Reinventing landscape planning for targeting “undisciplined” environmental challenges

Landscape planning has been (re)introduced and reinvented several times in Swedish planning history. This has been done to cope with new, complex and interdisciplinary environmental problems.

Given the unprecedented socio-environmental challenges of today, and the dire need to rethink spatial and environmental planning beyond the troubled silos of modern categories and administration, we need to learn from this history.

Also, this history is important as it has partly shaped the contemporary landscape and planning.The project aims for historical studies to reinterpret the “undisciplined” capacity of landscape planning to target future environmental challenges. This will be explored with a unique combination of relational ontology, landscape and planning theory.

It will be complemented with an international conference, and tested/implemented with and through dialogues with stakeholders on national, regional and local level.As previous research on landscape planning history and theory is scant and scattered the project will contribute with a theoretical framework that facilitating studies in both its history and theory.

The case is of international relevance as the absence of a formal landscape planning has opened up for several radically different conceptions which offers a valuable source of inspiration.

Finally, the project offers a guide to learn from and interpret different approaches in landscape planning for planners to better understand what landscape planning could be.