SLU news

Studying urban landscapes across hemispheres

Published: 25 June 2019

Urban landscapes are conditioned by water regimes, and those are changing when climate is, all around the globe – this requires the physical adaptation of urbanised areas to new precipitation patterns, river run-off, sea level rises etc. while also studying how urbanisation can contribute to counter resource depletion, CO2 production and global warming. One of SLU’s academic exchange projects within the Swedish Linneaus Palme Partnership programme allows SLU students and teachers in the field of landscape architecture (LTV faculty of Landscape Planning, Horticulture and Crop Production Science) to share knowledge on the physical transformation of urban landscapes with students and teachers in urban design from the University of Buenos Aires (FADU faculty of architecture and urban design).

Even if the urbanised areas in Sweden and Argentina, in Europe and Latin America differ greatly, approaches to understand, frame and solve questions of ecological, economic, social and aesthetic importance need to be addressed from a planetary perspective at both places. This is why co-educating young professionals and academics plays a crucial role for Lisa Diedrich, professor of landscape architecture at LTV and director of the research platform SLU Urban Futures, and Flavio Janches, professor of architecture and urban design, and director of the Urbanism Department at FADU. They currently invite students from both places to study successful cases of urban upgrading, as the German Emscher Park project, to inform similar cases in the Buenos Aires metropolitan area, such as the polluted urban river catchment of Reconquista. Further, they involve methods of community empowerment and urban open space co-creation, developed in Buenos Aires, to inspire urban transformation projects in Malmö.

This Linneaus Palme Partnership is running since 2015 and was just granted another year of student and teacher exchange. Per year the grant allows two students and two teachers of each university to integrate the other institution for a study or teaching period of 3 weeks (teachers)/ 3 months (students). The aim of this exchange project is

  • to allow both students and staff to learn from each other across the disciplines of landscape architecture (SLU Landscape) and urbanism (UBA Urban Design) and develop their agency to tackle global challenges in cross-disciplinary ways through teaching and researching about the design of climate change affected water landscapes, evolutionary open urban spaces and urban commoning.
  • to educate students towards critical thinking about global processes and their local implications, towards thinking together the effects of natural processes and people’s practices in urbanising water landscapes, and increase their interest in preparing a career in development projects.
  • UBA Urban Design has experience with the upgrading of marginalised settlements in fragile urban water landscapes (in the Rio de la Plata urban delta), SLU Landscape with the urban transformation of old industrial areas in coastal cities (in Malmö and other European harbour cities) – together, a broader spectrum of action-oriented critical knowledge on the global processes of urbanisation affecting urban water landscapes will arise and nurture teaching and research at the home universities.

Facts:

Interested in the Linneaus Palme Partnership on urban landscapes in Buenos Aires? Contact Lisa Diedrich.


Contact

Lisa Diedrich, Professor

The Department of Landscape Architecture, Planning and Management, SLU

lisa.diedrich@slu.se, +46 40-41 54 24