The term terrain vague, made famous incontemporary architectural culture by Ignasi deSolà-Morales, refers to a place in the city that is emptyand unoccupied, vague or uncertain, imprecise orunbounded. It carries both negative and positiveconnotations: unused but also free to be occupiedspontaneously. Interstitial spaces, brownfield sites,disused industrial estates, railway lines and stations,abandoned ports and plots in ruins, areunproductive areas within the economic structure ofthe city. Perceived as empty, they are often the focusof architecture’s and urban design’s desire forproductivity, control and order. This instrumentalview disregards the richness and special atmosphereof the terrain vague as a place colonised by nature andpeople in a more uncontrolled manner, ‘theuncontaminated magic of the obsolete’,1 the charmof the formless and indeterminate.

Terrain vague landscapes incorporate freedom andcritique. Abandoned by design, they assume‘ownership of past places of action, or current placeswith no formal identity assigned’, 2 producingstrange places that exist within the physical contextof the city yet ‘outside the city’s effective circuits andproductive structures’.3 Urban voids can be read atthe large scale as cracks in the mirror that testify toan uneasy process of change within a seeminglystable urban context. As pockets of self-sustainedvegetation, they act as nature reserves, connectingwith other green spaces to establish ecologicalcorridors and contribute to a much larger urbanecosystem. At the small, intimate scale theirapparent emptiness can be questioned: children playhere, dogs walk, homeless reside, photographers andfilm makers capture poetic nuances, and naturemakes its way back into the city, no matter how tinyits appearance (evidenced by the way in whichhumble vegetation types colonise vacant lots). It iscrucial then to understand the terrain vague not as anempty, neutral territory, but as a rich field ofinvisible social and natural operations. This paperargues that terrain vague landscapes arerepresentations of urban politics. Suchrepresentations are explored here, withphotographic images and stills from a short

documentary film made by the author acting asvisual references. Much can be learned from theterrain vague condition to formulate principles forthe design of public spaces in the city. Threeprinciples are explored: emptiness, indeterminacyand occupation. It is proposed that a new type ofurban public space is emerging based on theseprinciples. Self-organised and self-sustained, the‘vague park’ manifests itself in ways that will bedemonstrated through case studies of contemporarylandscape design projects.

Terrain vague as a model for public space in the cityFar from empty, the terrain vague, with itsspontaneous car parks, makeshift athletic groundsand occasional illegal, temporary architecturebecomes a multi-sensory domain for the inscriptionof landscapes of the imagination and simultaneouslandscapes of events [1]. Occurrences of suchinscription have been captured in contemporaryurban photography,for instance in the work of JohnDavies, Thomas Struth and others.4 In Davies’ ‘Goatsand sheep, Barcelona, Spain, 1990’5 [2] we areconfronted with a terrain vague on the outskirts ofBarcelona. In the background there are rows of high-rise housing blocks regularly spaced on what seemslike a planning grid. The city is represented as order,regularity, and dominance. In the foregroundhowever, which occupies more than two thirds of theimage vertically, there is an abandoned land dottedwith makeshift fences and huts, rocks and weeds,across which passes a flock of sheep and goats. Onthe left, near a hut, we can barely see someone whocould be the shepherd. The spontaneous occupationof the terrain vague by what appears effectively to be arural scene (the lower two thirds of the image) is instark juxtaposition with the towering city in thebackground (the upper third of the image). Thecamera frames the landscape in an almostsurrealistic manner, representing thus the multi-faceted politics of the production of space, space asgenerated through regulated political decisions: thetower blocks in the background; and space emergingand spreading through unregulated appropriation:the ‘grazing field’ of the shepherd with his flock.

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theoryExploring park projects celebrating Ignasi de Solà-Morales’ idea

of the terrain vague: ‘as found’, spontaneous urban landscapes

raising questions about relations between politics and design.

Vague parks: the politics of latetwentieth-century urban landscapesKrystallia Kamvasinou

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1

2

1 Still frames from theauthor’sdocumentary TerrainVague. Originalfootage recorded onlocation in Lagos,South Portugal, andKeratsini, south-

west Athens, Greece.From left to right,and from top tobottom: walker;stork’s nest onderelict industrialchimney; stork’snest close-up; fishing

in the void; illegaland legalarchitecture; naturein the void; councilownership; pocketsof nature as part oflarger ecologicalcorridors connecting

to the mountains;spontaneous carparks; vegetationtypes/prickly pear; apiece ofspontaneousmeadow amid thecity; openness;

dumping site forcars; colonisers; carpark in the void; kidsplay here

2 Goats and sheep,Barcelona, Spain,1990

Seen under this prism, the terrain vague can bethought of as an alternative public space. Such apublic space falls outside the legislative or politicallydefined borders of the city, carries a history of changeon the ground, and happens at present as aninterchange of occupations in its local use, rangingfrom the legislatively legal to the marginallyoutlawed. Nevertheless this type of public encounterhas also characteristics of traditional public space:people from different backgrounds gather together,participating in a range of activities. This type ofspace, it seems, is gradually disappearing in the questfor development and economic efficiency. It isimportant to ask what remains relevant and valuablein these types of spaces and how their qualities can bepreserved in designed environments. Is the terrainvague something we should avoid, or can we learnfrom its existence?

Principles of the terrain vague include emptiness,indeterminacy, and uncontrolled occupation, bothby people and by nature. The power of the terrainvague lies in its freedom and openness in contrast toother public spaces in the city which tend to beheavily monitored and commercialised. It is a spacewhere people can still access a strange slowness awayfrom the pace of the contemporary city. In terms ofurban politics then, the terrain vague includes in itfreedom and critique. If the lack of formalisedidentity, so evident in the experience of the terrainvague, is a trademark of our contemporary condition,then to assign these ‘empty’ landscapes a ‘place’ –literally, by acknowledging them in physical space,and metaphorically, in our mental framework –would mean the possibility of an alternative todominant thinking about the city.

Mohsen Mostafavi has suggested that ‘temporaryuses of such sites already contain clues to the potentialdiversity of future activities they might contain’ andsuch considerations have been discussedsimultaneously in various fields.6 In ‘Urban PoliticalEcology’, as Roger Keil suggests, the question of nature‘as a constructed rather than a pre-given concept’ –and therefore one ‘subject to political re-definitionand re-articulation’ – is crucial. Indeed, scientists suchas German ecologist Herbert Sukopp and landscapeecologists such as Michael Hough, have shown thecomplexity and importance of urban habitats. Forexample, writing about the bombed-out inner-citysites of Berlin, Roger Keil suggests that the sites’‘biological richness and diversity […] led to therejection of the common assumption thaturbanization equalled the destruction of habitat andthe degradation of first nature’.7 Recently, theLandscape Urbanism movement has supported thesuggestion that urban and natural landscapes cometogether in a process of merging the qualities of eachinto a bigger system. Vacant lots, ruins and abandonedinfrastructure are strategically reconsidered beyondtheir individual scale, viewed as parts of a much largerurban ecosystem, extending both in space and intime.8 As, more often than ever, landscape design hasto deal with the management of derelict areas, therehabilitation of urban voids and industrialwastelands, and the establishment of parks in

landfills, characteristic features of the terrain vaguehave found their way into recent landscape projects.Ideas such as recycling landscapes and landscapes ableto accommodate transformation, change and evenerasure have been slowly but steadily gaining groundover more formal or deterministic approaches.9

The ‘vague park’ emerges through the least-formeddesign: setting the rules for occupation to take placebut not the actual ‘form’ that this will take. In thesedesigned landscapes the void remains void withinthe urban fabric; it retains the illusion of thehorizon for modern urbanites. The void extends intime: agricultural techniques, a focus on watermanagement through irrigation and drainage, andsuccessional planting strategies with a view toestablishing pioneering species that require littlemaintenance, recreate an atmosphere, if not of anidyllic countryside, for sure at least of a workingrural landscape. Could this be a new pastoral?

The vague park: a new pastoral?This vague park, with its completely different startingpoint, could not copy the urban pastoral ideal of thenineteenth century. Urban parks were onceconceived as a reminder of a rural wilderness, anostalgic attempt to bring the countryside into theindustrial city for the enjoyment of the emergingurbanites. Central Park in New York began in thisway. M. Elen Deming argues that, although theconstruction of the park provided jobs for thousandsof unskilled immigrants, at the political level ‘thepark itself erased all traces of the former conditionsand occupants of the site’, such as for instance themakeshift communities of immigrants.10 Thecompleted park is therefore evidence of a specificpolitical destination for the terrain vague, controlledby the interests of politicians and businessmenrather than the ‘park-dwellers’.11 The contemporaryterrain vague instead suggests different priorities:indeterminacy, less control, layers of memory ofprevious activities. Actions and atmospheresinscribed in the previously leftover or undevelopedterrain vague take on a more formal character andbecome design acts, no matter how subtle theirpresence. It is this subtlety that distinguishes theseurban landscapes from the picturesque, highlycontrolled experiences of nineteenth-century parks.

Contemporary urban voids, as pockets ofuncontrolled nature and activities, require newstrategies of becoming. Instead of defining nature asembellishment within the context of the city, thenew generation of vague parks exposes the urbanpolitics that generated spaces in need of remediation,the way these spaces were formed and produced, andsubsequently occupied. If the nineteenth-centurypark’s picturesque principles were in stark contrastwith the ideological and political reality of a societythat had rejected those values, today’s vague parkseems to be a representation of current urban politicsof a society coming to terms with its industrial past;one struggling for reconciliation with pollution,contamination, waste management, the need forfuture sustainability, and the advent of an industrialaesthetic.

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Design and the terrain vagueA number of designers have been developingstrategies to deal with the terrain vague. Following arefour indicative projects each pursuing particularstrategies.

Agri-tectureSince 2004, landscape architects James Corner/FieldOperations with architects Diller Scofidio + Renfroand planting designer Piet Oudolf have beeninvolved in the redesign of the High Line, a derelictviaduct in Manhattan up to 9m above street level,2.4km long and up to 18m wide, as a sequentialpublic open space [3a & b]. The project is based on the

principle of what they call ‘agri-tecture’: naturebecomes architecture as it is inserted between thebuildings at an architectural scale, at once wild andcultivated. The choice of planting is influenced bythe existing vegetation that colonised the rail tracksduring the many years of dereliction; similarly, thedesign aims at blurring the edge between soft andhard landscape: ‘So-called “planking” meshesplanted areas and paved routes like planks, thuscreating fluid transitions […] The choice of plants isoriented on succession vegetation with indigenousgrasses, meadows and trees’.12 As a piece of derelictinfrastructure, the High Line however hovers

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3a

3b

between being a historic building to be conservedand a public amenity, a functional space to be usedby people and the city. To resolve this tension, theproposal designs people’s access while retaining ‘thearea’s characteristic distance from familiar publicspaces’.13 The designers’ slogan ‘Keep it simple. Keepit wild. Keep it quiet. Keep it slow’ sums up theexisting terrain vague characteristics.

Intermediate landscapesLandscape architect Michel Desvigne has coined theterm ‘intermediate landscapes’ to describe thetemporal and physical scale of his proposals.14 His2004 proposal for the reforestation of the Riverbanksin Bordeaux is based on the integration of vacantlots, ex-industrial landscape and river [4]. A sixkilometre stretch of the right bank of the riverGaronne in Bordeaux, mainly in industrial use, is tobe occupied by an alluvial forest. Desvigne proposesthat ‘lots becoming vacant are first to be plantedwith a tight grid of trees and thinned out later’,15 aprocess not very different from what would naturallyhappen if these lots were left to their own devices.Vacancy is filled but not built. Emptiness is retainedas open space for the city, given back to the people,providing unity along the riverbank, while takingadvantage of the river’s natural affording of ‘virtualretreats’ and ‘panoramic views’. ‘While it is quiteabsurd to imagine a facade of one built unit eightkilometres long, a forest with the same dimensions isaesthetically and ecologically coherent.’ 16 This forest,made of many empty lots of minuscule scale joinedtogether, falls in the tradition of large, geographicalscale green structures that form the frameworks of

cities. As Desvigne argues, it ‘suggests nineteenthcentury America more than contemporary Europe’and implies a new version of the pastoral ideal.

The transformation will take place over decadesand in an unpredictable manner. The principle ofindeterminacy is retained. Desvigne suggests that‘the municipality will acquire the land for the park,but the release of the lots and the withdrawal ofcertain uses are mechanisms with a random andunpredictable order’.17 However, although some ofthe land will be used, there will always be some partof it lying derelict; this strategy suggests that it ispossible ‘to use parts of lots to start planting thepark’ and that perhaps the park as a whole willalways be in an incomplete or intermediate state. Itwill be ‘a mosaic of afforested areas’ as the forests’textures, sizes and density, as well as open clearings,will depend on the time they were established,‘inserted between the existing buildings and amongthose that will gradually be built’.18 This is notdifficult to envision if one thinks of terrain vaguespaces existing in the city and the way they arepopulated by nature.

Recovering landscapeAccording to Carla I. Corbin, this strategy advocatedby James Corner and Sébastien Marot seeks tobroaden the field of vision so that the site expandsinto the larger geography.19 The site, its perceptionsand concealed facts – as well as regional, cultural andnatural processes – come to the fore to drive designdecisions and acts, and to create meaning forcommunities and local identity. James Corner andField Operations have developed this thinking intheir proposal ‘Lifescape’, begun in 2002, for theFresh Kills Parkland in Staten Island, New York; a site2200 acres in size and once the world’s largestsanitary waste landfill. [5] Their design involves a setof long-term strategies ‘based on natural processes,agricultural practice and plant life cycles’ to‘rehabilitate the severely degraded land over the next30 years, and transform the site into a huge publicpark’.20 By ‘public’, Corner refers to the park’sopenness, not only to nature but also to people’sengagement.

The 30-year timescale of the project suggests thatpolitics may change, but the process of ‘recovery’ willensure the lasting effects of the proposed strategy.According to Corner, ‘lifescape is both a place and aprocess’ and as such open-ended and flexible enoughto accommodate change. Access to the park isafforded while the park is continually evolving, andnot, as usually happens, once the park is completed.Experiences of the park will vary over time as theproject evolves: the open decontaminated lands,previously inaccessible wastelands; the plantcommunities and reforested edges, in 10-20 years’time; the circulation paths and avenues; and finallythe additional building programmes that will sitwithin this framework.

As a place, the park will be ‘vast in scale, spatiallyopen and rugged in character, affording dramaticvistas, exposure to the elements, and huge openspaces unlike any other in the New York

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3 a High Line, NewYork. Existingsituation

b View, High Linelandscape, FieldOperations and DillerScofidio + Renfro.

4 ‘Bordeaux RiveDroite’, MichelDesvigne

metropolitan region’.21 The condition of physicalemptiness (as openness) is clearly present here.Where the nineteenth-century park was recreatingan atmosphere of peace, pastoral beauty andcontrolled wilderness, today’s citizen wants moreextreme experiences. Nature at its most idyllic is notenough, it seems; one longs for the exposure to theelements, the erasure of known densities, the openhorizon, all rarely experienced in today’s cities. Atthe same time, you need to reflect on, not necessarilyto escape from, city life and memory.

As a process, the park represents an ecologicalstrategy of environmental reclamation at bothnatural and social level. It suggests ‘dynamic staging’of nature and people, in other words it is open toindeterminacy and uncontrolled occupation, ‘for asite of this scale and complexity cannot be“designed” in total, nor constructed overnight’.22

Three primary large-scale landscape architecturaltechniques (soil making, successional planting andlandform manipulation) will help produce theframework, or ‘matrix’ of the park.

Protecting destruction The work of landscape architect Peter Latz inDuisburg-Nord Landscape Park, 1990–2001, hasintroduced a new type of intervention which hasbeen described by Carla I. Corbin as ‘protectingdestruction’.23 His project aims to create a new publicplace without erasing the ‘complex and partly toxic’former character of the site. 24 As such, it has set amodel for reclaiming terrain vague landscapes [6]. Thepark is on the site of a blast furnace plant, part of theInternational Building Exhibition Emscher Park (IBA)in the Ruhr District, an organisation which wasattempting to set quality building and planningstandards for the environmental, economic andsocial transformation of an ex-industrial region.25

The politics of acquisition and design involved anumber of parties: the IBA organisation that had theoverview; the land development association which,with the aid of a real estate fund, purchased largepart of the grounds from the industrial owner andthe railway; the city of Duisburg council, which hadto designate the grounds as open space in a rezoningof the area; and the miners’ organisation, which

obtained economic restructuring aid and thereforethe funds for the design of the open spaces.26 It isinteresting to note thus that ‘vague parks’ seem torequire more flexible and open-ended processes notonly of implementation but also of design.

The proposed strategy of reclamation is carefullylimited to allow calculated access to the vagueterritory turned into park. Little has been done tofulfil expectations of what an urban park shouldlook like: the park has retained the atmosphere ofabandoned industrial territory, but has provided

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6

5 Fresh Kills Lifescape,James Corner - FieldOperations.Rendering ofSeptember 11Earthworkmonument looking

northeast, redrawnby the author(charcoal on paper)

6 Duisburg-NordLandscape Park, PeterLatz and Partners

access to more people than ever. It seems that such astrategy is made possible by changes in society.27

Industrial ruins are now appreciated and that has ledto a new aesthetic and cultural receptivity. Duisburg-Nord is thus a park which is a direct representationof a change in urban politics and ideals. The park’sopenness happens also in social terms, as itsrealisation involved numerous citizen groups,associations and employment programmes forpeople out-of-work.28

The stated idea was ‘to integrate, shape, developand interlink the existing patterns’ that were formedfirst by the site’s previous industrial use, and then byits decay and invasion by pioneering plants, and ‘tofind a new interpretation with a new syntax’. 29 Afterthe area was abandoned by industry, not only naturebut also people gradually reclaimed it:

‘Conservationists listed the steel chunk as an industrialmonument. Citizens’ organisations organised tours onhistory and botany. The Duisburg Alpine Club discoveredthe iron ore bunkers as a climber’s paradise. The divingclub gave the water-filled underground bunkers new usesas practice pools’.30

Latz looked at what was there in order to developexisting situations further into several individualsystems that operate independently and incalculated conjunction: the deep level water parkthat uses an existing system of canals, treatmentpools and reservoirs where diving courses areavailable; the single fields and clumps of vegetation;the promenades at street level which connect partsof the town having been separated for decades; andthe railway park with its high level promenades andthe ‘rail harp’, based on the existing rail tracks.31

The scale of spaces reflects opportunities inherentin the emptiness of the terrain vague, which has theflexibility to accommodate different sizes of crowdsand types of occupation: ‘during festivities up to 50000 people gather in these places’,32 proving the needfor huge voids where people can spontaneouslycongregate. But people can also go to the park alone.There are ‘many different parks that the terrain in

Duisburg offers different people’,33 the diver, theclimber, the cyclist, reflecting a change towards asociety of individuals.

Necessary accommodationIt can be argued that public spaces in the city areincreasingly characterised by excessive control, so itis perhaps in vaguely defined territories that there ispotential for spontaneous and anonymousengagement. Notably the qualities of the terrain vaguehave been acknowledged in recent work of landscapearchitects who are seeking to promote principles ofindeterminacy, emptiness and open-endedoccupation in projects related to large-scale public,decommissioned and marginalised lands within orat the edge of cities. We have looked at examplesfrom landfill, industrial, inner-city infrastructural,and waterfront projects.

In these projects landscape is seen as a process ofdynamic staging of people and nature. I suggest thatthese new vague landscape parks are thecontemporary equivalent of the urban pastoral ofthe nineteenth century. Although this paper hasfocused on design principles to be derived from theterrain vague, an important aspect of such places istheir relation to the economic and social structuresof the city. The precarious situation of the terrainvague as undefined politically and logisticallyrequires and proposes new models of landacquisition, ownership and management. Theexamples considered here reaffirm the urgent needto recognise and preserve terrain vague spaces inurban environments. Rarely designated public, theymake room for some of the most important publicvalues. They accommodate indeterminate andcollective occupation. They offer access to emptiness,as openness to non-controlled public events and tonature, as slowness and access to the horizon line.Their role is deeply necessary in a densely filledurban life. The vague park suggests an importantmodel for the public space of the twenty-firstcentury.

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Urbanism’, in Landscape Urbanism: amanual for the machinic landscape, ed.by Mohsen Mostafavi and CiroNajle (London: AA Publications,2003), pp. 58-63.

9. Galen Cranz and Michael Boland,‘Defining the Sustainable Park: AFifth Model for Urban Parks’,Landscape Journal, 23, 2 (2004): 102-20. The work of HargreavesAssociates offers a good example:Marc Treib, Settings and Stray Paths(London: Routledge, 2005); andMichael Spens, LandscapeTransformed (London: AcademyEditions, 1996).

10. M. Elen Deming, ‘The Country andthe City: John Bachmann’s views ofManhattan and Central Park’,Landscape Journal, 19, 1/2 (2000): 111-25 (p. 120).

Notes1. Ignasi de Solà-Morales Rubió,

‘Terrain Vague’, in Anyplace, ed. byCynthia C. Davidson (CambridgeMA: MIT Press, 1995), pp. 118-23 (p.123).

2. Bernard Lassus, The LandscapeApproach (Philadelphia: Universityof Pennsylvania Press, 1998), p. 81.

3. De Solà-Morales Rubio, ‘TerrainVague’, p. 120.

4. See photographic work by ThomasHoepker under the title Trás-os-Montes, Portugal, 1992, in TaniaGallenmüller, ‘UniversalLanguage’, Topos The InternationalReview of Landscape Architecture andUrban Design, 55 (March 2006): 50,reprinted from ‘Magnum’ Soccer(London: Phaidon Press, 2005). Seealso Stefano Boeri, ‘Milan: Urban

Footnotes’, in Future City, ed. byStephen Read, Jürgen Rosemannand Job van Eldijk, (Oxford: SponPress, 2005), pp. 257-69, especiallyFigs. 7 and 8 by John Davies.

5. John Davies, Cross Currents (Cardiff:Ffotogallery in association withCornerhouse Publications, 1992).See essay by Ian Walker,‘Transitions’, in Cross Currents(Cardiff: Ffotogallery in associationwith Cornerhouse Publications,1992), pp. 7-18.

6. Landscape Urbanism: a manual for themachinic landscape, ed. by MohsenMostafavi and Ciro Najle (London:AA Publications, 2003), p. 7.

7. Roger Keil, ‘Urban Political Ecology’,Urban Geography, 24, 8 (November2003): 723-38 (pp. 726-27).

8. James Corner, ‘Landscape

11. Deming, ‘The Country and theCity’, p. 124.

12.Peter Stegner, ‘High Line in theMuseum of Modern Art’, Topos TheInternational Review of LandscapeArchitecture and Urban Design, 51(June 2005): 6. See also Friends ofthe High Line, Planting Design by PietOudolf,<http://www.thehighline.org/design/plantingdesign.html> [accessed20 January 2007].

13. Stegner, ‘High Line in the Museumof Modern Art’, p. 6

14. Gilles Davoine, ‘In conversationwith Michel Desvigne:Intermediate Landscapes’, trans. byPhilip Gumuchdjian in LandscapeUrbanism: a manual for the machiniclandscape, ed. by Mohsen Mostafaviand Ciro Najle (London: AAPublications, 2003), pp. 82-89.

15. Michel Desvigne, ‘Riverbanks inBordeaux’, Topos The InternationalReview of Landscape Architecture andUrban Design, 51 (June 2005): 22-26(p. 23).

16. Desvigne, ‘Riverbanks inBordeaux’, p. 25.

17. Desvigne, ‘Riverbanks inBordeaux’, p. 26.

18. Ibid.19. James Corner, ‘Introduction:

Recovering Landscape as a CriticalCultural Practice’, in RecoveringLandscape: Essays in ContemporaryLandscape Architecture, ed. by JamesCorner (New York: PrincetonArchitectural Press, 1999), pp. 1-28;Sébastien Marot, ‘The Reclaimingof Sites’, in Recovering Landscape:Essays in Contemporary Landscape

Architecture, ed. by James Corner(New York: Princeton ArchitecturalPress, 1999), pp. 45-58; Carla I.Corbin, ‘Vacancy and theLandscape: Cultural Context andDesign Response’, Landscape Journal,22, 1 (2003): 12-24 (pp. 17-18).

20. James Corner, ‘Lifescape – FreshKills Parkland’, Topos TheInternational Review of LandscapeArchitecture and Urban Design, 51(June 2005): 14-21 (p. 15).

21. Ibid.22.Ibid.23. Corbin, ‘Vacancy and the

Landscape’, p. 19.24. Ibid. See also Peter Latz, ‘Landscape

Park Duisburg-Nord’, inManufactured Sites: rethinking thepost-industrial landscape, ed. by NiallKirkwood (London and New York:Taylor and Francis, 2001), pp. 150-61.

25. Peter Latz, Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord,<http://www.latzundpartner.de/L3/eng/e-4-du.htm> [accessed 20January 2007].

26. Lisa Dietrich, ‘No Politics, no Park:the Duisburg-Nord model’, ToposEuropean Landscape Magazine, 26(March 1999): 69-78 (p. 72).

27. Dietrich, ‘No Politics, no Park’, p.69. Corbin, ‘Vacancy and theLandscape’, p. 20.

28. Latz, Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord.29. Ibid.30. Dietrich, ‘No Politics, no Park’, p.

72.31. See Thies Schröder, ‘Latz+Partner,

Constructing Physical Nature’, inChanges in Scenery: Contemporary

Landscape Architecture in Europe, ed.by Thies Schröder (Basel-Berlin-Boston: Birkhäuser, 2002), pp. 64-77(p. 76); Peter Reed, Groundswell:

Constructing the Contemporary Landscape(New York: The Museum of ModernArt, 2005), pp. 124-31; Latz,Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord.

32. Latz, Landscape Park Duisburg-Nord.33. Latz, quoted in Dietrich, ‘No

Politics, no Park’, p. 74.

Illustration creditsarq gratefully acknowledges:John Davies, 2Michel Desvigne, 4Field Operations and Diller Scofidio +

Renfro/City of New York, 3bKrystallia Kamvasinou, 1, 5, 6Joel Sternfeld/City of New York, 3a

BiographyKrystallia Kamvasinou is an architectand landscape architect. She is aLecturer in Landscape Design at theSchool of Architecture, University ofKent; Visiting Lecturer at theUniversity of Westminster, London;AHRC Research Fellow at theDepartment of Geography, UCL; andfounding member of collaborativestudio terrain+.

Author’s addressKrystallia Kamvasinou Kent School of ArchitectureMarlowe BuildingUniversity of KentCanterburyKent, ct2 7nrUKk.kamvasinou@kent.ac.uk

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