Conjectural 'Landscape Cities'

Abstract

Landscape Architecture has a speculative role in imagining diverse, innovative, and environmentally responsive futures. As a research discipline, landscape architecture is prone to critique by a scientific community that either disqualifies speculations or does not know how to assess associative imaginations that guide many a design process. Such a critique is constructive because it urges to clarify what is both unique and systematic about designerly speculations and imaginative associations. In this article we will discuss the results and layout of a design studio with explicit speculative and imaginary methods. The outcomes are discussed and these reveal that creative discoveries are not bound by elaborative final design results. Some of the intermediate results, particularly those with an explicit habit-breaking effect on the imagination of the designers involved, have proven to be at least equally valuable. This discussion calls for a reconsideration of the presentation and sharing of the results of research through designing; moving from the familiar focus on high-end (i.e. ‘glossy’) finalizations, toward perhaps abstract but revealing intermediate products of enquiry.