Collective agency is when groups—people, animals, plants, systems—act together and shape outcomes that no single actor could make alone. Self-organization is how patterns or orders come out of such interactions without a central plan telling them what to do. In design talk these ideas are often celebrated, almost romantic, as if collective means harmony. But it is not always so. Self-organization can just as well bring conflict, inequality, or exclusion, not only cooperation. And when we say “bottom-up,” we should also ask who really gets the chance to self-organize, and who is left out. For landscape architecture it means working with processes that are not fully under control—participation, growth, change, many actors moving at once. The role of design is then less to fix form than to hold open a framework where things and people can adapt and invent.
Krater includes no landscape architects and follows no formal landscape architecture plan. Yet it is an intervention in landscape that stands as a provocative inquiry into the status of abandoned plots embedded within the urban fabric. The project poses fundamental questions: is a site truly ‘neglected’ if a thriving biotope has already taken hold? Could such a space, in its self-organized vitality, already constitute a form of an urban park? How to organize the social dimension? Krater unfolds as an expedition into landscape itself—an open-ended investigation in which fragmented architectural elements function as instruments of observation, experiment, and reflection. The site operates as a living laboratory, challenging conventional practices of open space production and the disciplinary boundaries of landscape architecture. It addresses relevant uncertainties the Anthropocene entails, engaging critically with issues of multi-species coexistence and the contested notion of environmental harmonization.
At a time when landscape architecture often seeks to simulate nature through aesthetic approximation or even mimicry, Krater seems oblivious to such representational impulses. Its proposition is radical in its restraint: rather than imposing form, it frames this ‘third landscape’ as a space of ecological processes, social encounter and experiment, revealing alternative logics of co-inhabitation, agency and design—logics that may become increasingly relevant as landscape architecture confronts its own ecological, ethical and epistemological limits.
TU Berlin presents its new Chair ‘Entwerfen von Landschaften im Anthropozän/ Designing Landscapes in the Anthropocene’, or ÉLAN for short, headed by Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich since April 2025. The name says it all: Rather than seeing the Anthropocene as the antechamber to apocalypse, for the detrimental changes wrought by human activities on all things […]
“The tool is trying to counter the friction of power and reposition power as cooperation and co-creation early on to generate mature design briefs from the get-go. And that the process of participating for all parties is not a drudgery of boredom, frustrations and resulting anger or dismissal of feedback loops”
Halloween evening in Brooklyn, New York. Outside, a menagerie of children milled the sidewalks in spooky costumes seeking offerings of candy. At the same time, a smaller coalition of diverse students, faculty, and researchers gathered inside Higgins Hall at Pratt Institute to engage in a tricky debate over public trailways, the return of indigenous lands, […]
The famous Bartleby quote: “I would prefer not to”, is often the paradoxical silent monologue of a professional working in development. You need the job but you don’t always believe the project’s brief is fully justified, in line with the values and needs of users, sometimes even feels forced to produce revenue which can put […]
Planet City is a worldbuilding project by Liam Young, envisioned as a multilayered city, occupying as little as 0,02 percent of Earth’s surface yet hosting all of the human population. Planet City is testing the Half-Earth idea by Edward O. Wilson, where we put aside half of the planet, to keep biodiversity. We spoke with Liam Young about the idea and the exhibition he curates, Visions of Planet City.
Sara Eichner is a visual artist and designer with a keen interest in data visualisations and cartography. She works with Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and programming languages like Python and uses design software to translate data into comprehensible visual stories. Her work is people-centred and she often uses data to represent less-heard voices. Eichner is […]
Open Landscape Academy invites you to join an online seminar from April 3 to June 2 on Democratic Landscape Transformation. The seminar focuses on building a prototype collaborative model that “engages academic and local knowledge, professionalism and creativity, giving privilege to the perspectives of the historically underserved communities who have not had access to landscape […]
HPO is an art and event-architecture group from Ferrara. Their work has been, among other venues, presented at Milan Design Week and 18. Venice Biennale.
In the interview, we discuss the marginal position, DIY, incomplete architecture and the importance of play.
Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory and Inter-Programme Collaboration Director at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. He is Chair of the Landscape Research Group (LRG), a Non-Executive Director of the digital arts collective Furtherfield, and an advisor to the Centre for Landscape Democracy at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences. He is also […]
In this interview, Zaš Brezar talks to Prof. Dr. Lisa Diedrich, the winner of LILA 2023 Honour Award. She speaks about her professional development throughout the years and specifically about being a ‘straddler’ between professional practice and academia. She references several books and projects that inspire her as a landscape architect, architect, journalist and especially […]
Landezine met with Taktyk at the XII Barcelona International Landscape Biennial in November 2023, at the same place where we made the first interview, seven years ago. Taktyk’s work is a collage of collaborations showing sensitivity to the site, tackling its most vulnerable spots. Sébastien Penfornis and Thierry Kandjee seek through prospective visions, on-site works […]
Rotterdam Rooftop Days (Rotterdamse Dakendagen) is an annual festival that promotes rooftop living and emphasises the potential of roofs in mitigating issues of public space, empowering communities, reducing urban heat, increasing urban biodiversity, urban food production etc. It features Knowledge Day, Rotterdam Rooftop Walk, various cultural events and, most importantly, establishes a network of permanently […]
In this essay, Zaš Brezar writes about the role of urban roofs in our collective memory. Illustrating the meaning of roofs through a selection of cultural references from films and music. The article is a part of Living Roofs focus on Landezine that is going on in October and November 2022.
Arsenal Oasis is a unique project located in Tbilisi Georgia. It was designed for the Tbilisi Architecture Biennale by an urban design and research studio Ruderal. In this video, the designer Sarah Cowles explains the forces and circumstances that shaped the project. The LILA 2021 jury wrote: Arsenal Oasis is an experimental project that deals […]
In the past decade or two, roundabouts have become a wide-spread phenomenon in Europe, bringing with them a series of issues, above all related to their number, location, and the ornamental structures placed in their centres.
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