Landscape-Infrastructure: shifts of meaning for changing cities

Abstract

Given the current global situation and the problems we need to face, landscape architects are more than ever before confronted with the task of planning and transforming complex cultural landscapes. In the light of this awareness, many professional figures, have once again turned their attention to the large systems of infrastructural networks, that are key to the expansion and functioning of our cities, looking for effective solutions to find a balance between the demand for use and the sustainability and quality of urban environments. The operative landscape design category going by the name of Landscape Infrastructure, marks a major change in the role that Landscape Architecture has played in relation to the production of urban and public spaces over the last century, by actively engaging the political agency, with new kinds of private/public partnerships, capable of creating new landscape super-organisms representing a genuine cultural shift.