The belly of the planner
Discovering the urban potential of the Limmattal.
Autoren
Maresa Schumacher, Michael Koch
Herausgeber
Institute for Landscape Architecture, ETHZ
gta Verlag
Zürich 2005
› Artikel als PDF (pdf_210kB)
The so called “suburbia” is challenging several disciplines: regional planning, urban design, landscape architecture…. Often, to often, the images which are leading the projects of these disciplines are retrospective: they are telling the stories of “untouched nature”, “beautiful, harmonious and protected landscape” and “concentrated, tiny little settlements as neighbourhood”. Images like this are ignoring the reality of the suburban space and territories. The past can not be the future. Wishful thinking of not reversible periods of urbandevelopment will not help to invent new tools for developing “suburbia”.
We have to explorethe urban reality of these territories. This article tries to convince for a new look, a new view on the suburban life and space - which is almost urban. In a first step we describe the Limmattal as a typical “swiss scape”, in which landscape and agriculture territories aretransformed into a specific kind of “urban scape” and network of public spaces. In a second step we explain our methodological approach to map these “unknown territories”. This leadsus in part three to some proposals for “crossover” and transdisciplinary approaches for a kindof re-invented planning and spacial design.
