Conference

New Dimensions.

Reflection of the Enlargement of Scale and Overlapping of Diciplines

The traces of cultural and non-cultural human activity on landscapes and cities have increasingly impressed themselves on the face of the Earth. The consequences of the past 150 years are serious, and have brought us to the start of a new era. Nature and the landscape – not only the built environment – are becoming the object of a consciously planned and regulated landscape-creation, with a balanced proportion of use, care and protection. In Europe, a wilderness is not, and never can be, a true wilderness, but “only” a deliberately planned unregulated area whose extent and regulation level have been the subject of social agreement. All of Europe is becoming a regulated and consciously shaped territory. The increasing value of carefully planned landscape and built environment will require an increasing number of experts trained to tackle these large scale hybrid tasks and projects.

With the growing capacity and intensity of our possibilities to change the world, there is an increase in the scale of our interventions and infl uences on the environment, accompanied by the almost limitless communication connectivity of society in the physical and virtual spheres. The Earth has grown, in relative terms, smaller- yet in contrast, the problems associated with it are growing larger. Globalisation provides a global extent and format for problems on the macro and micro scales, such as global warming, water management, sustainable development of cities and landscapes, the “development” of transportation, migration and assimilation, etc., in an ever more troubling and unignorable form. This increase in scale and the overlapping of disciplines in the fi elds of architecture – urbanism – landscape architecture in current practice needs to be refl ected in current education. As we term it, this is the “new dimension of our profession”.