Stan Angelica, 2014, The Landscape of the Urban Peripheries: An Alternative Therapy, in: Crăciun, C., Bostenaru Dan, M. (ed.), ‘Planning and Designing Sustainable and Resilient Landscapes’, Springer Netherlands, Dordrecht
- Author : Stan Angelica
- Year : 2014
- English Title : The Landscape of the Urban Peripheries: An Alternative Therapy
- Published in Book : Planning and Designing Sustainable and Resilient Landscapes
- Pages : 117-126
- Abstract in English : The landscape approach of peripheries moves the accent on the need to understand the general health of the city and to treat its peripheral territories through an alternative method then the classic regulatory planning methods. The paper argues by appealing to principles of homeopathic medicine, advancing the concept of “urbanopatie”, but not before underscores the importance of exploring and recognizing the suffering of peripheral landscape, as a pre-diagnosis stage. Landscape urban peripheries are crystallized by synthesis of public needs, individual initiatives, everyday practices, legal/illegal effects (direct or indirect), aspirations and cultural background. But this landscape is first an atmosphere that impresses negative, an amalgam that makes it being the source of a strong ambiguity. Re-learning to see these ambiguous marginal urban territories is a necessary step for understanding them, able to highlight their vulnerability, which is not only theirs, but of the whole City.
- Outline in English : 1 Introduction 2 Exploring the landscape peripheries 3 Re-learning to see the periphery 4 The diseases of urban peripheries 5 Urban peripheries health assessment: an alternative approach through Landscape 6 Conclusions
- Comments/Notes : The alternative approach of suffering peripheral landscape through the concept of “urbanopathy” tries to illuminate the possibilities to “treat” in a humanistic way the peripheries, as they concentrate important urban diseases. Providing a healthy environment for the urban life is not just about those physical, chemical and biological qualities needed, but also providing a environ-mental continuum in ambiance and urban image, so that what we perceive not to cause inconvenience. This fact, although simple, is quite difficult to be implemented; on the one hand, because it isn't brought to public awareness and on the other hand, because people themselves lost the confidence in their possibilities to re-invest emotionally a diseased landscape. Thus, the recovery (re-investment, renewal, re-vitalization, etc) and treatment of the periphery through landscape “alternative” therapy can create a true opportunity for the entire actual city. This City, suffocated by a chaotic development, crushed by formalism and globalization, could be able to re-create its identity, assuming its indeterminacy, sufferings and even the errors, as parts of its becoming. Moreover, this alternative approach could be considered as a “prophy-lactic plan” that would be done before the disease become malignant: an urban prophylaxis which could lead to avoiding the future urban mistakes.