After supervision

It is interesting to see how you begin to enter the mind field of Malmø in different scales, spanning from the territorial scale to the urban design scale, from strategic to concrete projects. As I discussed with some of you, the challenge when it comes to scale is to find a useful scale for the phenomenon that you want to explore and then hit the right abstraction level for the scale that you choose to work in. Many of you have also started to encircle and focus on specific themes so as cultural diversity, infrastructure, water, agriculture, urban growth or energy. I recommended further reading for some of you and I will post everything here so that the whole group gets the same information, you choose what you think is relevant to look into for your own work.

The EU Water Framework Directive
Breathless coastal seas
WWF: Baltic Ecoregion Programme
Documentary on cod fishing in the Baltic Sea

Some of you have asked to get the texts from mosaïc::region as a document, the text is in Swedish, but you can use Google Translate and get an approximate translation into English or other languages.

Journal: MARG – byen under press
Book: Water Urbanisms, ed: Bruno De Meulder & Kelly Shannon
ISBN 978 908 5066 729
Article: The planetary gardener, portrait interview with Gilles Clemént in ‘scape 2007#2

And for the ones working in the transition zones between the city and the agricultural land; a quote from the article Journey through the Picturesque (a Notebook) by Iñaki Abalos & Juan Herreros in LANDSCAPE URBANISM (AA manual 2003)

The dissolution of the opposition between nature and artifice on every scale requires a programme of works that is nothing less than the rediscovery, through architecture, of the contemporary human position in the world. “Areas of impunity” are precisely the zones where, as an exception, we find this ambiguous condition imprecisely defined as public or natural space. They are formerly degraded zones, endowed with a new urbanity by the gaze of new social subjects. Look at the wasteland beyond the outer suburbs; look at the way almost all the emerging forms of socialization have been constructed in them (although – or precisely because- they are degraded territories). We are tempted to ask whether they might contain a metaphoric model, or whether it is possible to think of it of their complement, de–edification, given that the term” wasteland” embodies a fascinating concept: land that has lost its attributes before the approach of the city, that is sterilized as the occupation proceeds, but also given a transcendental role in its new context. We ask ourselves whether architecture could be constructed the same way.

Kjerstin