The course is connected to the following study programs
Course description
This course is based on a discussion of land care and land rights in the Anthropocene. As environments are starting to behave in new ways and exposing us to new situations, we need to develop new ways of managing them. This involves an advancement of methods for landscape reading grounded in a need for care and not an urge for revenue. It asks how we can respect the voices and interests of voices, species and ecologies in a time of unpredictability and destabilization.
The course brings new and current knowledge from ecological, archeological, anthropological, and landscape studies into conversation with landscape reading and analysis. What can landscape architecture learn from other disciplines to update and enhance our landscape analysis proficiency? Which perspective may landscape architecture offer to enrich other discipline’s reading tools?
The course challenges current methods for landscape analysis and critically reads existing European and National frameworks for landscape heritage and safeguarding. It looks specifically at the discrepancies between general guidelines and situated knowledges of place and offers an apparatus for a more-than-human landscape reading – one that does not seek to evaluate landscapes as diffracted components mainly existing for human serviceability but rather contemplates them as always interwoven and relational processes in time and place.
The course draws examples from rural landscape settings that feature a variety of landscape agencies and forces with a focus on landscape analyses tools and methods for registration of:
- human and more-than-human traces
- biotic and abiotic qualities of landscape
- spatial activities and area planning
- what we do not see, either because it does not exist or because we do not know that it exists
- geo-morphological processes and their landscape-making agency
- oral evidence of landscape practices and history
Learning Outcome
Knowledge:
- landscape assessment tools and methodologies
- environmental humanities perspectives on landscape with a specific emphasis on rights and care.
- feminist and postcolonial theories on rights and care.
Skills:
- Landscape reading and analysis
- Interdisciplinary perspectives on and cocreational methods for landscape assessment in the Anthropocene.
General competence:
- Students will get a thorough introduction to current environmental theories on landscape in the Anthropocene
Teaching
- Lectures
- Assignments
- Individual and group presentation
The course is structured around weekly seminars and work sessions. Students must expect to spend the Tuesdays on the course. Each Tuesday will start off with a 2-hour seminar on current theories and proceed to preparatory mapping of the excursion area.
The student is expected to actively participate in the teaching activities. If possible, we will do a field trip in a southern Norwegian mountain context. Time: end of September. If we travel, there will be an alternative arrangement for students that are not able to travel.
Examination
Form of assessment: Project assignment
Grading scale: Pass/fail
Comment: Each group will develop and present a section of the course’s proposal for landscape analysis.