Mapping traditions:historically tendencies of an urban design method

Mapping has a long tradition as a method within urban design and landscape practice and is generally used in three ways: To analyze spatial conditions, generate design interventions, and communicate design ideas or spatial knowledge. It is a tool for thinking through the activity of reformulating and interpreting the complex and three-dimensional world into often simplistic, two-dimensional visual representations. Looking at mapping in retrospect, historically positions and tendencies that reflect contemporary society and urban landscape is revealed. This paper seeks to trace the mapping positions and tendencies through time. The paper takes its historically starting point in the period of the industrialization and seeks at outlining shifting understandings and perspectives of the spatial and physical world, which has affected plans and design of urban landscapes. From this unfolding of various mapping tendencies and ways of doing thought time, the paper wishes to discuss the contemporary tendencies of urban design mapping. Here the paper discusses the implication of technological improvement in mappings. Technology has and is affecting mappings in two ways. Firstly, technology has and still is advancing the accuracy of measures of urban structure, and it increases geospatial knowledge usable in mappings as GIS (Geographical Information System) is a result of. Secondly, technology enables new ways of sensing and understanding the world, which makes it relevant to reflect on how new technologies extend the human senses and what new spatial knowledge they might enable. Hence, the paper discusses the possibilities and implications of a more technology driven urban design mapping practice

Differentiated decline in Danish outskirt areas

In the last 20 years, Danish rural areas have suffered from depopulation and economic decline, and this development seems to be accelerating. This means a negligence of buildings and infrastructure and hence a decay in architectonic and spatial qualities. A general schism observed in the discussion about Danish rural development seems to be that the main focus is kept on a national and regional level. The consequence is a lack of nuances in the overall debate and a missing ability to create positive developments, locally. Through studies of the village of Klokkerholm, this article investigates how potentials of a landscape urbanism based development (Waldheim 2006; Corner 1999) and the commitment from the local community in participative projects (Jones, Petrescu & Till 2005) can create differentiated development in an area of decline: A strategy using landscape and citizen driven ‘dynamos’ as triggers for a development, which aims to improve everyday life by creating new landscape, based spaces