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Situated Practice: Gardening as a Response to Ownership and Ground in Girona
Full text linkThe ground is both the surface occupied by urban development and a physical media – soil – in which plants grow. Since housing density is a mechanism by which to maximise a site’s financial yield, construction covers the real ground. Consequently, the soil is provided to residents in containers on terraces or balconies. However, the properties of natural ground and simulated ground are different, affecting gardening activity and the kind of material and spatial outcomes resulting from it, the synthesis of which is called “the viridic” by the author. Gardening has health benefits for people. Correspondingly, because different soil conditions affect gardening, this benefit’s qualities are also inflected by access to and type of soil.
Using Yin’s “theory building” case study model, two gardens by a landscape architect in Girona are discussed: one on a terrace in containers; the other on the natural ground in a public reserve nearby. Comparing and contrasting these gardens allows for the consideration of the relationship between soil and gardening technique. In addition, the process of abstraction of the ground implicit in site development may also be considered, as well as the implications of such a process on the way in which residents cultivate their gardens and the limitations of private gardens in contributing to local microclimatic and environmental qualities. The paper concludes by refining the model of the viridic based on soil and how soil mediates the relationship of the viridic to urban development.
 
Designing with Hybridity, Scalar Paradoxes, and Complex Dynamics: How Two Domestic Gardens Challenge the Contemporary Landscape Imagination
Full text linkBelonging to the small-scale and private sphere, gardens are usually omitted from urban and regional landscape plans. Yet, we argue that the assemblage of everyday gardens – the garden complex – is an inherent component of the landscape metropolis that holds the potential to become a powerful landscape agency. This potential is enclosed, among others, within three particular qualities: hybridity, scalar paradoxes, and complex dynamics. Practicing these qualities as concepts for landscape design and analysis helps to expand the imaginaries of everyday gardens to more purposefully reflect and negotiate the condition of the landscape metropolis. By means of two case studies – two domestic gardens – we demonstrate that designing with hybridity entails versatility, simultaneity, and multiplicity, thereby engendering a richness of meaning and experiences. This pluralism is also inherent in the scalar paradoxes we observed. Cross-scalar interactions evoke design implications that transcend the confines of the private plot, surpassing individual, human gain, and making individual gardens enter into dialogue with each other and with their surroundings. Lastly, by working with an enlarged set of complex dynamics, the two case studies prove that a garden can be a driver of change and innovation, and thereby a valuable source of resilience.
 
Living with Nature: Water Stories of Kampung Naga, Indonesia
Full text linkRapid urbanisation and sprawling growth have become constant hindrances to nature in most developing countries. West Java is the most populated province in Indonesia under rapid urbanisation. In this rural area of the province, however, there is a traditional Sundanese hamlet called Kampung Naga that has succeeded in cohesively cohabiting with nature. This article discusses how the interaction of water, ecology, and anthropo-systems influences the spatial layout of the village, forms its cultural landscape, and shapes people’s social life. In addition to its sustainability, this article also reflects on the challenges of the possible application of this heritage landscape system in wider contexts. Three lessons can be learned from the water heritage system of Kampung Naga: (1) Understanding how the workings of the natural landscape are critical in determining the living space development; (2) The circular water system and its metabolism could only be maintained by integrating it into its cultural, social, and economical values; (3) Community planning and water circularity create a self-sustained living unit in Kampung Naga. Findings from this study can improve our body of knowledge of potential solutions for future spatial development, where the relationship between human and water could be profoundly re-established
Air Curtain Optimization
Full text linkThe term “impinging jet” refers to a high-velocity fluid stream that is ejected from a nozzle, a narrow opening or an orifice, and which impinges on a surface. As applied to the built environment, impinging jets are used in air curtains to separate two environments subjected to different environmental conditions with the purpose of improving thermal comfort, air quality, energy efficiency and fire protection in buildings. The design and application of state-of-the-art air curtains requires detailed knowledge of the relationship between the separation efficiency of air curtains—their main performance criterion—and a wide range of jet and environmental parameters involving air curtain design. In order to address the current knowledge gaps in the field, this project encompasses an investigation into the impact of different jet and environmental parameters on the performance of air curtains while giving special attention to the study of innovative jet excitation techniques by means of optimizing the separation efficiency of air curtains.
This project is being carried out in close collaboration with the air curtain manufacturer ‘Biddle B.V.’.
 
Gardens of Interstitial Wildness: Cultivating Indeterminacy in the Metropolitan Landscape
Full text linkThis paper looks into ‘gardens of wildness’ that have been established in metropolitan interstitial spaces. These unused, unfunctional urban spaces could be considered as spatial-temporary interstices of the metropolitan landscape. These ‘interstitial spaces’ possess the potential to host diverse social-ecological minorities that tend to be excluded by regulated urban spaces. The ecological qualities of interstitial spaces are recognised by French garden designer Gilles Clément, who regards spontaneous ecologies, which emerge in neglected spaces of the city, as cherished reservoirs that diversify and sustain the urban ecology. Specifically, this paper discusses the value of making gardens of interstitial wildness. If the garden is a potential design approach magnifying the quality of the place, what would be the role of interstitial wild gardens? Furthermore, how do these gardens respond to the relationship between interstitial spaces and the metropolitan landscape? In this paper we will analyse Gilles Clément’s garden design of Jardins du Tiers-Paysage (Gardens of The Third Landscape), located on the roof of the repurposed submarine base of Saint-Nazaire (FR). Reading Saint-Nazaire’s urban context and examining the design from ecological and experiential points of view, this paper shows how the gardens re-introduce the submarine base as a place in the metropolitan landscape of Saint-Nazaire. Orchestrating the experience of the site’s spatial characteristics and the emerging wildness, the gardens elicit an appreciation of the autonomy of non-human agencies and simultaneously reflect upon the heterogeneity of the metropolitan landscape.
 
Visual Water Biography: Translating Stories in Space and Time
Full text linkThe supervision of water systems in many countries is centralised and taken over from local water management collectives of ‘water workers’ by governmental or other water management institutions. Communities are literally and figuratively cut-off from ‘their’ water systems, due to the increase of urbanisation and industrialisation. On account of water management, humankind changed from communities of actively engaged water workers into passive users. In so doing, crucial knowledge about how communities created, maintained, and expanded ‘living water systems’, such as rice terraces, low-pasture systems, polders, floating-gardens, brooks-mill, and tidal systems, is rapidly diminishing. Revealing stories (oral accounts) of water workers generate insights and understanding of forgotten aspects of the landscape. They hold information on how to engage with water in a more holistic way, strategies that might help in facing today’s challenges. The world in general, but planners, spatial designers, and water managers working with water, in particular, have so far taken little account of these stories. Without documenting stories that are about the dynamic interaction between people and landscape, valuable knowledge has disappeared and continues to do so. To help to overcome this knowledge gap, to learn from the past, the Visual Water Biography (VWB) is developed. The novel method is based on the Delft layer approach in which the spatial relationship of a design and its topography is studied, and developed by many authors from the faculty of landscape architecture at TU Delft in combination with the landscape biography approach. The Visual Water Biography visualises and maps: 1) knowledge and 2) engagement of water workers by focusing on 3) circular and 4) cyclical processes that are descended in the landscape. The method developed for spatial planners, researchers, and designers explicitly allows for multi-disciplinary engagement with water workers, water professionals, people from other disciplines such as historians and ecologists, and the general public. The added value of the VWB method is shown by the case of the Dutch Sprengen and Brooks system, a water system that is well documented in terms of landscape biography but less understood as a living water system.
 
Land of Chabot: A Highway Landscape as a Monument to a Painter
Full text linkIn the contemporary metropolitan landscape of Rotterdam, the open landscape spaces that once surrounded the city have been reduced to components in a hybrid field. When the polders were still expansive, with an omnipresent horizon, and big skies, they were depicted extensively by the Dutch landscape painter Henk Chabot (1894-1949). Chabot is the Rotterdam painter of an oeuvre that is associated with angular, realistic expressionism of many layers of paint in hard colours, who painted heavily emphasised skies over poor countryside, or monumental portraits of refugees or farmers. For fifteen years, he lived and worked in a studio by the river Rotte. Now, only a relic of the farmland where he lived remains: an interstice between motorways, recreation parks, and suburbs that seemed to be overlooked in the frenzy of urban planning processes. The reason this interstice still exists is that it has been reserved for a future motorway for the last 30 years, and in the not-so-distant future will become the tunnel entrance for the new A16 motorway. As a left-over space, the terrain seems non-descript. However, it does have the implicit characteristics of a ‘landscape theatre’: introducing the processes and the scale of landscape as self-evident elements of the city, and heralding the open polder landscape twenty minutes away. It borrows its physical boundaries from the Rotte river dyke, the heemtuin (botanical garden) adjacent to the Ommoord apartment blocks, the access road to Ommoord, the industrial estate, and residential area in Terbregge. Such a “borrowed boundary” can be seen as a defining trait of the landscape theatre. The open space that is defined by this borrowed boundary and the central point of the tunnel entrance, is a secluded, self-contained place, removed in time and space, insulated against the everyday reality and, aside from the public realm of streets, squares, and parks, from the hustle and bustle of urban life: a place “outside”.
 
Mapping the Maritime Backyards of Póvoa de Varzim
Full text linkIn order to improve their professional activity, fishermen have developed special methods and procedures for organising the space of their maritime territory. This article presents some of these practices, based on the specific case of the fishing community of Póvoa de Varzim, a town on the north coast of Portugal. Over the years, each fishing family has developed mental maps of the “seas”, creating original names to identify certain places and their different characteristics, while simultaneously producing a remarkable intangible heritage. Together with the productive transformations that were characteristic of industrialisation, traditional fishing methods have also gradually changed, incorporating the use of electronic navigation devices and other mechanisms for the detection of marine resources. In this way, the sea has begun to be mapped digitally through a system of “maritime backyards” that divide the space according to the fishing gear used. The aim of this work is to map and compare the maritime space produced by traditional fishing methods and by the contemporary system of “maritime backyards”, giving visibility to practices and territories that are normally absent from the representations of places.
 
the Garden in the Landscape Metropolis
Full text linkIn this issue of SPOOL Landscape Metropolis #6, designerly and discursive work on gardens in the metropolitan landscape is explored. The focus is on the garden as a theatre of landscape in the metropolis, where the city-dweller can stand face to face with natural processes, the longue durée of evolution and natural growth, silence, and open skies, as the counterpart to the excess of the urban programme. This notion of the garden as a theatre, a stage on which landscape and growth are performed, is explored by taking a closer look, spotting those places that merit attention in the vast metropolitan territory. Consequently, this is how we invite our readers to read this issue of SPOOL – by giving attention to the particular, while establishing links between one particularity and another, and to the overarching whole.
 
Participatory Management of Traditional Urban Water Infrastructures in Iran: The Case of Tehran Historic Qanats
Full text linkQanats have played a vital role in underground water extraction since ancient times based on the community-based water management schemes in Iran. Due to recent urban sprawl and development pressures, qanats are progressively abandoned and degraded in the cities and are considered as endangered assets. To be sustainable, in addition to physical maintenance, the ecological and social aspects of qanat management systems, as the main characteristic of Urban Water Infrastructures in Iran, also need to be taken into account. A review of the traditional participatory management systems in Iran, as well as the contemporary community-based interventions (CBI) in the context of qanats, demonstrates the significant role of public participation in this regard. This research aims to provide solutions and recommendations for enhancement of stakeholder engagement in contemporary qanat rehabilitation practices by adapting the traditional communal management techniques and multi-stakeholder approaches to qanat maintenance in Iran. For this purpose, the transformation of the key urban water stakeholders from past to present are studied and mapped based on their roles and influence on decision making process for the management of qanats. The resulting illustration of the stakeholders’ networks and the comparative study of inter-relationships not only reveals today’s institutional gaps and missing links in qanats’ management procedures, but also highlights the former community-based coordination mechanisms that used to support the smooth functioning of this socio-technical infrastructure by promoting constructive interactions among conflicting parties. In order to tackle contemporary governance challenges, this research also provides a set of practical recommendations to adjust those traditional learnings to new conditions by addressing the physical, environmental, and socio-cultural aspects of qanats in Tehran.