Operative foundation, practice, theory and ethics of landscape-related disciplines

• Applicant: Dr. Karsten Berr
• Subject Area: Urbanism, Spatial Planning, Transportation and Infrastructure Planning, Landscape Planning
• Term: from 2011 to 2018
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 203267182

The continuation of the project serves at first the reconstruction of the local terms of landscape architecture, which delimits this discipline from other landscape disciplines and secondly the meta-ethical analysis of so-called Flags words (such as sustainability, resilience etc.), which easily can lead to preliminary decisions in theoretical discourses and public debates.Furthermore, the extended framework for analysis of landscape architecture will be extended to the critical semantic analysis of landscape concepts in other landscape-oriented disciplines. The results of this extension will be integrated with already achieved results in a transdisciplinary project that will develop common pragmatic perspectives for dealing with Landscape for specific theoretical and practical purposes and questions under the title Landscape Science. The term landscape therefore is to model as a reflection term whose use must be justified depending on the respective purposes and questions. This use therefore is not independent of specific context, application or purposes. Such a transdisciplinary approach, if it is not understood additively or hierarchical but complementary, also can help avoid unnecessary and fruitless struggles for opinion leadership in specialized discourses.The extension of the research approach to the question of the relation between town and countryside serves to take into account the political aspects of landscape-related plans and designs, which are linked to this relation. This political dimension leads us to the problem of the institutionalization of ethics of urban-, landscape- and spatial-planning below the legislative level and associated additional difficulties, such as the gap between an ethos-oriented and applied ethics and the seemingly insurmountable internal logic of social systems.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants