LE:NOTRE and Im/emigration Issues

Landscape architecture involves analysis, planning, design and management of different types of landscapes, natural, rural and urban. However, with the increasing aggregation of populations and issues of quality of life in cities in which approximately 80% of European population lives, the interest of the profession has started to focus on urban landscape issues more comprehensively than before. In relation to the phenomenon of "immigration-emigration and mobility" and question of "images of Europe", urban landscapes present a wide range of potential issues for research and practice.

As well as physical aspects of urban landscapes, social aspects have always had an important place in the process of renewal of urban areas. The rapid growth of cities, with migration/immigration, has brought different phenomena in urban environment, such as social-cultural fragmentation, exclusion and conflicts in public urban landscapes, which were intended serve every kind of urban dweller for their social and physical well being.

Recent topics can be summarized in terms of the relationship between landscape architecture (seen as the public sphere - streets, squares, parks, housing environments etc.) and migration and mobility and question of image in existing literature as:

understanding the nature of rigid fragmentation of urban neighbourhoods and urban landscape use by different ethnic-cultural or social groups, which lack social inclusion and socio-cultural diversity in public urban landscape;

understanding the perception and meanings of certain urban landscape features for certain ethnic-cultural or social groups conceiving their socio-cultural habits, behaviours and daily life patterns in relation to urban landscapes and their particular needs in urban landscapes;

genders (local and immigrant women-men) issues in urban landscapes (accessibility, use and security of genders), revealing negative and positive social and physical aspects of urban landscape in this respect;

children (local or immigrants) in the city; their perception, image, and their use of urban landscapes, their attachment to the places and identity as constuted by urban landscapes (considerations for policy, planning, design and management of urban landscapes);

understanding the reasons of social exclusion, vandalism and conflict in urban landscapes;

improving the understanding of urban landscape, and associated planning, design, management and policy making strategies for the social and cultural integration and well being of all urban citizens (for instance, therapeutic landscapes, landscapes for children and disadvantage groups for nature experience);

understanding the new role urban landscape in the context of European Union mobility and migration policies; understanding the potentials of urban landscape to contribute to the image of European cities;

comprehension of different images of urban landscapes (their positive and negative aspects) as images of Europe;

search for better understanding of potentials, and generating new typologies (new visual, functional and spatial characters) of urban landscapes for multi-cultural cities, considering the socio-cultural problems emerging from immigration or emigration;

dealing with population increase, problems of the unequal distribution of urban landscape (especially in case of immigrant, neighbourhoods, where the immigrants have limited amount of private living space and therefore have more need for public open space) and problems of green field development, and generating guidelines for planning and design of residential environments for special communities, with the aim of improving integration and socio-cultural diversity;

dealing with population decrease (shrinking cities phenomenon), and generating guidelines for planning and design of brown-field land, encouraging left-over urban areas to develop natural resources for the economical, social, and cultural use by disadvantage groups’

developing urban landscape planning, design and management as a tool for the purpose of integrating urban ghettos of immigrants into other parts of the city, making use of urban green-structures as channels for socio-cultural flux.