ABSTRACT
Designers of urban landscapes are confronted with urgent issues in connection with climate change and the finite nature of natural resources as well as with the everyday quality of life in spatially expanding urban landscapes. Many of these issues relating such landscapes can only reasonably be understood and tackled within large-scale, regional spatial nexuses. In the spatial design disciplines, one can recognise a reawakened interest in such large-scale issues. A changed understanding of space in the spatial design disciplines understands space as a relational structure, by going beyond dualisms such as city – country, natural – artificial and placing the focus on the relations between humans and things and their dynamics. The metaphor of navigating is closely related to maps and cartography. When navigating at sea, maps are an indispensable tool for comparing the observations one has made and registering them, for determining one’s position, for deciding on the further course and checking it.
