In Search of Landscape as a Medium for Integration: The Potentials of Landscape Narratives in the Practice of Landscape Architecture

摘要

The professional practice of landscape architecture plays a key role in achieving a more fruitful application of landscape to align diverse and competing forces and integrate them into new alliances in policy, management, planning, and design. This article builds on landscape narratives as time- and context-related interpretations of landscape adapted and implemented by landscape architects to give meaning to physical and social phenomena and relations in their professional projects. Triangulating among a qualitative interpretation of landscape literature with expert interviews of key informants and a study of professional practice in Flanders, I identify landscape narratives in the practice of landscape architecture. The article explains how the landscape narratives are not necessarily exclusive or limitative and thus offer opportunities for discussion and debate on landscape conception and conceptualization. It then focuses on the potentials of professional practice for the pervasion of holistic landscape conceptualization in place-specific development strategies. Finally, it explores how a reciprocal exchange of landscape narratives in theory and professional practice can promote the application of landscape as a medium for integration.