Abstracts and Bios

Imaginations of Transformation? Urban Development Models and Resilience

What role do urban concepts, ideas and designs play in the development of solutions aimed at resilient urban development? The contribution is based on the thesis that the design, be it a concret design of a project be it an urban planning concept, functions an interface that mediates between the problem, the solution and its perception and practical implementation. Or to put it another way: the urban design is a medialised playground whose imaginative power simultaneously reconfigures visions and horizons of expectation. In this respect, it has a transformative character. So, what conventions are refered to, what new pictures and thus imaginative spaces are created when concepts and designs are put up for discussion that react to the demands for resilient urban development? The paper attempts to describe and problematise this specific role of the urban design or concept on the basis of two projects for Copenhagen.

Katja Bernhardt is senior researcher at the Nordost-Institut/Northeast-Institute, Lüneburg (Germany). Before that she was substituting professor and research assistant at the chair of Art History of Eastern Europe at the Department of Art and Visual History, Humboldt-University in Berlin as well as guest professor at the Institute of Art History at Adam Mickiewic University Poznan. Her research focus is on the historical analysis of urban space and architecture and its visual representation. Furthermore, she is interested in history of art historiography.

Architectural Resilience as Principled Approach – Experiments in Research, Teaching and Practice Exploring the Potential of Seasonality in Baltic Vernacular Architecture

Architectural resilience is directly linked to climate-responsiveness and an ability to adapt – to a changing climate, weather and changing user needs. It stands for an elasticity in architecture related to place, therefore local environmental conditions are considered the starting point for the creation of resilient architecture. As every place is unique, design principles represent the typological framework for the creation of individual solutions.
The experimental nature of vernacular building and its evolution over centuries is revealing a method of trial, error and self-correction. Vernacular architecture, in being referred to as ‘architecture without architects’ by Bernald Rudovsky (1964, Architecture without Architects. A Short Introduction into a Non-pedigreed Architecture), could - in its next level version – follow up on the typical development process steered by experimentation as epistemic strategy. It could – on the contrary to its predecessor – make the architecture profession available as a moderator of this process, aiming for architectural knowledge production to answer the pressing question of to how to build resilient, climate-responsive and resource-conscious in the Baltic Sea region.

2 Schön, D.A. (1983): The reflective practitioner – How professionals think in action, Taylor and Francis, New York, London.

Susanne Brorson is currently professor at Hafencity University in Hamburg for Experimental Architecture and Rome Prize Fellow 2023/24 at the German Academy Villa Massimo. She graduated from Bauhaus-University in Weimar in 2004 with a Diploma in Architecture. She has been working with reknown architecture firms in Oslo, London and Berlin before setting up her own award-winning practice on the Island of Rügen. Susanne has lectured internationally on her work and research on climate-responsive architecture in the Baltic Sea region.

Northern Europe as a Landscape

Every landscape is shaped by nature, culture and ideas. There are ideas that either nature is threatened by man and his culture and must be protected, or the culture of the land is threatened by nature and must therefore be protected. How can we give resilience to nature and culture?
This will be illustrated by examples from Northern Europe, an area, where not only human influence changed nature. Nature itself changed dramatically; seas and lakes, coastlines, hills and islands came into existence and were destroyed again.
From a cultural point of view, it was attempted to create stable living conditions. Cities were abandoned and rebuilt, waterways silted up, ports had to be rebuilt. It must be asked, which resilience of the landscape we should protect and how we maintain its identity.

Hansjörg Küster studied biology at the University of Stuttgart-Hohenheim. In 1992 he habilitated at the Faculty of Forestry at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich. From 1998 he was Professor of Plant Ecology at the Institute of Geobotany at Leibniz University Hanover. Since 2004, he has held the honorary post of President of the Lower Saxony Heritage Society. He has been a book author since 1978 and has written over 500 scientific publications.

Electric Pridescapes

Current energy crises challenge the path how electric energy is produced in many countries and seek for alternative solutions. Renewable energy structures are small and scattered. However, they confront with the fact that there is electricity produced and there is a network connected to it, which we don’t want to see but want to profit from. These energy producing elements are usually built into the so-called good countryside. Moreover, the installations of energy production confront the rural landscape and its idealised image with the visual impact of structures, which seem to decrease the value for recreational purpose.
Questions arise on how to create regional aesthetical and cultural benefits beyond energy production and how to inject a feeling of pride into a working landscape without renouncing the good outside? Could the production of energy serve as the basis for regional identity? In an ener-cultural landscape, the production of energy would form cultural landscape in the same way as agri-culture: Renewable energy can be a motor or a glue for a region if it is part of an overall discourse, where Energy is the product, but the journey towards the it is the agenda.

Friedrich Kuhlmann is a landscape architect from Berlin living in Tartu. He taught and researched at TU Berlin, Rostock University and BOKU Vienna and also founded freelance businesses. He has taught urban design and contemporary landscape theory at EMU since 2005. His research interests encircle landscape theory, urban space design and social sustainability.

Art and Existential Resilience: three lessons from the realm of aesthetics

This talk will discuss three layers of how the arts and the aesthetic are intertwined with resilience. The focus is on existential resilience and the related concept existential health, here understood as the inner ability to find meaningfulness, hope, and connection, also in the face of crisis and loss. The underlying assumption is that outer transformation towards a sustainable society requires an inner transformation towards a more caring, responsible, and tender approach vis-à-vis the more-than-human world we are part of. If our bodily senses, as eco-philosopher David Abram says, are gates where we receive ’the nourishment of otherness’, then, that kind of transformation lies at the heart of the aesthetic.

Max Liljefors is a professor of art history and visual studies at Lund University. His research combines scientific and philosophical perspectives on the relation between aesthetics and resilience. He coordinates the interdisciplinary project 'Existential Resilience: Contemplation, Aesthetics, Compassion'. He is a member of the Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences.

Resilience, Climax Thinking, and Landscapes

I will concentrate the presentation around the three points I finished with in 2022. First, that studying landscapes inevitably leads to studying people. Second, I will elaborate on the ideas of Kate Sherren that landscapes may change fast but have inertia. And I will end with the statement of the former president of Estonia, that what brought us here doesn’t take us further. I will develop these ideas of how landscape resist changes based on some planning cases in Estonia that seem to support the ideas of climax thinking. And I will hopefully conclude that this climax state, as in ecology, is an illusion - landscapes are never stable nor are they built for the current function only, and that people are rarely aware of the past changes and do not like future alterations either.

Hannes Palang is professor of human geography at the Centre for Landscape and Culture, Tallinn University, and will be the next editor in chief of Landscape Research (Taylor and Francis, 2024).

Scandinavian SciArtscape: Social-ecological resilience as conveyed through art. A critical multimodal perspective

Making societies and ecosystems resilient in the 21st century is a difficult task. Communicating the challenge to the public in a lucid and comprehensible manner – even more so. There are questions that science alone cannot answer. Could the science-art interface hold the key to solving the problem?
The presentation will explore examples from the Scandinavian SciArtscape to critically evaluate the potential of art to facilitate the understanding of resilience-related concepts and phenomena. It will be based on insights drawn from critical multimodal analysis, post-normal approach to science, and resilience thinking, all with overriding goal to render the concept of social-ecological resilience intelligible.

Marta Skorek is a PhD researcher at the Institute of Scandinavian and Finnish Studies, at the University of Gdańsk, Poland. Her research interests include: sustainable marine governance, sustainable (conscious) tourism; ocean (ecological) literacy, critical language awareness, and sustainability skills; the Montessori pedagogy.