between parts and whole, but also with the weight shifting between virtual and
material, social and individual, natural and cultural, within the human habitat, the urban landscape.
So what?
If the idea of the compact city is to be taken seriously, it means that urban planning shift focus from
outwards out into the (rural) landscape to inwards into within the urban landscape. These
activities start a sequence of changes concerning landscape concepts, from a professional point of
view. One example could be the notion of landscape dynamics, where the old city wall materialized
the need for stability and safety for the human living environment, against the wild forces of nature
operating outside. If, symbolically, urban planning earlier has taken on this role of the city wall, to
provide stability (regularly by means of expanding and continuously incorporating virgin
land/landscape) against something outside, this idea is challenged by the aim of an urban planning
densifying the urban landscape. The questions raising could simplified be connected to the stretched
and vague terrain between on the one end concretized landscape conceptions (hilly, comfortable
meadows and copses among the pictured ideals) and on the other end the more duplicitous
landscape conceptions (using their linking and synthesizing potentials), in the search for new kinds of
(sustainable) urban habitats.

References
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