Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays

摘要

Against 'the attempted de-politicization of architecture by the so-called "post-critical" theorists in the USA', the editors of Landscape and Agency have assembled a series of texts for landscape architects and urban designers that foreground the relationship between politics and design. This attempted de-politi-cisation is theorised in the volume by Douglas Spencer, who sees a recent turn towards terms like emergence, and agency, as an attempt to relinquish responsibility, or what Spencer calls 'conscious agency', for the final outcome of architectural interventions. Against this perceived trend in architecture, this volume offers a tool-kit of ideas for how to think politically about design decisions using conscious human agency. This is to say that the model of agency used in this volume is an entirely binary one, that will be of limited use for considering landscapes that include non-humans. I want to begin by giving the volume its due, considering its valuable contributions to thinking about the relationship between politics and architecture, before turning to this more problematic aspect of the book: it's inability to think about landscape and agency outside of the binary model.