Landscape Urbanism Architectural Association

Overview

The Landscape Urbanism programme from Architectural Association explores the role that design and designers – from architects and landscape architects to urban designers and planners – can play when confronted with the processes, landscapes and territories of planetary urbanisation (metropolitan areas, rural environments, infrastructural and productive landscapes, etc) and the environmental, racial, socio-economic and health-related crises they have triggered. 

Planetary urbanisation is structured by an economic model based on policies, legal frameworks, political decisions, social and cultural contexts and engineering solutions; design inputs are either left out altogether or consigned to the fringes. 

LU explores design beyond normative aesthetic and performative proposals, as a mechanism with which to orchestrate, choreograph and negotiate political and economic frameworks to avert the contemporary climate crisis. LU is inherently multidisciplinary, integrating critical thinking at its core with practices including policy-making, political ecology, cartographic representation, scripted simulations and GIS mapping. 

Alongside this, various forms of media representation are explored, all of which are widely available but relatively untapped within the design field.

The programme will therefore develop proposals for a Global GND through the exploration of different policies, such as:

• Deconstruction and retrofitting existing buildings – specifically housing – across cities and towns to save energy, reduce material consumption and promote the repair, maintenance and reuse of material, structures and infrastructures within the building industry.

• Exploration of urban life beyond the use of private cars, and subsequent research into mobility alternatives based on people, mass public transport and the creation of healthy and fair environments for citizens.

• Transformation of urbanisation processes through the implementation of a four-day working week, and impact this might have on the landscape of cities.

• Rewilding of vast areas in UK and Europe, and the benefits that this could have upon the wellbeing of humans and non-humans in urban and rural environments.

• Alternative models of land and asset ownership such Public Common Partnerships (PCP), and how these might offer radical alternatives to mainstream private developments.