Reactivating Public Life through Water. Lessons from the Forgotten Historical Canals in Guangzhou

In the heart of the Pearl River Delta, the city of Guangzhou is fast-growing and prone to flooding. In history, people constructed canals based on natural waterways to deal with water problems. The canal system not only served as an important infrastructure but was also as the backbone of urban life. The city was built around its canals; they...

Visual Water Biography: Translating Stories in Space and Time

The supervision of water systems in many countries is centralised and taken over from local water management collectives of ‘water workers’ by governmental or other water management institutions. Communities are literally and figuratively cut-off from ‘their’ water systems, due to the increase of urbanisation and industrialisation. On account of...

Gardens of Interstitial Wildness: Cultivating Indeterminacy in the Metropolitan Landscape

This paper looks into ‘gardens of wildness’ that have been established in metropolitan interstitial spaces. These unused, unfunctional urban spaces could be considered as spatial-temporary interstices of the metropolitan landscape. These ‘interstitial spaces’ possess the potential to host diverse social-ecological minorities that tend to be...

Designing with Hybridity, Scalar Paradoxes, and Complex Dynamics: How Two Domestic Gardens Challenge the Contemporary Landscape Imagination

Belonging to the small-scale and private sphere, gardens are usually omitted from urban and regional landscape plans. Yet, we argue that the assemblage of everyday gardens – the garden complex – is an inherent component of the landscape metropolis that holds the potential to become a powerful landscape agency. This potential is enclosed, among...