New Practices. Emerging practices in European landscape architecture

On the Move is the fourth volume of the Landscape Architecture Europe (LAE) series that presents and discusses contemporary European landscape architectural projects. It presents projects that were gathered in response to a democratic call for entries, selected by a rigorous and independent jury of European landscape architects and shaped for publication through broadminded editing. As a result, the book showcases the ‘state of the art’ and raises awareness about what and how landscape architecture can contribute to society; it consists of a selection of 45 projects, complemented by essays, an introduction and an epilogue. The book is structured into three main themes. The first theme considers landscape architecture as based on working with processes and practices, leading to a different understanding of design: as transformation of that which already exists on a site. The second chapter heavy heritage considers the physical legacy of European heavy industry. The third chapter addresses the theme of curation. To counteract absent public funds and inherited functionalist planning practices, Europe is currently experiencing a trend towards the creation of spaces from the bottom up, imagined and built by amateurs instead of by professionals. This has implications for designers. Instead of retreating to the margins of society, some landscape architects are abandoning their identity as dominant creators and reinventing themselves as co-creators, especially for public and community spaces. My essay deals with this third topic, titled "New practices. Emerging practices in European landscape architecture". The phenomenon of usergenerated content is everywhere in daily life. The word ‘prosumer’, a contraction of professional and consumer originally coined by Alvin Toffler has become a buzzword, describing a broad spectrum of economic, political and cultural activities that transcend the duality of production and consumption. These developments, while apparently not immediately relevant, all have a bearing on landscape architecture. In fact, the signs of widespread and energetic claims on projects by landscape prosumers, people without specific training or professional competence, are so clear that I suggest we can use the term user-generated landscape architecture to refer to open spaces realized through do-it-yourself initiatives or co-design practice. Several innovative projects are challenging the traditional roles of participants and creators: people work themselves to make improvements to their everyday landscapes, taking places into their own hands, informally and spontaneously, whether as the need arises or simply because they are inspired to do so, while professional firms work out unsolicited projects, where there is no client. This is a new project paradigm, leaving the field open to unpredictability, vagueness and spontaneity. Open-endedness and uncertainty have always been qualities inherent to landscape architecture. The novelty is that usergenerated landscape architecture dilutes the boundaries between the different skills involved by an intentional relinquishing of authorial control and questioning the designer’s role, tasks and competence.