LANDLABS – Landscape Laboratories

The Doctoral Network “LANDLABS – Landscape Laboratories: Design strategies for sustainable and beautiful urban landscapes in the Anthropocene” (funded by the European Commission within the Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions) operates across six landscape laboratories throughout Europe (Hannover, Aarhus, Tromsø, Porto, Ljubljana and Wien), exploring new perspectives on the interconnectedness between humans, animals, plants, water, air, soil, and technologies. Through an innovative site-based, research-through-design approach, LANDLABS offers young researchers the opportunity to contribute to the critical and urgent issue of the green transition of cities in alignment with the European Green Deal and the United Nations Goals of Sustainability. The site under investigation have in common that they have developed different kinds of urban wilderness, following heavy human interventions. This includes, e.g. a former marl pit, a decommissioned marshaling yard and a landfill. The Vienna study area is the former marshaling yard Breitenlee in Vienna’s 22nd district.

Two terms are of central meaning for the Doctoral Network: The Anthropocene and Interconnectedness: The notion of the Anthropocene as a new geologic epoch, following the Holocene, has shaken up established Western concepts of nature and landscape. If every cubic centimetre on the planet has been influenced by humanity – this is the core notion of the Anthropocene –, the established dualism in Western cultures of nature versus culture has become obsolete. In the Anthropocene, there is no nature out there which is unaffected by humans. This means that – if the classical Western dualism between humans and nature has become obsolete -, new non-dualistic perspectives on the entanglements between humans, animals, plants, water, soil, air and even technical things need to be developed. One key concept in this contemporary debate is the interconnectedness between humans and non-humans.

This assumption of the fundamental relevance of interconnectedness in the Anthropocene is the starting point for LANDLABS. From the perspective of landscape architecture, the discipline which deals with designing landscapes on all scales, this Doctoral Network addresses the questions how interconnectedness can be better understood on an interdisciplinary basis and how such a new understanding can become productive for designing sustainable and beautiful urban landscapes in the future. LANDLABS combines disciplinary aspects (first, the perspective of the project´s guiding discipline landscape architecture; secondly, the analysis of disciplinary theories on interconnectedness) with interdisciplinary integration (joint reflection of six disciplinary theories on interconnectedness) and site-based work in the secondments with societal actors. This sums up to transdisciplinarity – a scientific mode which is highly demanded, yet rarely achieved in PhD programmes.

LANDLABS works with a research through design approach. This method is unique for design disciplines and combines specific design work for a site with the creation of transferable knowledge. It has a lot of potential for complex, conflict-ridden, application-orientated questions, which is often the case for real-world topics such as landscapes. Research through Design is a consolidated and recognised, yet still a very “young” method and LANDLABS offers a rare opportunity to develop this method further in a doctoral network programme.

Working withaestheticsand the sensory experience of the environment is central to landscape architecture and the related design disciplines. Therefore, LANDLABS consciously addresses the concept of beauty although it can be considered controversial in a research context. The LANDLABS consortium considers ideas of beauty and aesthetic appreciation of the environment to be linked to sustainability, e.g. through eco-revelatory design or issues of care and caring. LANDLABS offers its DCs a unique opportunity to explore new ideas of beauty and to develop criteria for beautiful urban landscapes in the Anthropocene.