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Lisa Diedrich
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This issue of SPOOL elaborates a designerly perspective on urban forestry. Evidence has increased rapidly in the recent years to confirm the agency of trees and urban forests to cure a number of ills besetting urban societies. An expanding range of disciplines, in varying and novel combinations, are turning to an urban version of forestry to re-configure green (and grey) infrastructures, re-write neighbourhoods, re-purpose derelict territories and re-vitalize disparate peripheries. As such, in the face of the growing number of challenges facing cities globally, we see that urban trees and forests are becoming increasingly central to spatial planning and design practise. And yet, with all this work done on the environmental, ecological, technical and recently also urbanism-related aspects of urban forestry (cf. Journal of Landscape Architecture 1/2023), its site-specific, spatial, aesthetical, and cultural dimensions have received less attention in research. For us as SPOOL editors, this is an invitation to focus on trees and forests from the vantage point of landscape architecture and the related thread of SPOOL, called ‘landscape metropolis’. This thematic thread addresses the dynamic, composite, and layered urban landscape with all its biotic and abiotic elements from a design perspective, with the intent to transcend the conventional city-countryside dichotomy, and to understand landscape as a permanent underlying subtext of the urban condition, with repercussions into the remotest corners of the globe. From a landscape metropolis perspective, cities are understood as complex territorial mosaics where the conventional categories of urban and non-urban give way to a mix of material environments in various stages of ‘naturalness’, or to put it another way: natures in various stages of becoming ‘cultured’. Building on the potentials of an alternative reading of the urban territory then, in this issue we feature a number of select authors who elaborate on this condition, expanding on a designerly frame of knowing and doing in urban forestry. Publication formats also help: besides regular papers, visual essays are featured as a lesser-known yet highly appropriate category of exploration for design research.
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This issue of SPOOL elaborates a designerly perspective on urban forestry. Evidence has increased rapidly in the recent years to confirm the agency of trees and urban forests to cure a number of ills besetting urban societies. An expanding range of disciplines, in varying and novel combinations, are turning to an urban version of forestry to re-configure green (and grey) infrastructures, re-write neighbourhoods, re-purpose derelict territories and re-vitalize disparate peripheries. As such, in the face of the growing number of challenges facing cities globally, we see that urban trees and forests are becoming increasingly central to spatial planning and design practise. And yet, with all this work done on the environmental, ecological, technical and recently also urbanism-related aspects of urban forestry (cf. Journal of Landscape Architecture 1/2023), its site-specific, spatial, aesthetical, and cultural dimensions have received less attention in research. For us as SPOOL editors, this is an invitation to focus on trees and forests from the vantage point of landscape architecture and the related thread of SPOOL, called ‘landscape metropolis’. This thematic thread addresses the dynamic, composite, and layered urban landscape with all its biotic and abiotic elements from a design perspective, with the intent to transcend the conventional city-countryside dichotomy, and to understand landscape as a permanent underlying subtext of the urban condition, with repercussions into the remotest corners of the globe. From a landscape metropolis perspective, cities are understood as complex territorial mosaics where the conventional categories of urban and non-urban give way to a mix of material environments in various stages of ‘naturalness’, or to put it another way: natures in various stages of becoming ‘cultured’. Building on the potentials of an alternative reading of the urban territory then, in this issue we feature a number of select authors who elaborate on this condition, expanding on a designerly frame of knowing and doing in urban forestry. Publication formats also help: besides regular papers, visual essays are featured as a lesser-known yet highly appropriate category of exploration for design research.
Critical Urban Water Landscapes
A North-South Research-By-Design University Network Fostering the Co-Transfer of Knowledge for Urban Areas Characterised by Changing Water Regimes
In the rapidly developing urban regions around the globe, the opportunity to link local urban development with actions targeted to prevent ecological catastrophe has become an imperative. Cities situated in geographical locations characterized by changing water regimes, such as flood exposed urban sites in deltas, on the coast, or along rivers, are particularly critical. Suggesting prevention or adaptation measures in these sites requires a process of interaction between diverse governmental bodies, civil society, and private actors – which is not easy in times of economic and political turbulence.
Hence our commitment aims to activate stakeholder involvement and to facilitate a multidirectional knowledge transfer, recognizing the various levels of interactions necessary to advance both knowledge and action on site, within an ever-decreasing local government budget, and an ever increasing complexity of issues to be addressed by ever more tailor-made strategies – this prompts the quest for new knowledge transfer methodologies, responsive to both the local sites/ locally active site actors, and the global knowledge community/ globally active researchers.
The question is then if sustainable socio-territorial transformation can be supported by a co-transfer of knowledge, catering to the different demands? Such a transfer concept relies on the co-creation of urban transformation knowledge while also involving the co-creators in the act of continuously translating their knowledge to each other and to different socio-political contexts and geographical locations.
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In the rapidly developing urban regions around the globe, the opportunity to link local urban development with actions targeted to prevent ecological catastrophe has become an imperative. Cities situated in geographical locations characterized by changing water regimes, such as flood exposed urban sites in deltas, on the coast, or along rivers, are particularly critical. Suggesting prevention or adaptation measures in these sites requires a process of interaction between diverse governmental bodies, civil society, and private actors – which is not easy in times of economic and political turbulence.
Hence our commitment aims to activate stakeholder involvement and to facilitate a multidirectional knowledge transfer, recognizing the various levels of interactions necessary to advance both knowledge and action on site, within an ever-decreasing local government budget, and an ever increasing complexity of issues to be addressed by ever more tailor-made strategies – this prompts the quest for new knowledge transfer methodologies, responsive to both the local sites/ locally active site actors, and the global knowledge community/ globally active researchers.
The question is then if sustainable socio-territorial transformation can be supported by a co-transfer of knowledge, catering to the different demands? Such a transfer concept relies on the co-creation of urban transformation knowledge while also involving the co-creators in the act of continuously translating their knowledge to each other and to different socio-political contexts and geographical locations.
Exploring Critical Urbanities
A Knowledge Co-Transfer Approach for Fragmented Cities in Water Landscapes
The urban conditions of many metropolitan regions in the Global South are marked by growing informal settlements, growing inequalities, and socio-spatial fragmentation. They face alterations of their natural-spatial context imposed by climate change and new hydrological patterns. Knowledge is needed to direct their transformation toward more sustainable futures. Academia plays an important role in this knowledge production process that bridges disciplines and geographies. It ensures links to professional actors, public authorities, and civil society in their respective localities. This chapter introduces the adaptation of a more collaborative, trans-disciplinary, and multi-directional working method called “Beyond Best Practice” that raises research questions around ever-evolving, multi-actor collaborations from a design thinking perspective. These research experiences allowed us to promote an open-ended, co-transfer thematic, and methodological knowledge process by developing and testing ideas in real-world laboratory situations. Its results can be redirected to the Global North, where patterns of informality increasingly characterize hotspots of critical urbanity and, in turn, would benefit from knowledge sourced in the Global South.
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The urban conditions of many metropolitan regions in the Global South are marked by growing informal settlements, growing inequalities, and socio-spatial fragmentation. They face alterations of their natural-spatial context imposed by climate change and new hydrological patterns. Knowledge is needed to direct their transformation toward more sustainable futures. Academia plays an important role in this knowledge production process that bridges disciplines and geographies. It ensures links to professional actors, public authorities, and civil society in their respective localities. This chapter introduces the adaptation of a more collaborative, trans-disciplinary, and multi-directional working method called “Beyond Best Practice” that raises research questions around ever-evolving, multi-actor collaborations from a design thinking perspective. These research experiences allowed us to promote an open-ended, co-transfer thematic, and methodological knowledge process by developing and testing ideas in real-world laboratory situations. Its results can be redirected to the Global North, where patterns of informality increasingly characterize hotspots of critical urbanity and, in turn, would benefit from knowledge sourced in the Global South.