Communs paysagers de la Ville-territoire: Design, démocratie et outils numériques

The interaction between landscape architecture, urban design and social research could provide timely strategies to make cities and regions more sustainable. In the last twenty years, each of these disciplines has come up with creative responses to improve life quality, social justice and ecological systems in urbanized areas. Among new approaches, the “City-territory” reconciles the praxis and theories of large-scale planning and small-scale design. In this framework, new conceptual and pedagogical tools would increase our capacity to design together. 

In this lecture at the University of Montreal School of Urban Planning and Landscape Architecture, I propose focusing on affordances and landscape commons as conceptual and design tools to create a more sustainable and just territory for citizens. I illustrate this approach with studio course in urban and territorial design and action-research projects at the intersection of interactive democracy and sustainability governance.

Through this lens, cities, countryside and nature become a generative landscape from which citizen aspirations drive the production of urban space. Urban and landscape designers thus play a central role in harnessing the many aspirations of citizens and designing the necessary affordances to their realization.