Suchergebnisse

This article addresses a new mode of planning that involves a collaboration between State, private and community actors in the context of growing urban gardening movements. It questions the view of urban gardening as a manifestation of citizens' dissensus towards administration's institutional planning, and the expression of urban 'counterplanning' whose aim is to resist the consequences of a neoliberal governmentality. Although this interpretation of urban gardening is to a certain extent true, it does not completely explain some current developments in socio-spatial planning practices. In order to fill this gap, the article advances a theoretical analysis of the emerging governmentality generated by an intensified relationship between institutional, private and community actors. The theoretical analysis is complemented by the example of representative urban gardening projects in Ghent, a dynamic and inspiring mid-size city in Belgium, providing an ideal context for exploring the transformation of planning practices and their socio-political underpinnings. The article concludes that urban gardening practices exemplify an emerging informal mode of planning supported by a new transactive governmentality, which may lead to a co-creative transformation of public urban space.

Between 1904 and 1911, botanist Jean Massart (1865-1925) made a series of landscape photos mainly situated in Flanders, the northern part of Belgium. They had a didactic purpose: Massart wanted to show the natural vegetation in its landscape context, and the relationship between agriculture and geography. In 1980, Georges Charlier rephotographed about sixty of Massart's landscape images for the National Botanic Garden of Belgium and the Belgian Nature and Bird Reserves association. For each photo, point of view and framing were identical to Massart's. Both series were published and shown in the travelling exhibition Landscapes in Flanders Then and Now. It had to illustrate the impoverishment of the natural environment. In 2003, Labo S, the Laboratory for Urbanism at Ghent University, and the Flanders Architecture Institute commissioned Jan Kempenaers to rephotograph the same landscapes. A fourth series of photos was made by photographer Michiel De Cleene, commissioned by the Province of West Flanders in 2014. Due to the restrictions of rephotography, Charlier, Kempenaers and De Cleene did have only little freedom to express a personal point of view. However, a different emphasis on documentarian, artistic and scientific aspects can be distinguished in their work. Besides their photographic qualities, the four series are in this book considered as part of a 'chronophotographic' collection showing in detail the transformation of landscapes. Since several years, the collection has served multidisciplinary research at Ghent University, in particular on urbanisation and landscape mutations in terms of agriculture, biodiversity, infrastructure, economical development and lifestyles. Photography and research are the two components of this book. Design: Roger Willems with Wout Neirynck

Over the past decade Labo S has been operating in the margins of the (urban) landscape by studying real places which go largely unnoticed and examining concrete problems that are rarely debated in the spotlight of the media or academia. By starting from a certain empathy for the landscape, by immersing itself in it and getting to know it, Labo S has been able to feel the fragility and impotence of the landscape with respect to oversimplified spatial dynamics and processes. Taking the landscape viewpoint as a framework for urbanism, Labo S has formulated an answer to the almost impossible task of grasping, mastering and changing this reality. Apart from a post-rationalisation of this extensive process of research, this book also aims to transcend the boundaries of its own work, to offer a reflection on the role that landscape as image and as design instrument can play when exploring and understanding the contemporary urban condition