Landscape Paradigms and Post-urban Spaces: A Journey Through the Regions of Landscape

This book is published in The Urban Book Series of Springer International Publishing AG, part of the Springer Nature Group, a resource for research in urban and landscape studies and geography. Chapter 1 provides a general introduction to themes and notions treated. Chapters 2 and 3 present an urban-studies panorama on the emergence of a built/landscape continuum following the anthropic expansion at the geographic scale and the consequent demise of the city/country divide. Chapter 4 determines an open-ended classification of contemporary space-making strategies exceeding the urban and metropolitan ambit, through a comparative anatomy of global case studies ranging from hard to soft: geotechnics or applied geographies, machinic micro-ecologies, aesthetic prostheses for operative metabolism, cybernetic utopias, atmospheric assemblages, psychic spheres, creole horizons, semiotic landscapes, geopolitical landscapes, geophilosophical excavations. Chapters 5 and 6 provide an in-depth theoretical analysis of disparate landscape constructs and the culture-grounding processes into region-forming and aggregates spanning from natural to anthropic and physical to semantic. Chapter 7 culminates in the proposal of a novel, comprehensive spatial paradigm addressing both anthropic and natural contexts. A possible spatial transcription of it projected into a territorial narrative, whose implementation and implications will be presented in a different publication, is described in Chapter 8. By virtue of its openness, fluidity, and volatility, fluctuating between heterogeneity and diversity, today’s built/landscape continuum exhibits the tendency to fuse into a contemporary notion of landscape. The proposed spatial paradigm, accommodating aggregates of artificial and living systems, physical and mental spaces, and machinic and cultural landscapes, represents a novel notion of landscape intended to reconcile the traditionally opposed ‘scientific-cognitive-metabolist’ and ‘cultural-geophilosophical-territorialist’ visions. Chapter 9 advocates for the proposed model as capable of transcending the exhausted myths of urban space, metropolitanism, and their filiations, in favor of a new form of expanded landscape urbanity, and identifies field for future research work in the urge for the determination of its novel intangible attributes and physical platforms. Foreword by Peter G. Rowe (Harvard University); Afterword by Elisa Cristiana Cattaneo (Politecnico di Milano).