What is it about?
This article critically analyses contemporary landscape architecture New York and Copenhagen that promotes sensory experiences (sights, smells, tactilities and sounds) as the means of releasing residents from their hectic lifestyles. I examine the sensory experiences of these designs and argue that researchers alongside urban planners and designers should be sceptical towards the claimed restorative effects of such spaces.
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Why is it important?
Landscape architecture is gradually introduced as a remedy for the challenges and pressures that face metropolitan areas today. In order to ensure that landscape designs provide more than mere aesthetic purification of cities, this article demonstrates that researchers and practitioners must pay greater attention to the lived experiences of these designs within their urban context. This is important to inform future urban planning and design practices.
Perspectives
The article emerges from a wider interest in the relationship between urban design practices (counting architectural designs, landscape architecture and most recently lighting designs) and the sensory experiences of their visitors. The research speaks to wider debates in urban design and planning, following my aim at taking embodied sensations and the diversity of lived experiences more seriously in urban design and planning practice.
Casper Laing Ebbensgaard
Queen Mary University of London
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: ‘I like the sound of falling water, it’s calming’: engineering sensory experiences through landscape architecture, Cultural Geographies, April 2017, SAGE Publications,
DOI: 10.1177/1474474017698719.
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