Landscape as a living system

Landscape as a Living System

Borders, and the lands between subjects and objects that give life to a landscape like the borders between countries, are transforming into places new structures and generative identity and: from places of separation to gates into until-now-unknown economic, political, historical and geographic areas; from instruments of opposition to catalysts of co-production, cooperation, and community building processes.

Landscape as a living system

By radically rethinking the way we read (analyzing) and write (planning) the landscapes that surround us, the research and work of the CfGC in this area is based on a redefinition of the nature of the landscape itself and the role that communication can have in relation to it. Beyond an aesthetic/perceptive type of approach, which identifies the landscape as a mere support to human activities, the generative communication paradigm interprets landscape as a living system: a union of natural environments, anthropic activities, infrastructures, networks of relationships and social conflicts, history, and traditions, that lives and feeds on interactions between its various parts–interactions which are in continuous transformation.

 

A complex resource of incalculable possibilities

This means that communication is the project and, at the same time, the product of what we call “landscape.” It is both the cause and the effect. Generative communication identifies the elements which make up this system and the fabric that characterizes it, recognizes in it the declared and undeclared, conscious and unconscious aims, and is able to direct energies toward that which is believed to be most suitable for the target objectives.
The conviction at the base of the CfGC’s interventions is the relationship between man and nature: the convergence of physical, man-made, biological, ethnic, historic, and geographic characteristics that give life to a landscape (industrial, agricultural, urban, etc.). This relationship is a complex resource and, as such, it offers possibilities that are practically incalculable and unpredictable so long as it’s possible to operate on the web of active connections or on those still to be discovered or created. This is the DNA of every present and future landscape.

The Earth is a complex physical-biological-anthropological whole in which life is an emergence of the history of terrestrial life. The relation/relationship of man with nature cannot be conceived in a reductionist or disjointed way.
Edgar Morin

Good communication for weaving unknown fabric from distant resource

Among the various available dimensions, in CfGC projects it is the ignored potential dimension that is most often incredibly rich in resources. By connecting what previously seemed distant, places that weren’t even imaginable are opened up to creativity, offering temporary dimensions that could not even have been intuited: in-between terrain to be explored, planned, and built. The new frontiers of our times are not in front of us, but amongst us.
We should seek these new, unknown and still-to-be-created webs of connections–which are wonderfully generative of resources–in the landscape of the future. The theory of complexity is confirmed. And this is the case not only for subjects that make up an already defined landscape that is recognized for what it is, but also for relations amongst various landscapes.

 

The CfGC approach to
"Landscape as a Living System"