Experiential Landscape

An Approach to People, Place and Space

Kevin Thwaites, Ian Simkins

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2006
• ISBN:
  9781134298518
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Architecture
• Categoría: Urban Planning & Landscaping

Experiential Landscape offers new ways of looking at the relationship between people and the outdoor open spaces they use in their everyday lives. The book takes a holistic view of the relationship between humans and their environment, integrating experiential and spatial dimensions of the outdoors, and exploring the theory and application of environmental design disciplines, most notably landscape architecture and urban design.

The book explores specific settings in which an experiential approach has been applied, setting out a vocabulary and methods of application, and offers new readings of experiential characteristics in site analysis and design. Offering readers a range of accessible mapping tools and details of what participative approaches mean in practice, this is a new, innovative and practical methodology.

The bookprovides an invaluable resource for students, academics and practitioners and anyone seeking reflective but practical guidance on how to approach outdoor place-making or the analysis and design of everyday outdoor places.

Section Two
The concept of experiential landscape

Introduction

Previously we have tried to sketch out aspects of thought about human-environment relations and have suggested that an element of philosophical immaturity might be at the root of limitations in landscape architecture’s capability to respond more fully to human dimensions in its place-making activity. We assert that giving greater prominence to a more holistic attitude to human-environment relations in the intellectual development of landscape architecture might be fruitful and we have tried to highlight sources that might be explored in more detail with this in mind. We have also highlighted that developments in place theory in particular seem to offer potential for a theoretical interpretation of holistic human-environment relations by integrating human behavioural and psychological functioning with the spatial and material world. Although it is quite clear that this and related principles are as yet far from the mainstream of contemporary landscape architectural thinking there are grounds for some optimism. It is evident, for example, that there have been frequent attempts to explore the implications of a more phenomenological understanding of the nature of place in the realm of architecture and urban planning. There remains considerable potential in this for landscape architecture’s theoretical and methodological development and we can see this beginning in elements of so called socially responsive approaches to urban design in which landscape architects are increasingly influential contributors. Valuable efforts are being made to tease out ways this might be developed for more practical application: Llewellyn-Davies’ Urban Design Compendium (2000) developed in association with English Partnerships provides an example. Of particular relevance here are messages implicit in this arena suggesting that certain spatial configurations may be beneficial to human experience of the external environment, the practical implications of which are hitherto not explored.

Up to now we have been concerned with theoretical grounding, an intellectual and academic justification for developing experiential landscape as a way to conceptualise people-space relations in the routinely encountered outdoors. At the heart of experiential landscape is a commitment to the idea that human experience has spatial dimensions and we have tried to present some justification for this view. Experiential landscape is, though, more than a field of academic inquiry. We are also interested in investigating how to apply the philosophical and theoretical principles that underpin experiential landscape in practice. Partly this means finding ways to understand the experiential character of outdoor settings through interpretation of spatial organisation and working out what components and procedures of design processes might help to make experientially better places. Space is arguably a fundamental medium for those who design outdoor settings and the sculpting and moulding of space and the material elements that define it are central to their purpose. The concept of experiential landscape responds with a conceptual framework setting out how certain categories of human experience can be interpreted spatially. This has helped develop and consolidate our ideas about how outdoor places can be understood holistically as four spatial types called centre, direction, transition and area, which combine in an infinity of ways to make places of different experiential character. Centre, direction, transition and area can be thought of as a kind of code representing the spatial expression of these experiences in the outdoors and, through knowing something of their properties and characteristics, makes it possible to read the experiential profile of existing settings and, although to a more limited extent, those still in the planning and design process. This model provides the basic structure upon which to begin to build the components and procedures required to apply experiential landscape principles in practice and this is what this section will sketch out. Before doing so, however, we want to say a few things about why the concept of experiential landscape is structured as it is.

Although there is a lot of complexity and difference in how this is expressed, a general convergence appears detectable across a diversity of sources to support the view that certain kinds of spatial configuration are associated with sustaining the fundamental human impulse to know where we are and what this means to us in relation to our wider surroundings. This appears to give primacy to categories of spatial configuration that can engender feelings of location, continuity and change. This is not to say, of course, that this is all people need to experience in their routine use of the outdoor environment to attain a sense of fulfilment. But it does appear that these sensations, in a sense, form basic foundations for how people orientate themselves, physically and psychologically, and from which they can then enjoy the sense of well-being that allows more sophisticated forms of place awareness to develop. So, although the experiential landscape model may appear to some extremely condensed, there does appear to be some theoretical justification, stretching back at least as far as Lynch (1960), for it to give us a starting point to link human experience with spatial expression in ways relevant to design decision making. Following on from this, then, is the issue of how to interpret this in a way sufficiently digestible and practical in contemporary practice contexts. Without being able to do this it is very unlikely that these evidently important experiential dimensions will ever find themselves sufficiently embedded into design practice and may remain in the comparatively rarefied environment of academia.

This is a problem that environmental psychologists Stephen and Rachel Kaplan highlighted a few years ago in the introduction to their book with Robert Ryan, With People in Mind (1998). The problem as they saw it was that although enlightened design practitioners recognised value and relevance in the research findings of environmental psychology, they simply could not easily translate the research literature into usable recommendations. The Kaplan’s solution to this was to appeal to the structure of Alexander’s Pattern Language as a framework with operational potential and they proposed their own matrix of patterns and themes to present solutions for the design and management of everyday nature. In terms of digestibility, this is a much lighter touch than Alexander’s epic work and an extremely useful and readable contribution. Although it was not meant to specifically address the urban outdoors, its quest to try to condense some quite complex concepts about the human-environment relationship into a set of principles relevant at the drawing board provides some inspiration for the way in which the structure of experiential landscape has evolved. Whilst acknowledging the risks inherent in over-simplification, the appeal of trying to compress a wide range of experiential diversity within just four overarching themes of centre, direction, transition and area is that it has the potential to provide a quickly memorable framework within which to weave a great deal of detail.

Another distinguishing feature of the experiential landscape concept that has crucial relevance in practice is that it offers the opportunity to take into account, and compare and contrast, the place perceptions of professionally trained members of project teams and actual users of the setting. During the development of the experiential landscape concept we have become convinced that the most useful understanding of place comes, not from privileging either professional training or public consultation, but by being able to bring both together in a collective view. There is sufficient evidence in environmental psychology and social science research to indicate that significant differences may exist in the way places are perceived by trained professionals and the non-specialist public. Salaman (1974) for example, argued for the idea of occupational communities consisting of trained professionals socialised into the beliefs and values of their particular profession that then assume precedence over client or public values. Subsequent research in the context of landscape architecture supports this idea and suggests that landscape architects emphasise physical and objective qualities in their judgement of landscape, whereas non-specialists tend to emphasise what places mean to them in relation to their daily living patterns (Clamp, 1981; Uzzell and Lewand, 1990). These differences have been taken to suggest that public and professional perceptions should both be considered in design decision-making processes.

Our own experience from pilot studies and experimental field work concurs with this. We have repeatedly found both trained professional and non-specialist site user perceptions seem to provide an important yet, taken separately, incomplete view about place perception for entirely different reasons. Trained environmental design professionals, for example, when looking at a site they do not routinely use, tend to respond to visual clues to identify where they perceive centre, direction, transition and area. It is important that they do, because the physical and spatial fabric delivers stimuli that influence users and we have to know about this to make appropriate design decisions. But this is not all that influences users and so it provides only a partial picture. Users tend instead to respond mainly to what associations places have for them and quite often this relates to places that might be visually insignificant or effectively invisible from a conventional professional perspective. This is also important because it reveals details about daily habits and emotional associations that simply are not accessible through examination of a site’s visible attributes. But, although the experiential landscap...