Tenth International Conference on The Constructed Environment

Abstract

Landscape Architecture has evolved, reconceptualized, and relabeled as Landscape Urbanism, Ecological Urbanism, and others, as a total urbanization process that merges nature and the constructed environment. Merging themes such as urbanization, nature, and ecology, the framework is particularly relevant to approach recent landscape transformations under the pressuring issues of a planetary urbanization under environmental crisis. However, its application on the so-called Global South, requires rethinking its basic premisses and methods. In Brazil, a history of a fragile democracy and politico-economic instability produces contrasting scenarios. Mining, agriculture and water resources infrastructures have as collateral, conflicts with indigenous populations, and the deforestation. This work proposes a method for rethinking landscape projects that takes into consideration two main categories with which to approach landscape transformations: time and space. It becomes necessary to rethink critically landscape projects in the past, present and future considering landscape as a fluid medium. As infrastructural interventions are willy-nilly located in specific times and spaces, the elaboration of timelines is a useful tool for their assessment. With the intention to orient spatial design practices, alternative timelines are constructed in a way that fiction can inspire reality and vice versa. The result is the production of “backwards utopias”, or “retrotopias” that allows simultaneous critical assessment of the past and imagining new futures. Here, utopia is not a non-space, but grounded in space and history, in order to imagine fictions that are simultaneously reality grounded and projective.