Diploma project
Autumn 2021
Institute of Urbanism and Landscape
Messy landscapes are abandoned or unexploited frag-ments of the urban fabric that grow outside the human intention. These spaces are both a condition and a process, constantly in transformation. The fragments tend to look messy, as there is little to no level of maintenance. Never-theless, these spaces are considered to have greater bio-logical diversity than those more subjected to exploitation and control.
Messy landscapes are part of the everyday scene and are often misunderstood and overlooked. The messy landscapes are ambiguous and transitional spaces that create dynamic open frag-ments that serve as innovative social, cultural, and ecological spaces.
Urban green spaces are becoming increasingly more programmed and fixed, an ideal that leads to a restrictive and static reality, often fragile to change. Instead, what one should strive for are spaces that are capable of adjusting over time, that are open for and embrace forces and pro-cesses outside human control, thus creating a deeper understanding of the complexity of our surroundings.
This diploma seeks to consider plants and plant communities from a different perspec-tive, and from this strives to validate an aesthetic that has its root in urban ecology. Fur-ther, it explores how these landscapes function and reveals the opportunities they pos-sess. Lastly, the goal is to examine how messy landscapes function within the urban city in relation to patterns of human behavior.
Emma Eriksen-Hirschberg / emmahirschberg@hotmail.com / https://issuu.com/emmahirschberg
