Urban Landscape Perspectives

Due to its numerous meanings, the term landscape cannot be reduced to a definition that lays
claim to conceptual unity. But the title of this book comes to our aid in that it enables us to limit the
field of possible definitions to the sphere of relations existing between the landscape project and the
city project. When we state the two terms city and landscape separately, we are implicitly
acknowledging a detachment between two figures that tradition has considered inseparable, as if
reality were inseparable from the representation of reality. But the city is difficult to represent,
while the landscape becomes an “additional figure” that takes on the role of revealing the city in
situations where it is possible to “see it”.
What, then, is the landscape for modernists? What is meant by designing the landscape
today? These questions match up with two conceptual worlds: one is the “environmental image”,
the “cover” for the unavoidable dynamics of the metropolis, the other in some ways the “counterspace”
of the metropolis, the space available for the project, the space that still enables us to design
the city. The first contains the classic concept of landscape that we have inherited from tradition,
which underlies a representational conception of the landscape as “environmental image”, having
impressed on it the acknowledgement of the separability of contemplation of the landscape from
living in it, a notion of landscape-object constructed and made an institution by modernity, a type of
landscape with which a relationship of equality is never established. The second conception takes
the landscape as an eminently projectual figure. It is a concept of landscape as a subject, which sets
itself up as collective intelligence of the territory. A concept that implies a “willingness for the
project”, as a propensity to take on new meanings in the city territory, different from the
conventional ones. This role can only be carried out by projectual intention that will reconstruct the
link between city and landscape and this is why we combine the landscape project with the city
project.