Flowscapes: Designing infrastructure as landscape

2017

Flowscapes explores infrastructure as a type of landscape and landscape as a type of infrastructure. The hybridization of the two concepts seeks to redefine infrastructure beyond its strictly utilitarian definition while allowing spatial design to gain operative force in territorial transformation processes. The publication provides perspectives on the subject from design-related disciplines such as architecture, urban design, urban planning, landscape architecture and civil engineering. The book builds upon the multidisciplinary colloquium on landscape infrastructures, that is part of the Flowscapes graduation design studio of Landscape Architecture at the TU Delft.  The authors explore concepts, methods and techniques for design-related research on landscape infrastructures. Their main objective is to engage environmental and societal issues by means of integrative and design-oriented approaches. Through focusing on interdisciplinary design-related research of landscape infra...

Manzar the scientific journal of landscape, 2016

| In the context of rapid global changes in the urban environments and sustainability and resilience approaches, many aspects of cities including infrastructure, i.e. urban highways, is experiencing a paradigm shift where programming for multiple-use and the integration of both human and natural needs is a primary consideration. In the ecological urbanism approach to infrastructure planning and design, urban infrastructure, including transportation routes, no longer belongs in the exclusive field of engineers, transportation planners and managers and role of landscape architecture and landscape ecology is incremental in this process. The potential of infrastructure systems for performing the additional function of shaping architectural, ecological, and urban form has been largely unrealized. Urban transportation corridors as an important part of built urban ecosystems can be enhanced by integration with ecological features in terms of their contribution to both human experiences of the urban environments and green infrastructure in the city. The significant roles of landscape architecture, landscape ecology and landscape urbanism in the urban transportation corridors planning and design is the core of this paper to find out how urban infrastructural projects can be built more sustainably and become multifunctional and bring ecological services to the city. This research uses a case study for investigation; EastLink, a large scale infrastructural transportation project in Melbourne, Australia. This project is the largest road ever constructed in state of Victoria and Australia's largest urban road project. It incorporates an extensive shared use path network for cyclists and pedestrians and has established constructed wetlands, water retention basins and bioretention strips along its route. The environmental experience of drivers, cyclist, pedestrians and the people living in the nearby environments has been considered during the planning and design and landscape architects and designers were actively involved in the process. The research has established accessibility, connectivity, multiple use, multi scale functions, and maintainability as main criteria for integrating human and natural realms in contemporary infrastructure design for the cities and reshaping future urban landscapes.

2015

In a critical review this chapter shows how the Yokohama Ferry Terminal by Foreign Office Architects crossed the three distinct realms of ‘infrastructure’, ‘architecture’ and ‘landscape’. This key individual project dissolved disciplinary borders between the three disciplines and achieved new methodical grounds for design. It is a precedent in a general shift in the development of the design disciplines of the built environment. The single project shows how deep conceptual shifts affect the disciplinary assumptions that initially limited this task for architects–and how versatile the strategies of infrastructure and landscape are in architecture. While the Yokohama Ferry Terminal is at first sight simply a passenger terminal, it is also an infrastructural transport-related building, used most of the time as a garden-like public space. At first elaborating on definitions of the three terms ‘infrastructure’, ‘landscape’, and ‘architecture’, the article will question how plausible and ...

Zarch Journal of Interdisciplinary studies in Architecture and Urbanism, 2016

‘Landscape boom’, evident during the last decade in many disciplines, defined the prospects for landscape architecture bringing landscape as a concept and a useful instrument for urban planning. One of the persistent trends in landscape architecture today is landscape infrastructure practice which can be considered both ‘landscape as infrastructure’ and ‘infrastructure as landscape’. Through the lens of this emerging practice and its duplicate meaning the shift in landscape meaning can be traced: from a “pastoral scenery” and ‘natural’ geographic surface, to idea of landscape as an integrated, a continuous whole of man and nature; evolving, constantly ‘under construction’, and productive space, that creates multiple benefits for the good of people and environment. Key words: landscape, infrastructure, productivity, urban planning

My Livable City 21: Landscape & Infrastructure, 2019

From the Mandarin Route to colonial boulevards and canals to Soviet-style networks to contemporary grids for city extensions and industrial zones, there has been a conscious relation of movement, landscape and urbanism. Construction of infrastructure has always been strongly motivated by development expectations. With that comes an alignment of infrastructure with the most innovative and performant technical means available. Simultaneously, there has also been a constant appropriation of infrastructural spaces for a variety of unintended uses. Vietnamese sidewalks are proverbial universes of activities. As the mobility revolution beckons, Vietnam has the opportunity to leapfrog development and largely skip the petrol-age: it can thrive with electric bikes and motorbikes, reinvigoration of its water transport network, various forms of public transportation and the sharing economy. At the same time, as one of the most severely affected countries by climate change, new street profiles can fundamentally redefine nature and culture relationships. As such, the assignment for new infrastructures is always multiple, generating a world of possible uses and meanings, while accommodating new means of transportation. In the coming post-petrol age, this creation of civics by technics necessarily has to incorporate much more sensitive relations with nature.

Roadsides, 2020

collection no. 004 • Architecture and/as Infrastructure Roadsides

Topos 74, pp. 64-71 (K. Shannon & M. Smets), 2011

In order to function, fit and be acceptable, infrastructure needs to enhance the quality of the landscape.Three major design approaches are overwhelmingly evident in a review of exemplary built projects from around the globe.

This paper examines the potential of a holistic approach for urban and regional strategies in order to understand the way this might contribute more effectively to current global challenges. Part of a wider research strategy investigating the extent to which low carbon and spatial quality can be delivered at a regional level, it demonstrates benefits of adopting a range of processes to deliver integrated and sustainable urban development. The case studies examined include the Landscape Observatory (Spain), the Room for the River (the Netherlands) and HS2/HS2LV (UK). The Landscape Observatory has raised public awareness of the value of landscape to the extent to which there is now a public law protecting landscape in Catalonia. An investigation of projects dealing with climate adaptation in the Netherlands demonstrates the potential and significance of introducing low carbon and the quality of space in urban and regional infrastructure projects. An examination of the HS2 high-speed rail project in the UK illustrates how it might be possible to impact on the perception and development of a singular engineering project in order to convey a wider sustainable vision and the impact that this might have on future landscape in towns, cities and rural areas. The significance of development of procurement processes, policies and legislations as part of the administration phase of urban and regional landscape schemes are also considered necessary for future landscape strategies. Initial outcomes indicate that successful delivery requires the development of a landscape vision and the understanding of low carbon and spatial quality concepts through design in order to be better expressed in the infrastructure and create added value to our cities and regions.

This practice-led research critically investigates development patterns in transitional peri-urban landscapes through the lens of landscape design. Concerned with prevailing atomised land use, over-scaled infrastructures and resulting bereft social and non-human ecologies, the research pursues opportunities in the landscape for synergies between uses. Using a critical understanding of networked ecologies, the project aims to create landscapes that are more than the sum of their parts. The research is sited in Taita Gorge, extending between the Silverstream and Pomare rail bridges and Western and Eastern Hutt Roads. This is a fragmented landscape, and an ideal site to investigate such prevailing tendencies amidst flooding risk. The study site is impacted by tectonic compaction resulting in tension between installed infrastructural systems and compressed spatial land uses¬. Here moments of conflict, or disharmonies, can be identified. The research discovers these points within the lan...