Imbrication: The Connections of City and Landscape

Essay, John Pløger, Layered Landscapes Lofoten, Low Density, Politics and economics, Territory and mobility, Urban Paradigms

Aesthetics, Architecture&nature, City, City life, City Planning, Competition, Connections, Dealing with Nature, Designer’s role, Essay, Immateriality, Interaction, Landscape, Nature vs. Artificial, Philosophy, Political implications, Politics, Power of materiality, Social consciousness, Structure, Territorial atmospheres, Theory, urban, Urban design, Urban planning, User’s experience

This essay is part of "Layered Landscapes Lofoten" by Magdalena Haggärde & Gisle Løkken, published by Actar Publishers -- https://lccn.loc.gov/2018942825

Photographs by: Andreas Tveit, Anna Liisa Saavaste, Gisle Løkken, Lassi Tulonen, Magdalena Haggärde and Stephanie Steriotis.

Imbrication is a metaphor used by a group of architects and the philosopher Henri Lefebvre, when they participated in an international competition on ‘The New Belgrade Urban Structure Improvement’ 1986 (Bitter & Weber 2009). They did not win the competition, but their project is interesting because the group saw imbrication as a ‘method’ to improve the urban structure. They saw imbrication as a “combinatory mode, the situational placement of different elements” (ibid.: 25), and thus tried to reflect on the constitutive forces for both the static, materialised city and the dynamic forces of city life.
They as such implicate an issue that is still crucial to urban planning: How can a structured city have a dynamic socio-spatial form and landscape? How can urban design work as giving space to events and the (everyday) eventalisation of space and place?