Landscape Architecture and the Green Deal Dare: Five Successful Experiences in Urban Open Spaces

Abstract

The present work focuses on European cities’ environments and open spaces, aiming to demonstrate how, through landscape architecture, it is possible to respond effectively to many of the ecological and social hardships that the Green Deal aspires to alleviate. It was signed in 2019 by all of the member countries of the Union, seeks to reverse the climate change trend by establishing a series of goals for improving environmental and economic quality for 2030 and 2050 and also aims to enact social justice in rural areas and in the urban environment. Landscape architecture, which is the art of combining the physical and immaterial elements in cities’ open spaces, is taken in this work as the method of interpreting the existing environment. The description, together with the narrative analysis of five selected site-specific urban renovations projects carried out in the last 15 years by some of the main contemporary landscape architects, such as Micheal Desvigne, Peter Latz and Gilles Clément, demonstrates, by means of their empirical experiences, the benefits of the landscape design. It is able to match both the ecological need expressed in the Deal and to respond to the ambition of an open and rightful city, as called for by the theories of Sennet and Balmori. In order to reach the just transition and to leave no one behind, and to meet and to implement the Green Deal objectives, the new, positive and long-lasting explained transformations require the consideration of landscape design, in all its material and immaterial components, as a theoretical synthesis capable of obtaining a practical application in fighting climate change, and it should be considered and included in city management policies and in the Deal, too.