The subject area ‘Designing landscapes in the Anthropocene’ offers teaching and research along the following lines:

Transdisciplinarity: Designerly thinking as a basis for knowledge generation

We present a designerly approach to transdisciplinary knowledge generation, based on pragmatist, constructivist, and new materialist theories, and on Mode 2 and Mode 3 (transformative) science as supported by Studio Urbane Landschaften and by the international ITD Alliance. Critical thinking stimulates all design and design research as a means of reflecting on and taking positions in the dynamic interplay of professional activities, education, and research. The aim is to revise epistemological norms and inherited academic and professional practices to update them for the challenges of the Anthropocene.

Critical Urbanities: fragmented cities and water landscapes 

We promote a global perspective on learning processes understood as research. It is based on networked studio teaching with urbanism and landscape programmes in the northern and southern hemispheres in the ACROSS Pluriversal Urban Futures network (TU Berlin, UAS Frankfurt, Universität Stuttgart, SLU Malmö, Universidad de Buenos Aires, Universidad Católica de Santiago de Chile, USP Sao Paulo). The aim is to build on SLU Malmö’s previous Critical Urbanities project and further develop a set of case studies and methodologies for promoting the resilience of urbanising water landscapes exposed to the effects of climate change (changing water regimes) and globalisation (changing socio-economic and cultural conditions).

Working with Fragilities: Travelling Transect

We adopt the contemporary reinterpretation of Alexander von Humboldt’s transareal and mobile empirical science (international network POINTS) into the field of landscape architecture and design research. We use and further refine the Travelling Transect method (developed by Lisa Diedrich and Gini Lee) to capture fragile site qualities through deep fieldwork-based empirical investigation, in-studio interpretation, and communication to off-site audiences. Both a design research method and a knowledge transfer tool, it lays the groundwork for conceptualising fieldwork findings and initiating co-design processes towards site-responsive design for threatened landscapes understood as everyday life-worlds for more-than-human actors in the Anthropocene.

Radicant Design: adaptive design for landscapes in the Anthropocene

We investigate and further develop landscape architectural design approaches for overlooked landscapes of everyday life, whether next to established areas of living and working, in the interstices of active urban or rural fragments, far away from the hotspots of planetary urbanisation, or along the many routes that connect them. Rejecting modernist tabula rasa approaches and instead working with what exists on site, we draw on French art critic Nicolas Bourriaud’s idea of ‘the radicant’ and reconceptualise design as an open-ended process of transformation that values – and does not waste – site-specific material and immaterial resources and promotes ‘journey-forms’ rather than static form as a design response to the uncertainties of the Anthropocene.