Landscape and Agency ─ Critical Essays

Landscape and Agency explores how landscape, as an idea, a visual medium and a design practice, is organized, appropriated and framed in the transformation of places, from the local to the global. It highlights how the development of the idea of agency in landscape theory and practice can fundamentally change our engagement with future landscapes. Including a wide range of international contributions, each illustrated chapter investigates the many ways in which the relationship between the ideas and practices of landscape, and social and subjective formations and material processes, are invested with agency. They critically examine the role of landscape in processes of contemporary urban development, environmental debate and political agendas and explore how these relations can be analysed and rethought through a dialogue between theory and practice.

Ed Wall is the Academic Leader Landscape at the University of Greenwich, London, Visiting Professor at Politecnico di Milano (DiAP) and City of Vienna Visiting Professor 2017 (SKuOR) for urban culture, public space and the future – urban equity and the global agenda. Ed’s research focuses on the design and theory of landscapes, public spaces and cities. He is the founding editor of the design research journal Testing-Ground (2015). In 2007 Ed established Project Studio. Award-winning projects have been published and exhibited widely, including at the Architecture Foundation, Royal Academy, Biennale of Landscape Urbanism, London Festival of Architecture and the Van Alen Institute.

Tim Waterman is senior lecturer and landscape architecture theory coordinator at the University of Greenwich, and a tutor at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He writes for a wide range of professional and academic publications on the subjects of power, democracy, taste, foodways and everyday life.