Visiting Scholar Corinne Jaquand discusses select examples of urban renewal in France and Germany in which the landscape project intervenes at the beginning of the planning process:

In Europe, new planning practices highlight the landscape as a foremost organizing strategy. The technocratic paradigm that gave priority to the program over the site has thus been inverted. It is the site itself with its distinctive geographic, environmental and patrimonial features that now dictates the planning process.

This seminar will present select examples of urban renewal in France and Germany in which the landscape project intervenes at the beginning of the planning process. It serves to manage complex scales in time and space as well as taking into account programmatic uncertainties with regards to the economic fluctuations and public participation. Such projects concern vast plots of abandoned land, bequeathed from the industrial era; urban fringe zones between suburb and countryside; areas where habitat and agriculture are threatened by the expansion of infrastructure. Depending on the circumstances, architects and/or landscapers are the designers of this new type of master plan, operating a sort of symbiosis between their professional capacities.

These projects elicit several questions: does the site’s determining factor induce an effect of globalization in the method and aesthetic of the projects? Do architects and landscapers encompass the relationships to natural ecosystems in the same way? What role can we attribute to cultural history which is echoed in the semantic variations between French and German to define contemporary landscapes?

I will attempt to answer these questions in examining, more particularly, the development of metropolitan planning through landscape in Germany throughout the twentieth century. I will retrace the steps that had led from a centrifugal planning procedure, radiating out from a hyper-center towards the periphery, to a comprehensive understanding of metropolitan areas as inhabited landscapes.

Corinne Jaquand received a PhD in History of Art (EHESS) and was trained in architecture and urbanism. She is a senior lecturer at the École nationale supérieure d’architecture de Clermont Ferrand, where she teaches the history of architecture and the city. She is also a member of LIAT (Laboratoire Architecture, Infrastructure, Territoire). Her research topics revolve around the topics of contemporary history of European cities, landscape and architecture. In November 2009, she published Architectures au-delà du Mur, Berlin, Varsovie, Moscou 1989-2009, with Ewa Bérard, which consisted of a monograph on the evolution of three post-Socialist capital cities through their architecture and urban forms.

Corinne Jaquand was a Visiting Scholar at the CCA in 2010.