The Landscape as mediator between Technosphere and Biosphere

Recently I discovered landscape architecture and design as a fertile ground for thinking about the technosphere, especially in the context of the concept of ‘landscape urbanism‘, a movement theorized by Charles Waldheim. This is a fascinating field because different from what most technosphere scholars do, the protagonists in this discipline mostly spend their time with actually designing and implementing projects that create artificial landscapes which, on first sight, just appropriate nature for human purposes. Landscape may become ‘green infrastructure’, such as the ‘sponge cities’ envisaged and created by the eminent Chinese landscape architect Yu Kongjian. Some of the leading designers in this field have also contributed substantial conceptual and theoretical work, which, however, in my perception, is rarely received outside these circles, such as the work by James Corner, extending to the vaguely defined field of ‘urbanism’ as the systematic thinking about human life in cities. In the idea of landscape urbanism this focus on the built environment combines with ecology. Landscape becomes a term that integrates built environment and so-called ‘natural’ environments: Yet, the latter is itself created by the human designer. But the idea of landscape overcomes such a simple dualism. This is because only at first glance, integrating built and natural environments would amount to ecological engineering, that is, employing ecological knowledge to design a ‘built nature’ as another form of technology. This is what often characterizes the use of ecology in urban planning. As James Corner argued in his landmark paper ‘Ecology and landscape as agents of creativity’ more than twenty years ago, this would overlook the key role of cultural creativity in enacting urban landscapes (the paper has been reprinted in the much appraised collection ‘Projective Ecologies’).

The term ‘landscape’ has a complex history and has often been associated with the human view (literally, as ‘gaze’) on nature, appreciating its aesthetic qualities. In a wider view, landscapes are arrangements of affordances for human action in the first place. In countries such as Germany, there is no genuine wilderness anymore, the entire space is assemblages of landscapes which have evolved historically and are often designed according to human goals and visions. Landscapes may include towns, agricultural fields, forests or nature reserves, and even the latter are assigned by human decisions and might be tended and cared for. Noticing this, I suggest that ‘landscape’ is the mediator between biosphere and technosphere. This can be grounded systematically in von Uexküll’s notion of ‘Umwelt’. We can approach the landscape as the distinctly human form of ‘Umwelt’: On the one hand, the landscape is an assemblage of affordances for human action: Some parts invite for agricultural activity, others for recreation, and others provide space for dwelling, and so on. But we cannot simply reduce this to an ‘ecological’ perspective in terms of functions fulfilling human needs: The landscape is also an aesthetic and cultural phenomenon, imbued with history and meaning beyond function. Yet, the concept of ‘affordance’ can cover both when it relates to a notion that is also a key idea in landscape urbanism, such as in the work of Rem Kohlhaas, the notion of ‘activity’, or ‘events’, ‘processes’ and so on: There are activities that respond to functional affordances, but also those triggered by cultural meanings.

This perspective allows to move to a more foundational level even, that is, conceptualizing the landscape as an evolutionary system, where both the so-called natural part and the built part evolve, or better co-evolve in the flow of actions. This is one of the key ideas in landscape urbanism, recognizing that the evolutionary nature of ecology can also become the model for evolving urban built environments: Then, the duality of natural versus built environments breaks down, and we can adopt both views simultaneously: In the urban landscape, nature is built, and the built is nature.

Considering this, the next step is straightforward: Thinking in terms of more-than-human landscapes. On first sight, this is already the case when we include ecological functions in designing urban landscapes. But this is still seeing the landscape in human eyes, only adding the scientific lens of ecology. This does not extend the dimension of the aesthetic to non-humans (as we have argued in a recent COEVOLVERS paper). What does it mean to approach landscapes as more-than human?

The first step is certainly to recognize the more-than-human sensory qualities of landscapes, which is not just to heed attention to what humans don’t feel but to potential trade-offs between human and non-human aesthetics, such as human opinions about what is beautiful about an urban park. However, the next step is more significant: Recognizing the multi-dimensionality of affordances of any kind of human-designed landscape, and actively responding to unforeseen responses of non-humans, which typically often are perceived as ‘disturbances’ by the human designers. For example, built environments often offer many opportunities for plants to ‘rewilding’ the artificial materials, such as grasses and other plants growing in pavement cracks. Indeed, in the past humans spent tons of herbicides to keep pavements ‘clean’. In the landscape urbanism view, such spontaneously emerging multispecies micro-habitats would be promoted and possibly tended, with human aesthetics appreciating new forms of urban design. And there is a function: Recent research has shown that so-called ‘weeds’ in the cracks drastically reduce the temperature of the pavement, which also decreases temperature above the ground. Indeed, the ‘heat island’ effect in cities is substantially generated by the impervious surface.

In sum, in the formation of landscape the duality of technosphere and biosphere dissolves into a new co-evolutionary synthesis. The landscape is neither built nor nature. In the Anthropocene the landscape has become a key geological feature of the Earth surface. The Earth as ‘hybrid planet’ embodies function and meaning, and hence becomes an aesthetic object, or better ‘hyperobject’ in Timothy Morton’s sense.