Today, the possibility arises to define a new design approach to address issues of environmental and social justice in the urban context. Based on an integrated understanding of the interdependencies involving human and environmental relations, the applied-philosophy approach for landscape architectural practices induces a paradigm shift in spatial design. Rather than applying downstream solutions to cure ever more convoluted problems, the approach apprehends the built-environment as a designed set of embedded ideals whose activation by human praxis is generative of upstream, individual and collective reorganizations. Conducive to impactful social care outcomes, these reorganizations act as nexuses for bettering society at large through a combination of proactive urban landscape designed environments that are both interactive and integrative of individuals’ agency. In twenty-first century landscape architectural practice, how can the applied-philosophy approach have a significant impact on social outcomes? Let us first look at the general approach that has dominated the field in the last two centuries.

Since the nineteenth century, to mitigate important social issues, landscape architects have been developing urban parks. Central Park (1858) in New York City, designed as a “Pleasure Ground”¹ by Frederick Law Olmsted (1822-1903) and Calvert Vaux (1824-1895), brought views of “unimproved nature” into the city, to “give respite to the tired worker,” healthy sensory stimulation, and the opportunity to “exercise the unused part of his brain.”² In Paris, the Parc des Buttes Chaumont (1867) designed by Adolphe Alphand (1817-1891) was organized as an assemblage of picturesque scenes, made primarily for the enjoyment and recreation of the growing working-class population, and for the interminglement of all classes in one common place. Such pleasure parks were planned as “antidotes” to existing social problems. So was, in the United States, the “Reform Park”³ promoted by early twentieth-century social reformers as a new type of open space able to support the education and integration into society of children in need, immigrants, and the working class. Likewise, park typologies during the second half of the twentieth century were designed with the intent to adapt to the morphology of the evolution of the urban social question (the “recreation facilities”⁴ in the US, the “jardins d’utilité”⁵ in France, the “open space systems,” and the “sustainable park”⁶).

In their genealogy, all these parks can be considered as downstream events, to some degree afterthoughts, made to treat body, mind, and brain. As such, nineteenth- and twentieth- century parks can thus be considered as outcomes of an applied-science approach, since they constitute landscape solutions to identified social problems. Most practitioners addressing social concerns today continue to act as “downstream” problem solvers. As with physical and technical problems, such as climate change or stormwater management, they tend to tackle issues first identified as problems in other disciplines, such as civil engineering, political science, or sociology, before framing those situations from a landscape architectural perspective. In that sense, practitioners propose design solutions aimed at remediating problems that are, in fact, multi-form, complex, and often difficult to grasp. However responsible and/or constructive those solutions may seem, their implementation and assessment typically follow a model drawn from applied science, and they fall far short of considering, let alone addressing, anything related to the “proper situating of the human individual within the entire context of life.”⁷ While social issues are not contingent problems of individual life, but systemic problems, they could be preempted through design if thinking processes address larger questions, such as ways of being and living. Think applied philosophy rather than applied science.

In fact, postmodern views have been challenging society’s status quo leading to the strong intuition that socially-minded practices should no longer rely on the sole pretense of scientific universalism but widen their scope of vision and their mode of action. In a contemporary society of knowledge/information, citizens can indeed potentially claim more agency and push for a recalibration of power. Institutions and expert scientists are losing power which is now being transferred significatively to new social agents (NGO, skilled citizen, social subsystems), positing the impetus for action in territories where people’s voices are diverse. In this context, an applied-philosophy approach becomes more pertinent than the traditional applied-science approach. It enables practitioners to engage more deeply with the complex, interwoven realities of how the world is changing, taking into account the fundamental hermeneutic of the relationship between the human being, technology, and the environment. It also acknowledges that the city’s future can now be designed upon its inhabitants’ agency, which, once activated, can have significant impact on social outcomes.

This view celebrates more than the participatory or community approaches that have developed tactics toward social issues with participatory processes and citizens’ urban garden projects. In fact, the applied-philosophy approach embraces the idea that individuals are now vital agents in and with the urban landscape, in their own right, and with their full agency.

Consequently, in practice, the scope of possible interventions increases, and meets the need for a more complex approach, so to interconnect all the dimensions and parameters of the postmodern context. The applied-philosophy approach in landscape architecture has thus the potential to bring a new intersectional platform of thoughts. It is ontologically driven—it keeps asking who we are—and, rather than solutions, it allows landscape practitioners to think about long-standing grounded strategies that infiltrate the city fabric and people’s experience before impacting the city’s social tectonic. Precisely, it is an upstream approach. It only relies on a designer’s impetus to subsequently provoke an unravelling of auto-generated dynamics that, ultimately, influence the collective and society at large through the agency of citizens in space.

To compare: while the applied-science approach in landscape architecture leads to a shallow understanding of the human being’s cosmological perspective, the applied-philosophy approach, by thinking through a hermeneutic of the fundamental human dwelling conditions, transcends the static framing of the human/human and human/environment relations. Moreover, as the science-based model, the applied-philosophy approach is structured, logical, and methodical in its development. It is structured by a cohesive framework for reflection that uses three parameters to acknowledge the centrality of human/environment relations. In the first parameter, individuals are signifying persons communicating with words, gestures, postures, attitudes, and bodily movements. Secondly, they evolve within a sensorium, characterized by a specific environmental, social, historical, and cultural mediation of the senses and the shaping of perception. And thirdly, persons seek for mutualism, that is to say, for enabling themselves to dwell in a symbiotic milieu where relationships between environment and human beings shape each other in a continuous process of beneficial development. The applied-philosophy approach is also logical. The model unfolds in five phases: 1/ acquisition of philosophical concepts; 2/ enunciation of derivatives; 3/ activation in the urban landscape; 4/ modification of the sensorium and alteration of the symbiotic milieu; 5/ elaboration of new communalities and socialities. Finally, the applied-philosophy approach is methodical. It proceeds from the general to the specific in order to bring philosophical reflections—reflections that are so necessary today, particularly around the ethical questions of environmental and social justice—to the matrix of thoughts articulated in landscape architectural thinking. In doing so, the methodical process leads to the enunciation of derivatives applicable in design practice. These derivatives are concepts of an ideal–idealects⁸– made to translate an ideal of human experience in the world into the conditions of its realization.

To feed a preliminary philosophical reflection with concepts deeply bound up with individual and collective human existence (phase 1 of the model), the applied-philosophy approach in the Western context can rely on phenomenology. Concepts of selfhood and otherness for instance are unavoidable topics on which to cogitate today, since cities are in part, but not only, centered around the self and the other(s) within an ecology whose frame of relations ought to be (re)-defined for every design process, per hermeneutic factor. To nourish this philosophical reflection, a multilevel approach is necessary in order to holistically apprehend relational concepts in city-making and enunciate meaningful derivatives for every question of justice that is at stake. At the level of the individual sphere, for example, exploring philosopher Henri Maldiney’s notions of openness⁹ sheds light on the dynamic of the everyday individual’s praxis and how it generates an ecology of the encounter/event which fully impacts one’s life.¹⁰ At the level of society, referring to philosopher Paul Ricœur’s ideas of oneself as another¹¹and recognition¹² transcends the individual sphere by bringing insights of the fundamental interrelations of acknowledgement between individuals, groups, and institutions, leading to the good life.¹³ Lastly, at the level of the polis, philosopher Jacques Rancière’s perspectives on the emancipated spectator¹⁴ and the distribution of the sensible¹⁵ add disruptive possibilities to reorganizing the sensible through the reassertion of everyday citizens’ agency.¹⁶ These multilevel phenomenological formulations of individual, societal, and political relations expand the possibilities for socio-political alterations and co-existence in cities, in other words, for future just cities.

From the philosophical key concepts of openness (Maldiney), recognition (Ricœur), and emancipation (Rancière), three derivatives seem meaningful in landscape architectural practices: indetermination, pedagogical space, and reorganization of common values. Indetermination, a derivative of Maldiney’s notion of openness, would favor experience of spatiality on an event- advent mode that triggers life—rhythm—rather than rational order—beat—and draws successive horizons of attraction. This is the “recomposed horizon” that landscape architect Michel Corajoud drew in projects “to thread alliances.”¹⁷ It is the premise of a new sensorium in progress.

Pedagogical space, a derivative of Ricœur’s notion of recognition, would advance the possibility to learn through spatial experiences in public urban contexts. Inspired by the concept of mutual recognition, pedagogical space in landscape architecture can also advance the potentiality of horizontal knowledge. Along this line of thought, architect Go Hasegawa describes this aspect of his work as the “amplitude in the experience of space.”¹⁸ By giving to his creation a pedagogical dimension that implies a way of learning from others and from the world, a way of interacting, he makes his architecture highly engaged and offers the possibility for thinking and imagining.

Reorganization of common values, a derivative of Rancière’s notion of emancipation, would take place through the involvement of people in public space, using the latter not as a proscenium for existence, not for representation, but as a place where real lives enter into interaction with each other. In public space, dissensus is real and must be exposed to initiate a reconfiguration of the sensorium and informed communal space to serve as common ground for developing shared values and shaping healthy communities. Landscape architects Christof Mayer and Markus Bader have developed such a landscape with their project Tempelhof in Berlin.¹⁹ It comprises a vast, quasi-untouched, former airport landscape in which renewed initiatives and users’ engagement continually propel the activation of space and a renewed possibility for coexistence through which to learn and develop communal bounds. Remaining unprogrammed, the open plateau of the park is activated by visitors (Berliners) who create, encounter, experience, and expose themselves to the possibility of continual change, transforming their relations to their milieu through their own agency. Experiencing Tempelhof thus signifies being engaged in the organic social municipal body (made of a facetted entanglement of communities and underground centricities), one that is rhizomatic rather than rooted, open to indetermination in order to better apprehend the hermeneutic of human existence and imagine desirable futures.

To tackle urban environmental and social justice issues, socially-minded landscape architects have been using various park typologies in the last two centuries. As conveyed earlier, these typologies are obsolete. Today, the applied-philosophy approach offers avenues to inform transformative outcomes in society through a grounded, upstream reflection that deciphers the integration of ideals into the process of space-making, rather than applying solely scientific solutions. This approach offers relevant, contemporary opportunities to address the urban fabric’s complexity and diversity, and furthermore advances the idea of paradigm shift toward new humanities, a notion dear to philosopher Michel Serres.²⁰

This new humanism in preparation calls for the activation of the conditions for spontaneous change, a score to guide landscape architectural practices, and ultimately, engage all individuals, as agents dwelling within a sovereign mutuality and influencing the reorganization of common values, in a shared enactment of new principles. This activation implies a novel interaction between philosophers—as they attempt to explain existence according to an ethical framework—and all citizenry and city-makers, most importantly landscape architects, to form new ways of being-in-the-world and to convoke alliances capable of challenging old structures.

To imagine these new ways of being in the world, here are three recommendations for landscape architectural practices to meditate upon (since they are each worth a specific article):

– Undoing programming: Designers should think about limiting their interventionism and featuring citizens as emancipated designers. It would imply envisioning space as polysemic, meaning malleable, receptive to the users’ choice of praxis. Thus, urban landscape could be declared a territory of empowerment, where a reconfiguration of a socio-political praxis would be at work toward a horizontal civil society.
– Undoing vertical knowledge: Designers should consider offering new forms of participation and communication, sharing new qualitative criteria, and releasing creativity. The urban landscape could be declared a place of reconciliation for economic, ecological, and social shared realities.
– Undoing technicity: Designers should disrupt the holistic embodiment of technology-as-process, and bring back the ontopoetics of space, e.g. the meaningful human/environment symbiotic relation that leads to mutuality. As a consequence, the urban landscape could be declared a site of familiarity and genuine transaction with the world for a more primal truth.

Based on the applied-philosophy approach, these three recommendations are parts of an intersectional platform of thoughts that offers the opportunity for landscape architects to transition their field to a new design paradigm in phase with, and therefore better suited to, contemporary capacities, agencies, and ontological realities, of a new humanity in progress. Eventually, the last two-century urban parks, often perceived as hollow places in the city’s solid body, will have preceded designed landscape environments that will now be both interactive and integrative of individuals’ agency, and be parts of a pervasive, proactive strategy for ubiquitous, impactful social outcomes.

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¹ This is the first urban park model identified by Galen Cranz in her typology published in The Politics of Park Design: A History of Urban Parks in America, The MIT Press, 1982.
² Ibid., p. 8.
³ Ibid, p. 9.
⁴ Cranz. Op. cit., p. 105.
⁵ Dorothée Imbert. The Modernist Garden in France, Yale University Press, 1993, p. 106. D. Imbert is a landscape scholar and designer. Achille Duchêne (1866–1947) speculated that spaces for sports would become a feature of the “future jardins d’utilité.”
⁶ Galen Cranz and Michael Boland. “Defining the Sustainable Park: A Fifth Model for Urban Parks.” Landscape Journal, University of Wisconsin Press, vol. 23, no. 2, 2004, pp. 102-120.
⁷ Anna-Teresa Timieniecka. “The Pragmatic Test of the Ontopoeisis of Life.” Phenomenology of Life. Meeting the Challenges of the Present-Day World, Analecta Husserliana (The Yearbook of Phenomenological Research), vol. 84, Springer, 2005, p. xxvi. A. Timieniecka (1923–2014) was a Polish-American phenomenologist.
⁸ Stéphane Vial. “Design and Creation: Outline of Philosophy of Modelling,” 2013, p. 2. Accessed on 12/15/2019: https://svial.uqam.ca/wp-content/uploads/2021/02/2013_vial-wikicr-en.pdf
⁹ Henri Maldiney (1912–2013). Regard, Parole, Espace, L’Age d’Homme, 1973.
¹⁰ Alexandre Champagne. Mobilizing Landscape Architecture against Urban Precarity: Framing an Applied- Philosophy Approach through the Works of Henri Maldiney, Paul Ricœur, and Jacques Rancière, Ideals, 4/2024, p. 55. Accessed on 9/20/2024: https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/items/131313
¹¹ Paul Ricœur (1913–2005). Oneself as Another, University of Chicago Press, 1995.
¹² Paul Ricœur. The Course of Recognition, Harvard University Press, 2005.
¹³ Champagne. Op. cit., p. 56.
¹⁴ Jacques Rancière (b. 1940). The Emancipated Spectator, Verso, 2011.
¹⁵ Jacques Rancière. The Politics of Aesthetics: The Distribution of the Sensible, Continuum Intl Pub Group, 2004.
¹⁶ Champagne. Op. cit., p. 56.
¹⁷ Michel Corajoud. Le paysage, c’est l’endroit où le ciel et la terre se touchent, Actes Sud/ENSP, 2010, p. 206. M. Corajoud (1937–2014) was a French landscape architect, awarded Grand Prix de l’urbanisme in 2003.
¹⁸ Go Hasegawa (b. 1977). Lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design, Cambridge, MA, 4/19/2017. Accessed on 5/3/2017: https://www.gsd.harvard.edu/event/amplitude-in-the-experience-of-space/
¹⁹ See article by Krystin Arneson. “Tempelhof: The single site that embodies Berlin.” BBC Travel, 11/1/2022. Accessed on 9/4/2023: https://www.bbc.com/travel/article/20221031-tempelhof-the-single-site-that-embodies-berlin
²⁰ Michel Serres (1930–2019) interviewed by Pigaht & Dolphijn. “A New Culture to Suit the World,” in Michel Serres and the Crises of the Contemporary, Bloomsbury, 2018, p. 173. M. Serres states the following: “In comparing with the seventeenth century, body, life, death and humanity have all changed. (…) it’s not the same world, not the same life and not the same body. But we still have the same institutions, the same politics, the same governments and the same rights. That’s an untenable situation. […] therefore, the goal today is trying to prepare this new culture; these new humanities.”

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About the Author

Alexandre Champagne holds a Ph.D. in Landscape Architecture from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and an MLA from Cornell University. Before pursuing his education in the United States, he was a financial analyst at the Banque de France in Paris. He interned at Peter Walker and Partners (Berkeley, CA) and worked briefly at Michel Desvigne Paysagiste (Paris, France) before co-founding the firm Aire d’essai (Los Angeles, CA) in 2004. Based on choreographies of tailored individual and collective practices, his projects have been mini laboratories in which to experiment with ideas of communality, wellbeing, and education. His research addresses urban challenges and how professional involvement could have broader impacts on social well-being by relying on an applied-philosophy approach guided by interdisciplinary perspectives.