ECLAS Conference on Landscape and Ruins

23-27 September 2009,

Facoltà di Architettura
Stradone S. Agostino 37
16123, Genova
Italia

CALL FOR ABSTRACTS: deadline 23rd february 2009
abstract (max 2.000 characters).

Abstracts selection: before 30th march 2009.

Deadline for full length papers/posters: 30th april 2009.
Abstracts and papers should be addressed to: www.eclas.org

More info at
http://www.arch.unige.it/eve/convegni/08_09/info.pdf
and at www.eclas.org

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LANDSCAPES & RUINS - Planning and design for the regeneration of derelict places

Ruins have special meaning in relation to the landscape and the garden: the sense of loss, of harmony broken, and, at the same time, the hope of the future rebirth.

Landscape in ruin should be not only archaeological sites or traces of old gardens and sites, but places destroyed by catastrophic events – earthquakes, hurricanes, floods – or by the war, ordinary landscapes like post-industrial areas, abandoned railways areas, contaminated periurban and agricultural landscape, with problems of rejection and disorder.

The abandoned places in their several meanings - from the classical ruins of Villa Adriana to fauxruin gardens created in the English parks, to the ruins of the World War and to more recent ruins of European areas involved in post-conflict reconstruction process - (C. Woodward, In ruins, 2002), and the non-places - the ambivalent spaces that do not hold enough significance to be regarded as "places” - (M. Augé Non-Lieux, Introduction à une anthropologie de la surmodernité,1992) are a
peculiar aspect of contemporary landscape.

The landscape in ruin can have very fast degradation or very slow transformation.

In the processes of evolution/devolution landscapes can have various potentialities from the ecological, social and cultural point of view.
They are the ‘Third landscape’, and they will become the landscapes of the future. The architecture planning, design and management has the social responsibility to recapture
landscapes which are in ruin for different reasons.

Francesca Mazzino