Alienation

Alienation marks a condition of estrangement, of not being fully at home in the world. For Marx, alienation describes the worker’s separation from the product of labor, from the act of production, from others, and ultimately from species-being itself. For Freud, alienation operates psychically, as repression and the return of the unconscious estrange the subject from its own desires. Contemporary thinkers such as Todd McGowan emphasize alienation as constitutive rather than pathological, the inescapable gap that structures subjectivity. In this broader sense, alienation is less a problem to be solved than the very condition that makes critique, perception, transformation, and perhaps even emancipation, possible.

Animism / New Animism

Animism, in its classical anthropological sense, describes worldviews in which non-human beings—animals, plants, objects, or natural phenomena—are endowed with agency or spirit. Once dismissed as a “primitive” belief system in contrast to modern Western “naturalism,” animism has been reinterpreted in recent decades under the rubric of new animism. This perspective does not focus on projecting human qualities onto things, but on recognizing relational ontologies in which humans and non-humans participate as subjects. New animism thus resonates with posthumanist and ecological thought, suggesting that Western dualisms of subject/object and culture/nature obscure other viable modes of world-making. In landscape and environmental design, methodological animism provides a framework to acknowledge plants, animals, soils, and waters as active participants rather than passive resources. It opens space for rethinking ethics, aesthetics, and design practices in ways that destabilize human exceptionalism.

Anthropocene

The Anthropocene is the proposed geological epoch defined by human activity as a planetary force, leaving stratigraphic traces in earth systems. It names climate change, mass extinction, and industrial extraction as markers of geological time. Yet the concept is contested, for it risks universalizing “humanity” while obscuring differentiated responsibility across class, race, and geography. In design and theory, the Anthropocene unsettles the ground of practice, forcing a confrontation with the entanglement of culture, nature, and geology. It is both a scientific claim and a cultural symptom of ecological crisis.

Authorship

Authorship in design traditionally implies the imprint of individual vision and control, yet in landscape architecture it often dissolves into the appearance of the “undesigned.” Many landscape architects strategically obscure authorship to highlight ecological processes or communal ownership. Yet authorship need not undermine ecological or social function; rather, it can act as an assertion that landscapes are cultural works, demanding recognition in the public sphere. Explicit authorship can awaken landscapes into perception, interrupting their habitual invisibility as mere background. In this sense, authorship becomes both a mode of professional advocacy and a tool for estrangement.

Biourbanism

Biourbanism is an interdisciplinary approach to urban design and planning that treats the city as a living organism or urban body, composed of interconnected layers of social, ecological, and infrastructural systems. Drawing from life sciences, systems theory, and ecology, it emphasizes the non-linear interactions that generate emergent urban properties such as resilience, wellbeing, and quality of life. At its core, biourbanism proposes a paradigm shift: cities should be designed and managed as forms of nature (anthromes), integrating human needs with ecological processes. This includes optimizing relationships between citizens, food, water, waste, energy, mobility, and technology to produce healthier, climate-resilient, and socially inclusive environments. Poorly designed cities threaten life and exacerbate ecological crises; biourbanism instead seeks urban forms that enhance systemic efficiency, ecological balance, and human flourishing.

Cabinet of Curiosities / Wunderkammer

A cabinet of curiosities—or Wunderkammer—was an early modern collection of rare objects, natural specimens, and artifacts, often displayed without strict order. It was a way to gather the world in miniature, mixing science, art, and wonder. The cabinet is not only history; it still haunts how we classify and exhibit nature today. It framed knowledge through spectacle, often exoticizing and appropriating, showing the power relations in what was chosen and what was left out. At the same time, it staged a world of strange juxtapositions, where the boundaries of categories collapsed and imagination expanded. In landscape architecture, the cabinet of curiosities suggests ways of assembling fragments, mixing ecologies, creating places that invite wonder but also question how we order the world.

Capitalocene

The term Capitalocene, advanced by Jason W. Moore and others, critiques the Anthropocene for obscuring capitalism’s central role in planetary crisis. It situates ecological breakdown not in “humanity as such” but in the historical regime of capital accumulation, colonial extraction, and cheapening of life. The Capitalocene reframes climate change as inseparable from political economy and systemic exploitation. For landscape and urban studies, it emphasizes how environments are produced through capitalist value regimes. The concept demands structural critique rather than generalized human guilt.

Correlationism

Correlationism, as named by Quentin Meillassoux, describes the philosophical stance that we only ever have access to the relation between thought and being, never to being in itself. It critiques the Kantian legacy that restricts knowledge to phenomena as mediated by human cognition. Within contemporary theory, correlationism becomes a limit that speculative realism seeks to exceed by affirming a world independent of human access. For design and aesthetics, the concept unsettles anthropocentrism by questioning whether reality can be reduced to human-world correlation. Correlationism thus opens the field to ontologies where nonhuman entities exert their own reality beyond representation.

Creative Destruction

Creative destruction, popularized by Joseph Schumpeter, names the capitalist dynamic whereby innovation incessantly dismantles existing structures to generate new ones. It describes progress not as linear accumulation but as a cycle of rupture and renewal. While central to economic theory, the concept resonates in urban and landscape contexts, where redevelopment often erases prior forms of life and memory. Creative destruction exposes the violence of innovation as both generative and dispossessive. It is a logic of transformation inseparable from systemic instability.

Decolonisation

Decolonisation refers to the undoing of colonial structures of power, knowledge, and representation. It is not merely the transfer of governance but a profound reorientation of epistemologies, territorial relations, and cultural authority. In design and landscape studies, decolonisation challenges Eurocentric models by foregrounding indigenous and marginalized perspectives. It demands not only restitution of land and recognition of histories, but also a reconfiguration of how space is imagined, produced, and perceived through aesthetic experience. Decolonisation is both an ongoing struggle and an unsettled horizon.

Design with Nature (McHarg)

Design With Nature is Ian McHarg’s influential book that argued for planning and design guided by ecological science. Using overlays of maps and data, McHarg proposed methods to align human development with natural processes. The book became a cornerstone of ecological planning, but it also carried the risk of technocratic certainty—reducing landscapes to layers of suitability and constraint. It reflected a modernist faith in systems and control, sometimes overlooking the cultural, aesthetic, and contested dimensions of land. Still, it changed how design professions understand their relationship to ecology. For landscape architecture, Design With Nature opened the door to ecological thinking as part of design practice. Even if its methods today feel dated, the call to design in dialogue with natural processes remains foundational, a point of reference for both critique and inspiration.

Digital Product Passport

The digital product passport is an emerging regulatory and technological tool aimed at tracing the lifecycle of materials and products. By embedding information on origin, composition, repairability, and recyclability, it seeks to enforce transparency in supply chains. Within the context of sustainability, it reconfigures accountability by making environmental and social costs legible. For design, it introduces a new material literacy, where products are inseparable from their data profiles. The digital product passport materializes the politics of traceability and makes the address of global ecologies more transparent, tracing the tentacles in the global landscape of supply chains and material production.

Distribution of the Sensible (Ranciere)

Rancière uses “distribution of the sensible” to describe how a society decides what can be seen, said, and heard—what counts as common sense and who is allowed to participate in it. It is about how perception is organized, not only politics in the narrow sense but politics as aesthetics of the everyday. The phrase shows that visibility and invisibility are never neutral: some voices are amplified, others muted; some bodies are made central, others pushed to the edge. This distribution is always contested, always shifting, and often enforced by institutions, design, and space itself. For landscape architects, the concept asks whose presence a place acknowledges, and whose it denies. A park, a square, a street—all distribute the sensible by framing who feels at home, who feels excluded, who can linger and who is chased away. To design is therefore also to shape perception and belonging, consciously or not.

Dystopia

Dystopia is the imagined opposite of utopia: a future or place marked by collapse, oppression, or ecological ruin. It is often used in literature and film to warn about paths society might take. Dystopias exaggerate but also reveal real fears—of surveillance, climate breakdown, authoritarian control. They are not only fictions but mirrors of present conditions, showing what already exists in fragments. Too often, dystopia is used as spectacle, consumed as entertainment rather than a provocation to act.

Eco-Cathedral

The Eco-Cathedral is Le Roy’s lifelong project and conceptual manifesto: an evolving landscape built not through master planning but through ceaseless human and ecological collaboration. Beginning in the 1980s with the patient stacking of bricks and stones, the Eco-Cathedral is designed to grow for centuries, a place where spontaneous vegetation, insects, animals, and human gestures converge in open-ended construction. It refuses closure, finality, and aesthetic control, offering instead an ethic of time, slowness, and unpredictability. The Eco-Cathedral stands as a provocation to conventional landscape architecture, suggesting that true sustainability lies not in fixed solutions but in the endless negotiation between culture, material, and ecological process.

Emancipated Spectator (Ranciere)

Jacques Rancière’s book The Emancipated Spectator challenges the old idea that audiences are passive and must be “taught” how to see. For him, every spectator is already active, already interpreting, already capable of making meaning. This breaks the hierarchy between the artist as master and the audience as pupil. The spectator does not need instruction but space—room to connect, to imagine, to build her own links. To over-explain or over-narrate is to mistrust the spectator’s intelligence, to close down what could remain open. This can mean resisting the urge to deliver fixed stories or polished images. By obscuring narratives into a low-resolution state, the landscape is left ambiguous, open to interpretation. The visitor, already emancipated, explores and reads on their own terms, finding meaning in estrangement, silence, or fragment.

Emancipation

Emancipation in landscape architecture can signify the release of landscapes from colonial legacies, neoliberal logics, and the extractive practices of the Capitalocene. It also entails freeing landscapes from aesthetic regimes—the picturesque, harmony, or “naturalness”—that dictate how they should appear and be consumed. Emancipated landscapes need not serve as mirrors of identity or Genius Loci; instead, they open toward their own becoming, indeterminate and unclaimed. In this sense, emancipation extends to the spectator, who is no longer guided by prescriptive design cues but enabled to discover alternative ways of dwelling. Landscape becomes a platform where identities are loosened, expectations suspended, and other modes of inhabiting the Anthropocene may emerge.

Estrangement (Shklovsky)

Estrangement (ostranenie), introduced by Viktor Shklovsky in 1917, defines art’s capacity to make the familiar appear strange. By disrupting automatic perception, estrangement forces renewed attention, extending the act of seeing itself. It is a technique of defamiliarization that resists habitual consumption, opening perception to ambiguity. In landscape and architecture, estrangement unsettles normalized environments, allowing them to be experienced as aesthetic and critical phenomena. Estrangement is both a device and a method: a strategy of un-homing that reawakens the sensible.

Eva Horn

Eva Horn (b. 1965) is a German cultural and literary scholar whose work explores climate, ecology, and the imaginaries of the Anthropocene. A professor at the University of Vienna, she has written influentially on the aesthetics and politics of ecological crisis, situating cultural forms as crucial to understanding environmental transformations. Her book The Future as Catastrophe (2018, English translation) examines apocalyptic scenarios in literature, science, and politics, tracing how cultural narratives shape responses to risk and crisis. More recently, she has advanced an aesthetics of the Anthropocene, focusing on how latent processes, entanglements, and scale clashes can be rendered perceptible in art and design. Horn’s work calls for modes of explication that make the invisible operations of climate change graspable beyond scientific abstraction. Her interdisciplinary approach positions aesthetics as an indispensable dimension of ecological knowledge and politics.

Feminism

Feminism is the movement for equality, justice, and recognition of women’s rights and presence in all fields of life. It has developed in many directions, with different “waves” and theories, but at its core it challenges gender hierarchies and patriarchy. In landscape architecture, feminism is often spoken less in theory and more in practice—who gets to design, whose work is remembered, who is invited to the table and what’s the pay-gap. The field has long overlooked women’s contributions, often writing them out of history, assigning them to a nearby male, or confining them to the margins.

Forest Urbanism

Forest Urbanisms is a design concept that places the forest at the center of urban, agricultural, and territorial organization. It rejects the modernist separation of land uses and instead calls for hybrid morphologies—where forestry, farming, and urbanism are interwoven—to recalibrate ecological systems and socio-cultural relations. As both a political and ecological project, Forest Urbanisms envisions an “Urban Forest Age” in which forests, from vast landscapes to pocket groves, act as catalysts for resilience, ethics, and justice.

Gaia Hypothesis

The Gaia Hypothesis, first proposed by James Lovelock and later expanded by Bruno Latour, describes Earth as a self-regulating system where living and non-living processes interact to maintain conditions for life. Gaia is not nature as backdrop but an active, dynamic assemblage. Bruno Latour warns that Gaia is not a benevolent mother or harmonious organism. It is unstable, reactive, sometimes violent—a force that resists control and reminds us of our fragility. Gaia disrupts the old image of a passive environment waiting for human use, showing instead a restless actor that pushes back.

Genius Loci

Genius Loci refers to the “spirit of place,” a Roman concept revived in architectural theory by Christian Norberg-Schulz. It posits that every site possesses a distinct character that design should reveal or reinforce. While influential, the concept risks essentializing place as stable and singular, obscuring contested histories and ongoing transformations. In contemporary discourse, Genius Loci is both a poetic call for attentiveness and a problematic fixation on identity. To invoke it today is to negotiate between fidelity to atmosphere and critique of place as constructed myth.

Greenwashing

Greenwashing designates the strategic use of ecological rhetoric or imagery to disguise environmentally destructive practices. It is a mode of representation where sustainability is performed as branding rather than enacted as material change. In landscape architecture and urbanism, greenwashing often appears through token plantings, ecological metaphors, or superficial certifications. The term exposes the gap between ecological aesthetics and ecological ethics. Greenwashing is thus less a design error than a political tactic within neoliberal capitalism.

Half-Earth

Proposed by biologist Edward O. Wilson, the Half-Earth concept is a speculative and provocative idea that calls for setting aside half of the planet’s surface for the protection of biodiversity. The idea is that only such a radical measure could prevent mass extinction. The proposal is bold but, needless to say, also deeply contested: whose land is to be taken, who decides what counts as wilderness, what repressive apparatus would emerge to contain population, and what happens to people already living there? It risks repeating colonial patterns under the guise of ecological urgency. At the same time, it dramatizes the scale of change required, refusing small gestures.

Heterotopia

Michel Foucault introduced “heterotopia” to describe real places that function as counter-sites—spaces that mirror, invert, or unsettle the order of society. Examples range from cemeteries to gardens, ships to museums, each operating under distinct rules of time and access. Heterotopias are not utopias but disruptions of the familiar, exposing the multiplicity of spatial orders. In design and theory, they frame space as layered, contradictory, and charged with symbolic surplus. To invoke heterotopia is to recognize the city as a constellation of othered sites within the everyday.

Horizon

In design, the horizon serves as both compositional anchor and shifting limit, framing how space is apprehended through movement. Though grounded in optics, it carries metaphorical weight: the horizon gestures to openness, possibility, and the unfinished. It is where space folds into expectation, always withdrawing as it is approached.

Incomplete / Incompiuto Siciliano

The Incompiuto Siciliano manifesto names unfinished public works in Italy since WWII as a distinct architectural style—concrete skeletons of stadiums, pools, and infrastructure left half-built. These structures stand as contemporary ruins, monuments of excess, corruption, and failed promises. The incompiuto turns error into style, incompletion into aesthetic. It reveals the political, economic, and cultural systems that produced it—public funding, exuberant ambition, collapse. At once tragic and magnetic, these ruins are both scars and sites of imagination. Iincompiuto raises questions about how to treat the unfinished: demolish, complete, or reframe as open projects. They are invitations to rethink ruin not only as past but as ongoing process—spaces where nature reclaims, and where contemplation of incompleteness becomes a form of design through an acknowledgement of low resolution.

Interdependency

Interdependency denotes the relational condition in which humans, non-humans, and technological systems are entangled in reciprocal forms of influence and reliance. In contrast to notions of independence or autonomy, interdependency foregrounds the mutual vulnerabilities and co-constitutions that structure ecological and social life. Within Anthropocene discourse, interdependency highlights that human survival is inseparable from planetary processes, multispecies communities, and infrastructures. The concept aligns with posthumanist perspectives that decentre humanity, advocating for non-dualistic understandings of nature–culture relations. In landscape architecture, interdependency suggests design practices attentive to symbiotic relations between species, and to the maintenance of shared ecologies across scales. It is increasingly framed not as a limitation but as an opportunity for conviviality, justice, and re-imagined forms of cohabitation.

Justice / Ethics

Land Ethic

Aldo Leopold’s “land ethic” is a call to extend the community of moral concern beyond humans to include soils, waters, plants, and animals. It reframes land as not property to be used but a collective organism of which humans are only one part. The ethic demands a shift from domination to respect, from exploitation to stewardship, from economics to ecology. Leopold envisions conservation as a cultural and ethical revolution, where right action preserves “the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic

Landscape Convention

The European Landscape Convention (2000) is a landmark treaty recognizing landscape as a common good, integral to cultural, ecological, and social well-being. It expands the definition of landscape beyond exceptional sites to include ordinary, degraded, and urban environments. The convention emphasizes public participation, democratic responsibility, and cross-border cooperation in shaping landscapes. In theory, it frames landscape not only as object of design but as a shared right and duty. The Landscape Convention articulates landscape as both heritage and ongoing collective project.

Landscape Literacy

Landscape literacy refers to the ability to interpret and critically engage with landscapes as cultural, ecological, and political texts. It entails reading spatial arrangements, material choices, and symbolic references beyond surface appearance. In design education, landscape literacy cultivates awareness of how landscapes encode histories, ideologies, and exclusions. For publics, it empowers agency to question and contest the spaces they inhabit. Landscape literacy is not passive recognition but an active practice of decoding and re-signifying the environment.

Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames

Messy Ecosystems, Orderly Frames (1994), is a seminal essay by landscape architect Joan Iverson Nassauer who argued that people accept and value ecological “messiness” more readily when it is framed by visible signs of care and order. Wildness is tolerated if bounded by neat edges, paths, or cues that signal human intention. This principle reveals how aesthetics and ecology are entangled: what looks “untended” is often rejected, even if it is healthier for biodiversity. But it also risks keeping wildness always subordinated to a human gaze that demands order as reassurance. While it can easily be accused of ‘keeping up appearances’, the essay itself soberly examines various constellations of dynamics between the ecological function and representation, and aims to sway perception.

Metaphor

Metaphor in landscape thought operates as more than rhetorical device; it shapes how environments are conceived, valued, and lived. The garden as paradise or Arcadia, the forest as danger or refuge, the mountain as site of transcendence—such metaphors mediate perception and action. They function as cultural templates that naturalize certain spatial imaginaries while suppressing others. In design, metaphors can guide form-making but also constrain imagination by reproducing inherited tropes. To interrogate landscape metaphors is to examine the ways language organizes the sensible world.

Modernism

Modernism in architecture and landscape was a movement of the 20th century marked by functionalism, sobriety of form, and rejection of ornament. It aligned with a social project of progress, housing, hygiene, and collective improvement. While it carried utopian aims—better living for all—it also imposed strict forms, sometimes erasing local cultures and ecologies. Modernism unfolded in waves: heroic, brutalist, late-modern, each promising renewal yet often producing alienation. Its rhetoric of universality often masked its exclusions. Modernism shaped entire cities—housing estates, plazas, infrastructures—setting standards for openness, clarity, and rational order. Today its legacy is both admired and critiqued, leaving behind spaces that can feel both visionary and harsh, in need of re-interpretation rather than nostalgia.

Nature-Culture Dialectics

The nature–culture dialectic frames nature and culture not as fixed, opposing realms but as forces locked in continuous tension and mutual transformation. What was once cast as a dualism — nature as external, passive, exploitable versus culture as active, shaping, superior — dissolves under scrutiny. Bruno Latour argued that “we have never been modern,” since humans and nonhumans have always been bound in hybrids and collectives. Donna Haraway advances the notion of “naturecultures” to highlight co-constitution, while Philippe Descola and Eduardo Viveiros de Castro demonstrate that many non-Western cosmologies never produced a strict divide to begin with. The Anthropocene makes this dialectical entanglement undeniable: climate change and extinction show how geophysical and cultural processes feed into one another. In landscape and architecture, the dualist residue still lingers in tropes of wilderness versus city, or nature as a backdrop for culture. To treat nature and culture dialectically is to position design as an arena of negotiation among human and more-than-human agencies. The dialectic refuses purity and forces confrontation with the ongoing interplay of forces that structure our environments.

Onto-Cartography

Onto-cartography, introduced by Levi R. Bryant, is a practice of mapping how entities—human and nonhuman—interact to produce worlds. It shifts cartography from representing geography to tracing ontological relations and power dynamics. Machines, infrastructures, plants, and laws are all mapped as actors that shape terrains of existence. For design, onto-cartography highlights how spatial arrangements emerge from complex assemblages rather than singular intentions. It is a method for visualizing the invisible architectures of agency.

Ontopoetics

Ontopoetics is a way of thinking where being (ontos) and poetics are entwined: existence is not only fact but also expression, unfolding as story, image, or rhythm. The term suggests that reality speaks poetically, not only scientifically. It resists the split between cold ontology and soft aesthetics. To speak of ontopoetics is to say that how things appear, resonate, or move us is part of their being, not an aftertaste. Critics may see it as vague or too lyrical, but it insists that poetics belongs at the heart of how we understand existence. Ontopoetics invites attention to the expressive life of materials, forms, and ecologies. A path, a tree line, a floodplain—each has ontological weight, but also poetic force in how it is lived, perceived, narrated. Designing with ontopoetics is designing with both fact and resonance at once.

OOO – Object-Oriented Ontology

Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), developed by Graham Harman and others, posits that objects exist independently of human access or perception. It rejects correlationism by affirming that objects withdraw into their own reality, irreducible to relations or appearances. In this framework, rocks, plants, infrastructures, and artworks all share ontological dignity. For design and aesthetics, OOO destabilizes anthropocentrism, inviting attention to the agency and opacity of things. It cultivates a speculative imagination where landscapes are not passive scenery but autonomous assemblages of objects.

Operational Landscape

The operational landscape, a term advanced by Neil Brenner and colleagues, describes territories organized primarily for resource extraction, circulation, and logistical control. It extends the notion of landscape beyond visible form to include infrastructures, hinterlands, and zones of production that sustain urban life. Such landscapes are less sites of dwelling than engines of metabolic flow—mines, ports, highways, energy corridors. They expose how urbanization operates at planetary scales, rendering even remote areas integral to the city. The operational landscape reframes design as engagement with global systems of operation.

Paradigm Shift (Kuhn)

Thomas Kuhn, in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (1962), described paradigm shifts as moments when the dominant framework of knowledge breaks and a new one takes hold. Science, he argued, does not progress smoothly but through ruptures that redefine what counts as truth. The concept has spread far beyond science, sometimes overused as a cliché for any change, landscape architecture conferences included! Yet its core insight remains: paradigms are not eternal, they collapse, and when they do, reality itself is reorganized in thought, not only intellectual but social and institutional.

Perception

Perception is the process of sensing and interpreting the world through the body—sight, sound, touch, smell, memory, all entangled. It is not passive reception but active construction. Philosophers like Merleau-Ponty stressed that perception is embodied, always from a position, never from nowhere. What we perceive is shaped by culture, habit, and power as much as by the senses. Perception is therefore unstable, contested, political and can not reveal an object in their entirety, no matter the method of observation.

Picturesque

The Picturesque arose in 18th-century England as an aesthetic category between the beautiful and the sublime, codified through painting, garden design, and later public parks. Its irregular forms, curated vistas, and harmonious compositions promised a softened vision of nature, naturalizing hierarchy while aestheticizing conquest in colonial landscapes. The legacy survives in 19th-century park design and is still present today in mainstream landscape architecture. The persistent appeal of harmony obscures deeper ecological and political tensions: the picturesque reduces landscape to visual properties, staging an image of equilibrium while concealing conflict, extraction, and crisis. In the Anthropocene, this aesthetic regime risks becoming anachronistic—an outdated comfort that masks urgency by aestheticizing harmony.

Planetary Urbanization

Planetary urbanization, theorized by Neil Brenner and Christian Schmid, argues that urbanization now extends across the entire globe, dissolving the distinction between city and countryside. Resource frontiers, logistical corridors, and hinterlands are integral to the urban fabric, even when far from traditional city centers. The concept reframes urbanization as a planetary condition, producing new socio-ecological metabolisms and inequalities. It challenges design to think beyond bounded cities toward infrastructural and ecological systems at global scales. Planetary urbanization situates every landscape as implicated in urban processes.

Pluriversalism

Pluriversalism is a philosophical and political concept that calls for the recognition of multiple coexisting worlds, epistemologies, and ontologies. Emerging from decolonial theory, political ecology, and convivialist thought, it critiques modernist universalism, which seeks to impose a single framework of rationality, progress, or development. Pluriversalism instead asserts that diverse cultures and cosmologies embody valid, situated knowledges, and that planetary futures must be negotiated through their coexistence. The Second Convivialist Manifesto (2020) frames pluriversalism as an ethical stance that values maximum cultural diversity compatible with shared survival. In design and landscape discourse, pluriversalism underlines the need for practices that are context-sensitive, open to non-Western ontologies, and responsive to multispecies worlds. It is thus both a critique of homogenization and an affirmative call for plural pathways of living together.

Posthumanism

Posthumanism challenges the centrality of the human, arguing for a view of the world where humans are only one actor among many—technological, ecological, nonhuman. It critically disturbs the hierarchy that placed man above nature, animals, and machines. At times, it risks becoming too abstract, but its force is in refusing the old humanist frame that made everything revolve around us. It demands new ethics of relation and responsibility. For landscape architecture, posthumanism opens the door to seeing landscapes as multi-species and multi-agency systems. Design is then less about control than negotiation with other assemblages, agencies, flows, and machines.

Postmodernism

Postmodernism in architecture rose in the late 20th century as a reaction against modernism’s austerity and universal claims. It embraced ornament, irony, eclectic references, and contextual play. It challenged the idea of one truth in form, opening space for plurality, contradiction, even kitsch. But it also slid into spectacle, sometimes losing critical edge and sinking into surface games. Its legacy is mixed: liberation for some, confusion for others. For landscape architects, postmodernism meant freedom from strict functionalism—pastiche plazas, symbolic gestures, layered narratives. Today it reads as both provocation and warning: design can embrace multiplicity, but risks hollowing into style without substance.

Postnatural

Postnatural refers to landscapes, ecologies, or beings shaped by human intervention to the point where the line between natural and artificial dissolves. Think of genetically modified organisms, engineered rivers, urban ecologies. The term resists nostalgia for a pure “nature” that no longer exists, if it ever did. It points to the reality that all environments are now touched by culture, technology, and design. Yet it can also hide responsibility, as if everything altered is simply “postnatural” without asking who altered it and why. The postnatural is not exception but condition: every site is already hybrid, already mediated. Since Nature is a cultural construct, we categorized it under ‘Imaginaries & Discursive Sites.

Production of Nature

The “production of nature,” a term developed by Neil Smith, contests the idea of nature as external and given. It argues that capitalist relations actively shape ecosystems, resources, and environments through labor, technology, and political economy. Nature appears not as untouched origin but as a product of social processes, unevenly distributed and commodified. In landscape architecture, this framing reveals every “natural” site as historically and politically constructed. To design with nature, then, is to intervene in its ongoing production.

Pyro-Gardening

Pyro-gardening designates practices of cultivating landscapes through controlled burning. Long employed by Indigenous communities, it frames fire as a generative agent rather than purely destructive force. Pyro-gardening maintains ecological cycles, fosters biodiversity, and reduces catastrophic wildfire risk.

Pyrocene

The Pyrocene, proposed by Stephen Pyne, names the fire-dominated epoch where combustion—fossil fuels, wildfires, industrial burning—defines planetary conditions. It reframes the Anthropocene through the lens of fire as both ecological process and anthropogenic driver. The Pyrocene foregrounds how human economies intensify fire beyond ecological rhythms, destabilizing climate and ecosystems. For landscape studies, it situates fire as a central agent of design, crisis, and adaptation. It is an epoch marked by the reign of flames.

Queer

Queer names identities, practices, and perspectives that resist heteronormativity and patriarchal structures. In design fields, it also gestures toward openness, refusal of fixed categories, and imagining other futures. The word carries both political urgency and fragility: it belongs first to queer lives and struggles, not as a metaphor to be freely borrowed. Yet it can also describe projects that resist classification, that trouble norms of use, form, or identity in space. To queer is to destabilize what is assumed natural or proper. Queer points both to the work of queer designers and to spaces that resist being boxed—projects that disrupt patriarchal orders and open space for other ways of being together. It asks literally and metaphorically: what might landscapes become when decolonized from centuries of cis-hetero structures?

Ready-to-hand / Present-at-hand

Heidegger distinguishes between the ready-to-hand (Zuhandenheit) and the present-at-hand (Vorhandenheit) to describe modes of encountering things. The ready-to-hand names tools and objects as they function seamlessly in practice, integrated into action without explicit awareness. The present-at-hand emerges when breakdown occurs, and objects confront us as detached, observable entities. In design, this distinction highlights how landscapes often withdraw into background utility until crisis or estrangement forces them into view. It reveals perception as conditioned by use, disruption, and disclosure.

Relative Universalism

Relative universalism is a term developed by Philippe Descola to navigate between cultural particularism and absolute universalism. It acknowledges that while different societies conceptualize human–non-human relations through distinct ontologies, these worldviews can still be compared through patterns of continuity and discontinuity. Rather than positing a single “nature” opposed to diverse “cultures,” relative universalism insists that all societies produce relational schemas that define likeness, difference, and interaction. This framework allows anthropology and allied disciplines to avoid both cultural relativism and ethnocentric universalism. For landscape architecture, relative universalism highlights the importance of engaging design through plural ontological perspectives, while still enabling translation and dialogue across them. It provides a theoretical grounding for rethinking landscape as a multiplicity of naturecultures rather than as a universal backdrop.

Representation

Representation in landscape architecture refers to the drawings, models, and digital renderings through which ideas are communicated and tested. These mediations are never neutral; they frame perception, value, and authority within the design process. Philosophically, representation invokes debates on whether images capture reality or construct it, from Plato’s suspicion of mimesis to poststructuralist critiques of signification. In landscape discourse, representation both enables collective negotiation and risks reducing complex ecologies to surface images. To question representation is to ask how landscapes are imagined, translated, and legitimized before they are built.

Resilience

Resilience denotes the capacity of landscapes to absorb disturbance, adapt, and continue functioning without collapsing into another regime. Originating in ecology (Holling, 1973), it emphasizes cycles of disturbance and renewal rather than equilibrium. In policy and design, resilience often becomes a normative ideal, mobilized to justify adaptation to crisis rather than systemic change. Landscapes that are resilient may still perpetuate social or ecological injustice. The concept thus oscillates between technical measure, political tool, and aspirational metaphor.

Resolution / Low-Res

Resolution refers to the clarity or definition with which an image, object, or environment is perceived. In design theory, “low-res” signals an intentional ambiguity, where indeterminacy prompts active interpretation rather than passive consumption. A low-res landscape resists closure, refusing the seamlessness of high-definition representation. It opens perception to estrangement, where meaning is unsettled and multiple readings coexist. Low-res acknowledges that landscapes cannot be fully resolved, as they are entangled in countless relations, each a thing in itself; to assume such complexities could be mastered by human minds alone is a conceit. Low-res is thus not a lack but the very ceiling of resolution in landscape.

Retreat

Retreat describes the deliberate withdrawal of human intervention from landscapes destabilized by climate change, contamination, or disaster. It contrasts with control-oriented adaptation by acknowledging limits to design and management. Retreat does not signify abandonment but re-situates agency, allowing ecological processes to unfold without constant anthropogenic steering. In landscape discourse, it raises ethical and political questions: who retreats, from where, and at what cost. As a practice, retreat stages humility, marking a shift from mastery to relinquishment.

Rhizome

In A Thousand Plateaus (1980), Deleuze and Guattari describe the rhizome as a model of growth and connection without hierarchy or fixed center, unlike the tree which branches in order. A rhizome spreads sideways, always in the middle, with no beginning or end. The rhizome resists order and control, suggesting systems that are fluid, networked, and unfinished. It can be over-romanticized, but it remains a strong image against rigid thinking, against singular authority. In architecture and landscape, rhizome has become a metaphor for non-hierarchical design—distributed networks, porous structures, spaces that invite multiple paths. It encourages designers to think in terms of connections and flows rather than fixed centers.

Right to the City/Landscape

The “right to the city,” a concept articulated by Henri Lefebvre and expanded by David Harvey, frames urban space as a collective resource to be claimed and reshaped by its inhabitants. It is not a right to the existing city, but to the power of remaking it against the forces of privatization, exclusion, and commodification. The notion emphasizes urban life as a site of struggle, where access, participation, and use-value are contested. In landscape and urbanism, it underscores that design must confront questions of justice, belonging, and collective authorship. The right to the city insists that space is political, and that its transformation is a matter of shared agency.

Risk

Risk is the possibility of harm or loss under conditions of uncertainty. It is both statistical calculation and lived condition. Risk is not only environmental—floods, storms, fires—but also social and political, distributed unequally across populations. It is an ontological condition of living in unstable worlds, intensified by climate crisis and global systems. To speak of risk is also to speak of responsibility: who carries it, who avoids it, and who designs for it. Risk frames how spaces are planned for resilience and safety, but also how uncertainty itself is acknowledged as part of life. To design with risk is to negotiate between protection and exposure, control and adaptation.

Safety

Safety refers to conditions where harm is minimized and users can act without fear. In public space, it involves physical, social, and psychological dimensions. Safety can be protective, but it can also become over-securitized, turning public space into controlled space of limited options and surveillance. Measures against crime or terrorism, for example, can produce atmospheres of fear even as they claim to prevent it. Safety is never neutral; it always balances freedom and control. Safety is a practical demand—lighting, sightlines, accessibility, protective barriers—but also a question of atmosphere and trust. Designing for safety means more than fortification: it means enabling people to inhabit space openly, without constant surveillance or threat.

Scale

Scale describes the relative size and extent of things, from body to building, landscape to planet. It is not only measure but also relation: how small gestures resonate within larger systems. Design often slips into one scale at a time, but scale is always nested, always layered. To think across scales—what some call transcalar thinking—is to refuse the split between detail and system, between a bench and a watershed. Scale is not only a technical matter but an attitude: to design small with the big in mind, to let local actions register at larger scales, and to see how global forces bear down on intimate sites. Thinking transcalar spreads focus, raises awareness and invites the sublime.

Set-Theoretic Ontology

Set-theoretic ontology, articulated by Alain Badiou, grounds being in mathematics, specifically in set theory. For Badiou, “being qua being” is pure multiplicity without inherent unity, with sets as the only adequate language for ontology. Events, truths, and subjects emerge as ruptures within this mathematical order, interrupting the situation. Though abstract, the framework resonates with design discourse: landscapes appear as multiplicities rather than singular essences, structured yet open to interruption. Set-theoretic ontology displaces identity with the logic of infinite relationality.

Simulacra & Simulation

In Simulacra & Simulation, Jean Baudrillard argued that in late-modern societies, signs and images no longer represent reality but create their own reality. The simulacrum is not imitation (mimesis) but substitution, a copy without an original. This shift means that representation collapses into simulation: Disneyland, advertising, digital media all produce worlds where image is reality. It is a disturbing thought—that reality may already be simulation, endlessly circulating signs. Baudrillard’s critique may warn us against spaces that function as mere simulations of “nature” or “community.” Unlike mimesis, which at least refers back to a model, simulation floats free, risking landscapes that are pure image without depth.

Smooth/Striated Space

Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari distinguish smooth and striated space as contrasting spatial logics. Striated space is organized, gridded, and hierarchical—typified by the city, the map, the metric. Smooth space is open, continuous, and intensive—like the desert, the sea, or nomadic trajectories. Yet these are not binaries but interpenetrating modes, as smoothness is continually striated and striation continually smoothed. In landscape and architecture, the concept reframes design as oscillation between control and openness. Smooth/striated space is less classification than process, a tension structuring how spaces are lived and produced.

Speculative Realism

Speculative realism is a philosophical movement that resists correlationism, affirming a reality independent of human thought. Thinkers such as Quentin Meillassoux, Graham Harman, and Ray Brassier diverge in method but converge in rejecting the reduction of being to its accessibility for humans. It re-centers the opacity and autonomy of objects, forces, and processes. For landscape and design theory, speculative realism opens the possibility of engaging environments as worlds in themselves, not just backdrops for human experience. It is an invitation to think with the inhuman and the withdrawn.

Surplus

Surplus signifies an excess beyond immediate function or necessity, a remainder that generates value, tension, and transformation. In Marxian terms, surplus value drives capitalist exploitation, extracted from labor beyond subsistence. Psychoanalytic theory (Lacan, Žižek) refigures surplus as jouissance—an excessive enjoyment or drive that resists assimilation into utility. In landscapes, surplus appears as features without function, aesthetic excess, or ecological proliferation: elements that cannot be reduced to purpose yet shape experience and meaning. Surplus resists closure; it produces ambiguity, conflict, and possibility. Far from waste, it is the unstable core through which new orders emerge. Surplus is the reminder that systems, whether ecological or social, always generate more than they can contain.

Symbiocen / Symbiosis

Symbiosis describes living together of different species in relationships that may be mutual, parasitic, or somewhere in between. The term Symbiocene (Glenn Albrecht) names a hoped-for era after the Anthropocene, where human and nonhuman life would thrive in mutual benefit. It is an attractive vision, but maybe also too clean. Symbiosis is not always gentle; it can be extraction and dependency as much as cooperation. To imagine the Symbiocene risks smoothing over conflict, forgetting that living together is often tense, fragile, unstable. Thinking symbiotically means designing with entanglement—plants, animals, humans, soils, machines. But it also means staying with the doubt: coexistence is messy, not only harmony.

Technocene

The term Technocene has emerged as one of several alternative framings of the Anthropocene, alongside notions such as the Capitalocene or Plutocene. It emphasizes technology—not humanity per se—as the dominant geological and ecological force shaping the planet. From fossil-fuel infrastructures to geoengineering proposals, the Technocene highlights how technological systems organize both environmental degradation and potential mitigation. Critics note that this framing risks reproducing technocratic, solutionist logics by privileging technical fixes over systemic social and political change. Yet, as a critical narrative, the Technocene exposes the scale of planetary dependence on technological mediation and the deep entanglement between human futures and technological trajectories. For landscape and urban design, it invites reflection on whether design can resist or inevitably reproduces the technological domination of ecosystems.

Temporality

Temporality refers to the modes through which time is structured, experienced, and articulated. In philosophy, it has ranged from Augustine’s phenomenological reflections to Heidegger’s analysis of being-toward-death. In landscape, temporality emphasizes growth, decay, succession, and cyclical rhythms, positioning design as an engagement with processes rather than fixed outcomes. Temporality destabilizes spatial permanence, reminding us that every site is an interval within longer durations. It makes visible the inseparability of landscape from becoming.

The Ignorant Schoolmaster (Rancière)

Jacques Rancière’s The Ignorant Schoolmaster (1987) tells the story of Joseph Jacotot, who taught students without knowing their language, demonstrating that intelligence is universally equal. The book critiques hierarchical pedagogies that presume ignorance and superiority of the master. For Rancière, emancipation begins when students discover their own capacity to learn, independent of instruction. Applied to design and landscape, the concept undermines expert dominance, suggesting that users and publics already possess interpretive power. The ignorant schoolmaster stages equality as a principle, not an outcome.

The Third Thing

Rancière describes the “third thing” as the shared object of attention that mediates between teacher and student, artist and spectator. It is neither a transmission of knowledge nor a direct imposition of meaning but a space where interpretation unfolds autonomously. The third thing interrupts hierarchy by staging equality: all are equally capable of relating to it and producing meaning. In design and landscape, the third thing can be the project itself, operating as a site where publics negotiate sense beyond authorial intent. It names the interval where emancipation becomes possible.

Third Landscape (Clément)

The “third landscape,” formulated by Gilles Clément, refers to neglected, marginal, or unmanaged spaces—roadside edges, fallow lands, infrastructural fringes—where biodiversity thrives. Unlike parks or reserves, these spaces are not curated but emerge as residues of abandonment or indifference. Clément frames the third landscape as a democratic reservoir of life, outside of planning and control. In landscape discourse, it challenges dominant aesthetics by valuing the spontaneous, the overlooked, and the residual. The third landscape embodies the ecological and political potential of the un-designed.

Urban Political Ecology

Urban political ecology (UPE) examines how ecological processes in cities are inseparable from power relations, capital, and social struggle. It challenges the natural/urban divide by showing how water, air, green space, and infrastructure are produced and contested through politics. Rooted in Marxian and ecological thought, UPE foregrounds issues of justice, inequality, and environmental racism in the urban fabric. In design and planning, it highlights that ecological interventions are never neutral but embedded in governance and conflict. Urban political ecology situates the city as an arena where nature is always political.

Utopia

Utopia, coined by Thomas More in 1516, names both “no place” (ou-topos) and “good place” (eu-topos), embodying the tension between impossibility and aspiration. Throughout history, utopian thought has informed urban design: Renaissance “ideal cities” organized by symmetry and fortification, Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City model as a synthesis of town and country, and Le Corbusier’s Ville Radieuse as a rationalist project of order and light. These visions oscillated between emancipatory promise and authoritarian imposition, where the pursuit of perfection risked suppressing plurality. In critical theory, Ernst Bloch conceived utopia as the anticipatory impulse of hope, while Fredric Jameson cast it as a necessary method for thinking beyond capitalism. For landscape architecture, utopia persists as speculative ecology, communal commons, or experimental grounds that contest the status quo without collapsing into blueprint. Utopia thus names both danger and necessity: the discipline of imagining other ways of living together.

Void

Void refers to emptiness, absence, or cleared space. Philosophically, it has been seen as both nothing and potential, the ground where new meaning can emerge. For Heidegger, emptiness is not just lack but the opening where being discloses itself. In art and design, voids can emancipate subjectivity—giving the viewer or user space to project, imagine, or simply exist without saturation. Yet void is also feared, often filled too quickly with function, program, or spectacle. Voids are not wasted space but charged gaps. They allow rest, ambiguity, estrangement, or even emancipation—places where people confront openness and themselves.

Walking / Strollology / Dérive

Walking has long been framed as both everyday practice and philosophical method. For Thoreau, in his essay Walking (1862), it aligned with wildness and freedom from the constraints of settled life. The Situationists later radicalized walking through the dérive, drifting through urban environments to expose hidden psychogeographies and disrupt capitalist spatial logics. Michel de Certeau described walking in the city as a tactic, a small improvisation that resists the strategic control of planners and institutions. Jane Jacobs, in turn, emphasized walking as the medium of urban life, and her legacy continues in Jane’s Walks—annual citizen-led tours that cultivate local knowledge, civic participation, and collective critique of urban space. Rebecca Solnit has further traced walking as a cultural practice of necessity, leisure, and reflection. Swiss sociologist Lucius Burckhardt, coined the term “strollology”, translated from German Spaziergangswissenschaft. In design discourse, walking foregrounds the embodied and temporal dimensions of landscape, revealing space not as fixed form but as lived sequence.

Wastewater Urbanism

Wastewater urbanism describes approaches to urban design that integrate sewage and water treatment as spatial and ecological infrastructures. Rather than concealing waste flows, it foregrounds them as productive systems—constructed wetlands, bio-filtration landscapes, or civic infrastructures that double as public space. Wastewater urbanism reframes pollution not as residue to be hidden but as a material to be metabolized within ecological cycles. It unsettles the dichotomy of clean versus dirty by situating waste as constitutive of urban metabolism. The concept ties infrastructure, ecology, and public life into a single spatial register.

World-Ecology

World-ecology, developed by Jason W. Moore, theorizes capitalism as a way of organizing nature, binding ecological and social relations into a single historical process. It challenges separations between “society” and “environment,” arguing that capital operates through the appropriation of “cheap nature”: labor, energy, food, raw materials. World-ecology reframes crises of climate and extinction as crises of the capitalist world-ecology itself, not as external shocks. For landscape and urban studies, it emphasizes that every design operates within global webs of extraction, metabolism, and inequality. World-ecology is thus both analytic and critical horizon, situating the production of environment within the dynamics of capital and power.