Third Nature

The term Third Nature emerges from cultural geography and ecological philosophy as a way to describe hybrid environments that arise from the entanglement of the natural and the artificial. Unlike first nature—wilderness untouched by humans—and second nature—the landscapes transformed by agriculture, settlement, and infrastructure—third nature signals a more ambiguous terrain where ecological processes persist within, despite, and through technological and urban conditions. It names wastelands, ruins, industrial margins, and urban interstices where new ecologies take hold beyond design intention or control. As such, Third Nature unsettles clear boundaries between nature and culture, exposing the simultaneity of decay and regeneration, abandonment and invention. It is a critical lens for understanding how landscapes evolve in the Anthropocene, marked not by purity but by entangled continuities.

The inaugural lecture, given by Joost Emmerik when he assumed his position as Head of Landscape at the Academy of Architecture in Amsterdam, The Netherlands, in 2022. The text particularly excels in embedding doubt into the teaching process. It is the doubt about nature, our entanglement with it, and the values and politics that drive the design process. It is about passing knowledge to others and questioning it meanwhile – a much more pertinent and productive teaching paradigm for times of uncertainties and change.

When we speak of Nature in cities, the question we want to stress is, is nature in cities natural or in fact an artefact? When we speak of natural processes, they of course take place but apart from spontaneous nature, left to random succession, emerging in spaces that Gilles Clément calls the third landscapes, there […]

»Paradigm shift« has been, for at least a decade now, one of the most used phrases in landscape architecture. We use it mainly to address the need to focus on design with natural processes in mind. This is important as it concerns our core values, attitude towards nature, the understanding of natural processes and the […]

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