ABSTRACT

Landscape and Agency explores how landscape, as an idea, a visual medium and a design practice, is organized, appropriated and framed in the transformation of places, from the local to the global. It highlights how the development of the idea of agency in landscape theory and practice can fundamentally change our engagement with future landscapes. Including a wide range of international contributions, each illustrated chapter investigates the many ways in which the relationship between the ideas and practices of landscape, and social and subjective formations and material processes, are invested with agency. They critically examine the role of landscape in processes of contemporary urban development, environmental debate and political agendas and explore how these relations can be analysed and rethought through a dialogue between theory and practice.

chapter |6 pages

Introduction

Critical concerns of landscape

chapter 1|11 pages

Landscapes of Post-History

chapter 2|16 pages

Reciprocal Landscapes

Material portraits in New York City and elsewhere

chapter 3|18 pages

Agency, Advocacy, Vocabulary

Three landscape projects

chapter 4|13 pages

The Law is at Fault?

Landscape rights and ‘agency’ in international law

chapter 5|13 pages

How to live in a Jungle

The (bio)politics of the park as urban model

chapter 6|12 pages

Planetary Aesthetics

chapter 9|14 pages

Publicity and Propriety

Democracy and manners in Britain’s public landscape

chapter 10|13 pages

The Power of the Incremental

Agronomic investment in Lisbon’s Chelas valley

chapter |5 pages

Afterword

Landscape’s agency