Proposal for a “Landscape Laboratory” in the Meuse Valley in Liège (Belgium)

In an article untitled „Landscape Laboratory as a Scandinavian Concept“, R. Gustavsson describes the experiment he set up in the 1990s at Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences in Alnarp. The Landscape Laboratory is an ongoing full scale afforestation experiment that brings together the different theoretical and practical traditions of forestry, ecology and landscape architecture. It is based on the epistemological paradigm of case study analysis, and involves “slow learning”, combining design and management, in phase with the living processes it studies. As such, it is necessarily open, responsive to the site-specific dynamics that it started and accompanies through time. By introducing the idea of “creative management”, it proposes a time-based conceptual framework that can be used in the on-going study and experimentation of different urban and landscape issues.
The idea was taken on in projects in different contexts in Scandinavia and elsewhere in Europe. The research led by the unit “Ville-Territoire-Paysage” (LabVTP) of the Faculty of Architecture at the Liège University for the requalification of industrial sites in the Meuse valley offers an opportunity to confront the laboratory approach to yet another context, that of a post-industrial urban site in search of (landscape) meaning. The aim of LabVTP is to set up a permanent landscape observatory, aimed at regaining “landscape literacy” through a series of iterative, local landscape projects throughout the city, that articulate small-scale landscape elements with long-term place- and time-contextual investment. Each of these interventions can turn into a small “landscape laboratory” involving local stakeholders, and supporting teaching and research on themes such as vegetal reuse of industrial sites, participative urbanism, time-based design and “creative management”. Through the landscape laboratory approach applied as “landscape acupuncture”, our aim is to help rebuild the coherence of the apparently chaotic territory, and thus imagine a vision for its future.