A

CONVERSATION
WITH:
JOSÉ ALFREDO RAMIREZ
CLARA OLÓRIZ
PIERRE BÉLANGER

José Alfredo Ramirez, director, and Clara Olóriz, project leader, are from
Groundlab. A multi-disciplinary international practice that explores
Landscape Urbanism and sees the cities and the landscapes in between as
natural processes that constantly change and evolve, therefore requiring
lexible and adaptable mechanisms and designs to emerge, conigure and
reconigure the existing and future urban environments.

Pierre Bélanger is Associate Professor of Landscape Architecture at the

Harvard Graduate School of Design, Co-Director of OPSYS, and Advisor
to the US Army Corps of Engineers. He is author of the forthcoming book,
Landscape Infrastructure: Urbanism beyond Engineering (MIT Press, 2014).

Urban landscapes are not traditionally known to evoke feelings of isolation and
displacement. Rather, it is the landscape that lies beyond the urban boundary that
typically evoke such sensibilities. Our fascination with historical conditions places
limitations upon the evolution of our current urban identity, linking it to outdated modes
of occupation. In ‘The Generic City’, Rem Koolhaas investigates the possibilities of
independent cities brought about through the reconiguration of land and infrastructure
processes as they are relieved of ties to already established territories.1 The discussion
that follows interrogates landscape homogenisation as an intentional process, and
how this in turn relates to the themes of reclamation of landscape processes and the
subsequent development of new spatial typologies.
KERB 22 PG. 75 IN CONVERSATION

Koolhaas identiies urban JAR Remoteness coupled with distance is rapidly disappearing, new communication and
precincts as individual elements CO infrastructure technologies ensure that distant landscapes can be integrated in a more
within a much wider urban eficient manner through our hyper-connected world. Either they are part of a gigantic
constellation. While dense in their chain of production and circulation of physical matter around the globe (as Jane Hutton
interior composition, they exist as describes in her essay on ‘reciprocal landscapes’) or they can be accessed by everyone
independent entities when viewed from everywhere through remote digital tools, a click away from us.
from a distance.2 Despite this fact,
rural townships that have taken This is revealing to designers not because it is a given and imperative condition that we
on the basic typology of urban and must work towards, and respond to rapidly in an eficient manner as skilful and smooth
suburban areas are still seen as operators, but because such conditions provide us with the opportunity and capacity
remote settlements, lacking the to position ourselves critically in relation to them and through our practice. Broader
vital public infrastructure that is connectivity as a contemporary value and localised proximity as embedded within our
otherwise capable of dismantling scope of interest is to be questioned by designers before taking it for granted. In this
the boundaries that exist between sense, it is worth asking if the agency of the designer can be reduced to that of a service
regional and greater metropolitan provider that ensures given values are inherently embedded in contemporary conditions.
regions.3 Or should they rather turn into a position of cultural producers to question and confront
who, how and why this poses a beneit, if any, to anyone?
How can we ensure that broader
connectivity remains valued when
localised proximity continues to
capture and contain processes PB We have never been urban.
within a deinitive ield?
Either we have to redeine the urban through the remote, or we have to extend the
urban to encompass what is seen on the outside. That is one view, a sociological and
a geographical one. The other view is to simply acknowledge that we have never been
urban. We’re in a neo-industrial era that is of a larger magnitude, scope and kind than ever
before. Corporations – the third entities and third spaces – have outgrown the industrial
era as the economist John Kenneth Galbraith predicted in his The New Industrial
State (1967), beyond the polarised spectrum of public and private, to become spatial
conigurations that have become larger than the state space of countries themselves.
(Revenues of Wal-Mart for example are larger than the GDP of South Africa or Greece,
Exxon and Chevron are larger than Romania, Peru, or Ukraine). The cities that people claim
or say that they live in, are incorporated entities, i.e. they not only work for corporations,
but live inside them. Further to this, we are removed further and further, geographically
and culturally, from the actual processes of production that are required to support urban
life, and most patterns of life in the Western Industrial world depend precisely on the
economies of scale that industrial economies are built on, whose burden is shouldered by
emerging or under-developed countries.

Seeing longitudinally, contemporary change like life itself is best understood across a
range of scales: from the personal to the planetary, from the cellular to the systemic, from
the depths of the ocean, to the outer atmosphere. From this dimension, decentralisation
(and the spatial fragmentation and diffusion that accompanies) can be understood as
the great force shaping and reorganising the planet today, ranging from the provision
of personal communications (mobile phones) and personal mobility (cars), to personal
cultures (clothing, housing). It is a process more akin to Vikramāditya Prakāsh’s idea of
deruralisation, and Vijanyanthi Rhao’s notion of migration, which we spend very little time
on in design schools. The notion of the urban ield, if there is to be one, could be rewritten
as Lewis Mumford’s ‘The Non-City in History’: the non-city deies containment, enclosure
and certainty. It abhors borders and walls. Instead, the urban ield relies and thrives on
openness, porosities, variabilities, transgressions, uncertainties and indeterminacies.
Like a landscape, it multiplies through surfaces, processes, and patterns across different
environments, from oceans to atmospheres to undergrounds. Landscape is not merely a
qualiier of urbanisation, it is urbanisation itself.
KERB 22 PG. 79 IN CONVERSATION

The rapid development and
expansion of territories continues CO following afirmation: ‘To the extent that identity is derived from physical substance,
to accommodate an ever-growing,
interconnected population.10
Global connectivity through
both physical and technological
means has led to the eradication
of localised goods and services,
giving birth to the new itinerant
citizen.11 Joys found through the
discovery of informal settlements
and value of spontaneity are
disappearing as we shift towards
existing solely within one
ubiquitous virtual territory.
How are we able to maintain
growth and establish the
permanence of land processes if
we are no longer concerned with
establishing places for physical
longevity?
JAR One of the key questions that can be extracted from Koolhaas’ ‘Generic City’ is the
from the historical, from context, from the real, we somehow cannot imagine that
anything contemporary – made by us – contributes to it.’ From here, we understand
two implicit consequences that we think are crucial to addressing the issue of identity
and permanence: on the one hand, it challenges the assumption of the impossibility of
contemporary contributions to identity and, consequentially, it leads to a re-deinition
of what we consider the identity of a place often based on nostalgic and touristic values
of preservation from a static point of view. One of the projects that the AA Landscape
Urbanism programme is working on questions this static approach to identity through the
exploration of sand dune territories across Europe. It is quite revealing, the fact that it
shows an inherent contradiction in current preservation policies in a territory intrinsically
dynamic, in constant movement. So in our understanding, the contemporary conditions
you describe sit within the tensions amid the rapid development of interconnected
territories and the demands for local reafirmation, as the current political situation
and the claims for independence and self-determination across Europe are showing.
Paradoxically, the blurring of the boundaries of the European Union’s policies is being
challenged by calls to declare new borders within the actual countries. In this case, the
border, as an instrument of state control and territorial management, embodies the
strains between the borderless global networks and the pursuit of distinctive identities.
We have been discussing these issues as part of a research cluster we are conducting
at the AA, co-directed by Douglas Spencer and Clara Olóriz, called ‘Urban Prototypes’.
We have made references to Tafuri’s Venice and the Renaissance, where he identiies a
tension between tradition and invention in Palladio’s type, and to Aureli’s ‘Geopolitics of
the Ideal Villa’, where he refers to Palladio’s projects as the paradoxical combination of
‘formal abstraction and radical site speciicity’. As such, the struggle between the global
or the generic and the speciic or identity is not new or alien to architecture, landscape
or urbanism. One could even say that it is embedded in its modes of operation, and the
tensions it produces are fundamental to the designers’ operative frameworks.

PB There is nothing informal about informality.

1. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, ‘The Generic
City’, in S,M,L,XL, New York: Monacelli Press,
1995.
2. ibid.
3. Mohsen Mostafavi, ‘Why Ecological Urbanism,
Why Now?’, in Mohsen Mostafavi and Gareth
Doherty (eds.), Ecological Urbanism, Zurich: Lars
Muller Publishers, 2010.
4. ibid.
5. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, ‘The Generic
City’.
6. James Corner, ‘Terra Fluxus’, in Charles
Waldheim (ed.), The Landscape Urbanism Reader,
New York: Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.
7. Linda Pollak 2006, ‘Constructed Ground:
Questions of Scale’, in Waldheim C (ed.), The
Landscape Urbanism Reader, Princeton
Architectural Press, New York.
8. James Corner, ‘Terra Fluxus’.
9. ibid.
10. Elizabeth Mossop, ‘Landscapes of
Infrastructure’, in Charles Waldheim (ed.),
The Landscape Urbanism Reader, New York:
Princeton Architectural Press, 2006.
11. Rem Koolhaas and Bruce Mau, ‘The Generic
City’.
We have inherited language, such as the ‘Third World’ from demographer Alfred Sauvy’s
Tiers-Monde, that together have been internalized by the United Nations and the World
Bank as forming the indicators, by which we consider conditions to be developed, under
development, and under developed. For the most part, these thresholds are biases
based on Western industrial modes of thought that privilege three different dimensions
of formal development: institutionalization of income, knowledge, and health. These
thresholds are used across the world to quantify levels of well-being, and potential for
development, within another institutionalized coniguration: that of the nation state.
But, this development index overlooks a vast array of other spatial and social indicators,
from wage lexibility to inequality, that operate outside or beyond the enclosure of
development indexes. As such, these extra-factors consist of non-institutional or extra-
institutional (as opposed to informal) factors that contribute to varying levels of economic
intensity and cultural exchange. As Hernando de Soto has explained in The Mystery of
Capital, these ‘extra-legal’ and ‘extra-spatial’ dynamics lie outside the container level of
indicators, and therefore require entirely new spatial designations as emergent urban
ecologies. Unabated accumulation can be replaced with cyclic distribution and diffusion,
disciplinary education is swapped for exchange and experience, and reactive healthcare
is substituted for pre-emptive, incremental behaviour. Inverting the western industrial
model of development, the absence of regulatory controls, technocratic frameworks, or
centralized infrastructures, may in fact yield value, produce beneits, transform space,
and support life. Subtraction, substitution, and retraction of institutional frameworks
may in fact redress the inequities, injustices, imbalances and externalities of western
industrial models of spatial production as a pathway to the formation and multiplication
of unknown landscape geographies. As a counter project, we may therefore have to look
towards ecologies of underdevelopment as our shared future.
CONVERSATION
Just as cities and infrastructure
operate as entities of processes and
relationships, ecological processes
that occur within vast and expansive
ields can be seen to operate in a near-
continuous manner.8 However hard we
try to establish a diplomatic distribution
of services for occupants of landed
territories, they remain in relation to
the broader boundaries that distinguish
different ecologies.9
Are we able to transpose and integrate
multiple ecological processes evenly
across different scales in the same way
we distribute new settlement nodes
across larger territories?
PG. 78 TRANSPOSITIONS
JAR The use of ecological processes as an engine for territorial ones seems rather to reafirm
CO nature as the ‘natural and indisputable way forward’. To pose ecology as an imperative
within all our ways of proceeding, without questioning its beneits, places the designer
inside a linear problem-solving scenario (as manager of given conditions) rather than
the potential envision of novel ones (as designer of alternative future scenarios). In this
sense, to generalise an even transposition of ecological processes as necessary to larger
territories and at different scales leaves out the potential nuances that glitches and
frictions between necessary conlicting systems could bring about and within which
the designer’s agency could operate (as described in Douglas Spencer’s essay ‘Nature
is the Dummy’). Dealing with territory as a conlictive arena entails a set of negotiations
for which a decision-making process is paramount. These decisions, far from seamless
integrations, are informed by priorities established in the deinition of intentions and
territorial stances. In turn, they have the capacity to empower or affect the various
agencies and interests at stake. It is in this very regime and decision-making process,
behind these intentions, where new territorial relationships are designed – where our
agency resides, as designers and not as managers. In the understanding of landscapes as
territories in constant interaction and negotiation of forces, we aim to develop strategies
that reconigure themselves through the aggregations of landform dynamics, social
practices, cultural traditions and political visions vital for territorial articulations.
PB How do we design for the intangibility, imperfection, and unevenness of democracy?
If the anonymous and banal presence of open space represents the last spatial
expression and translation of democratic freedoms in urban environments, then the
street is one of its most irm and expressive advocates. With a record of persistence that
has risen out of social, economic, political, and geographical inequity, the street – la rue
corridor – is one of achievement in the face of adversity. Cultivating a deep commitment
to the latent relationship between equity, ecology and economy, the street – both in study
and practice, in material and in history – traces a proile across the emerging social and
political agencies that the design of open space-urbanisation holds in the translation
of contemporary ideals of freedom and justice in the design of democratic public space
and our built environments. Whether the street involves the redesign of peripheral
spaces below highways (infrastructural thickening), the carpeting of exterior walls with
political grafiti (infrastructural marooning), or the segregation of regional cultures by
roads (infrastructural apartheid), the street’s profound and resounding engagement of
marginalised subjects and invisible infrastructures of urbanisation reveals an alternative
way of seeing. The road represents a visual, spatial and intellectual counter-culture. Not
only does the street propose a different way of reading the urban environment – a very
unique one, it is also profoundly inluential and infectious to other peripheral, marginal
or overlooked spaces. By revealing undisclosed dimensions of urban policy and political
natures and planned zoning, the street traces, draws, and delineates new contours of
perception and casts its light on shadowed dimensions of space we often ignore and
overlook through our western, industrial eyes. It is, in this augmented reality, that the
view from the street (a view from the ground) is our sixth sense, and it offers critical
direction for the ield. Along this critical horizon, the street – in all its permutations from
highway, to pathway, to subway, to airway –proposes a ‘sense of enlarged freedom’ –
one that Frederick Law Olmsted so adamantly advocated for in his designs and surveys
of contemporary urbanisation at a period of tremendous turbulent transformation in
nineteenth century America – as it grows in kind, to form a landscape democracy, and
produces more designers of democratic landscapes for years and decades to come.
KERB 22
Pulled, stretched and applied
across multiple scales, the city
grid is no longer limited to the
central urban precinct. The urban
grid as a tool has been used
in translating programmatic
techniques across vast expanses.6
The inluence of rigid spatial
programming upon the ways in
which roads, buildings and nature
can coexist has now begun to
encroach onto previously remote
land situated just beyond the
urban boundary.7
How are we able to reassert
landscape processes that were
once naturally occurring, while
newly deined mega-territories
seek to simplify and regiment
ecosystem services?
PG. 77 IN CONVERSATION
JAR The grid is a fundamental concept and device that describes historically our relation
CO to landscapes as territories through a technological and calculative grasp of it. In this
sense, the idea of a recent expansion of its use to a non-urban precinct is not a recent
phenomenon, as it goes hand in hand with the birth of territories, be it urban or rural,
central or peripheral, close or remote, or a constellation of networked settlements with
blurred boundaries. However, the exacerbation of physical and virtual connections
that new technologies are bringing about, especially to remote landscapes, reasserts a
general acceptance of concepts such as interconnectivity, continuity and eficiency as an
imperative to harness resources and modes of production akin to the relentless dominant
economical system. In this sense, a possible answer to this question should not gravitate
around the apparent recent contradiction between gridded/rigid spatial organisations
vs natural/ecological landscape processes, but in the power of designers to understand
territories within their inherently and historically manufactured condition, and to envision
alternative scenarios that strategically intersect and confront these processes as part, or
not, of mega-territories.
These potential intersections should not be seen as direct alternatives to simplify and
regiment eficiently remote ecosystem services, since they will not match common
ambitions, traditional targets or eficient bench marking schemes of corporate territorial
management. Neither will they have the capacity to fulil every aspiration in a given
territory. Rather, they aim to provide the means to envision unconventional (limited or
continuous, linked or fragmented) scenarios that eficient and streamlined principles per
se have undermined or restrained by the implementation of technocratic goals, especially
in the last few decades.
PB We are not designing ecological systems, they are designing us.
As urban ield, landscape is in and of itself megastructure. Like J. B. Jackson mentions
nearly a half century ago in his The Public Landscape (1966), at the tail of end of the
failure of the architectural movement of the megastructure (the world simply could not
be contained inside a building): ‘The architectural concept of the megastructure, popular
several years ago, was roughly that of a skeletal framework comprising the essential
functions of the building, into which are inserted the individual, more or less temporary,
installations ... The advantages of the megastructure are that the individual is provided
with necessary facilities and also a greater freedom of choice. The megastructure is
prior to the individual installation and presumably, more lasting ... Few of us realise that
there is another kind of megastructure in terms of the whole environment; one of the
oldest creations of man. This megastructure consisting of the environment organised by
man can be called the public landscape.’ Patrick Geddes Valley Section of Civilisation
(1923) provides a key representational strategy towards making this oceanic turn to and
seeing urban conditions and urban economies more laterally, more temporally, and more
altitudinally, from sea to sky. The section un-differentiates and frees us from the plan
(and its aesthetic), and the sectional proile is blind to the planometric grid. In fact, the
section weakens the power and control of the grid itself, because it no longer depends
on continuity. Thus, the amalgam of webs, networks, systems and elements that make
up the urban ield is contingent on the design of indirect relationships, overlaps and
interconnections (both possible without direct continuity) across different altitudes and
latitudes, designing thresholds. Designing in section and thinking topographically grants
us the liberty of ‘le plan libre’.
CONVERSATION
Invisible forces are driving the
emergence of settlements across
broad geographic regions as the
physicality of place no longer
acts as the dominant mode of
spatial interpretation. Proximity
to land resources, coupled with
distinct atmospheric conditions,
has allowed for expansive
landscapes to be traced back to
the urban centres of different
settlement typologies.4 These are
such distinctly individual regions
whereby a myriad of social,
ecological and geographical
processes ilter through
established borders around
otherwise undeined space.5
Rather than merely navigating
between static nodes of human
settlement across vast territories,
are we able to harness the
transitory condition that exists
between isolated regions and
promote a new settlement
typology?
PG. 76 TRANSPOSITIONS
JAR Within these invisible forces, I think one should be able to propose certain forms of
CO resistance that foster new types and the construction of identity and differentiation
through them. For example, remoteness could be put forward as a mechanism within
virtually and physically hyper-connected contexts, perhaps, to design spaces as oases
or refuges within networked generic conditions. Remoteness as a conceptual framework
can derive into novel alternatives to harness the possibilities of current conditions.
Along these lines, we developed a project called Ground Ecologies in a post-industrial
site at the outskirts of Shanghai. The site was inevitably becoming an in-between generic
(residential, commercial, plus CBD) territory tightly interconnected and conveniently
located next to a recently built metro line, thus highly networked to the Shanghai
metropolitan area. As a post-industrial place, on-site pollution provided us with the
excuse to design manufactured topographical grounds whereby generic programming
was subdued to landscape processes of remediation. In turn, they created a different
regime of space occupation, through different phases and building restrictions derived
from capping issues that is not entirely subjected to market forces. In a way, landscape
processes and techniques produced a sort of remoteness by an inaccessibility to given
developmental conditions. Typical compartmentalisation and privatisation of these in-
between territories was opposed through the insertion of remote and undevelopable
grounds, as well as the insertion of a slow time frame, with the capacity to choreograph
emergent and novel conditions outside the current imperative briefs assigned to this
generic development.
PB Pace is the new space.
Movement, and processes of transition, are rendering the idea of the settlement obsolete,
and putting it out of business. We are in an era of unabated and uninhibited migration.
Pace has positively replaced the sociological notion of place and the architectural notion
of space. Planners and architects are incapable of keeping up with the rapidity of this
change, which justiies why we should be developing ontologies of change, designing
transitions, spans, conveyors, cycles and processes of change, as opposed to their end
terminus. The study of speed – dromology, as Paul Virilio proiles in his Vitesse et Politique
(1977), is a fruitful avenue to pursue as his work engages the politics of supporting,
suspending or sensing movement, and the geopolitical signiicance of different rates and
morphologies of changes.
Movement, mobility, circulation, and low deine contemporary urban environments, and
historian Rosalind Williams substantiates this in her ‘Cultural Origins and Environmental
of Large Technological Systems’ (1993): ‘The outstanding feature of modern cultural
landscapes is the dominance of pathways over settlements ... the pathways of modern
life are also corridors of power, with power being understood in both its technological
and political senses. By channeling the circulation of people, goods, and messages, they
have transformed spatial relations by establishing lines of force that are privileged over
the places and people left outside those lines.’ Since engineers have understood this for
quite some time, they design transitions and lows through infrastructure. We should pay
attention to the scalability of their work, and develop both anthropology, and ethnography
or different infrastructures to start thinking like Sanford Fleming and establish our longue
durée, and plot out the design of new time zones.