Care refers to practices of tending, maintaining, and sustaining relationships—between people, between people and environments, between humans and nonhumans. In landscape discourse, care is often reduced to maintenance, but it is more: it is ethical attention, responsibility, and time. Yet care is not innocent—caring can also be patronizing, imposing regimes of protection that misread or override the needs of those being cared for. Social activist groups, for example, may exercise well-meaning but protectionist attitudes toward Indigenous communities or certain species, missing the point of different logics and values. Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2003) stages this paradox vividly: care slips into coercion, as Grace’s insistence on her notion of justice and democracy turns violent. Care can backfire, producing dependency, erasure, or cruelty masked as benevolence. Care is a principle as much as a practice: to design with awareness of who maintains, who benefits, and how spaces endure beyond the first moment of construction. But care must also remain self-critical, attentive to when “caring” slips into control.
The Krater Collective is a group of transdisciplinary artists who have decided to transform their professions, studios and working conditions in order to act as advocates for a self-determined ecosystem in an abandoned construction pit in Ljubljana. In Crafting Biodiversity, they expand over their fenced-off domain.
In the U.S., lawns cover nearly 2 percent of the land surface and, as researcher Cristina Milesi revealed using satellite data, “could be considered the single largest irrigated crop in America”—their total area is three times larger than that of irrigated cornfields. The infatuation with lawns runs so deep that, in some cases, failing to […]
TU Berlin presents its new Chair ‘Entwerfen von Landschaften im Anthropozän/ Designing Landscapes in the Anthropocene’, or ÉLAN for short, headed by Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich since April 2025. The name says it all: Rather than seeing the Anthropocene as the antechamber to apocalypse, for the detrimental changes wrought by human activities on all things […]
The colloquium will investigate the relationship between the design and maintenance of living systems, seeking to cultivate practices, terminology, and theoretical insights into approaches that attempt to maintain otherwise. About The current separation between landscape design and landscape maintenance is no longer tenable. Unpredictable weather patterns and dwindling water supplies intersect with cuts to municipal […]
At a moment when another “inanimate natural entity”, the Taranaki Maunga, a mountain in New Zealand, is granted personhood, The National Gallery of Victoria (NGV) in Melbourne, Australia, is holding an exhibition, Reimagining Birrarung, Design Concepts for 2070, on the future of Yarra River, it’s catchment area and people, envisioned by landscape architects. The exhibition […]
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.
Dušan Ogrin (1929-2019) was the pioneer of Slovenian landscape architecture. In 1972, he founded the Landscape Architecture programme at the University of Ljubljana. His seminal work The World Heritage of Gardens was published in 1993, so it was not too far-fetched to dedicate a book in his memory to the topic of gardens. The editors […]
Sara Eichner is a visual artist and designer with a keen interest in data visualisations and cartography. She works with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and programming languages like Python and uses design software to translate data into comprehensible visual stories. Her work is people-centred and she often uses data to represent less-heard voices. Eichner is […]
The 2025 Colloquium by Network City and Landscape, NSL, titled “Beyond Maintenance: Responsive Practices for Changing Landscapes,” will be held at ETH Zürich from February 26-28, 2025, under the invitation of Prof. Teresa Galí-Izard. The event aims to explore the integration of landscape design and maintenance in response to evolving environmental and social challenges. With […]
Charles Birnbaum is the CEO and founder of TCLF—The Cultural Landscape Foundation. In his work, he is a fearless advocate and activist for significant American landscape architecture sites. He was honored as a 2020 LILA Honour Award Winner for initiating and developing TCLF for over 25 years with an “innovative vision, executed with great precision, […]
HPO is an art and event-architecture group from Ferrara. Their work has been, among other venues, presented at Milan Design Week and 18. Venice Biennale.
In the interview, we discuss the marginal position, DIY, incomplete architecture and the importance of play.
Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory and Inter-Programme Collaboration Director at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is Chair of the Landscape Research Group (LRG), a Non-Executive Director of the digital arts collective Furtherfield, and an advisor to the Centre for Landscape Democracy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He is also […]
We are thrilled to share with you the interview with LILA 2022 Honour Award winner Gilles Clément. The interview was conducted in Paris in November 2022 by Zaš Brezar and Joost Emmerik. The editors wrote in the award statement: Gilles Clément (1943) is a French landscape architect or better ‘paysagiste’, having a more garden design-related […]
