Le Nouveau Jardin Pittoresque: ethics, aesthetics and garden design in Belgium (1913-1940)

Le Nouveau Jardin Pittoresque (The New Picturesque Garden) association was founded in 1913 to ‘renew and popularize garden art’ in Belgium. Originally, the emancipation of the lower classes was put forward as an important task; the association acted as a platform for those who were interested in the ethical role of garden design. Taking its journal Le Nouveau Jardin Pittoresque as the main source, this article investigates what was understood by the ‘new picturesque’ garden, why this type of garden was considered a suitable instrument for popularization and how the addressed audience evolved. The main argument is that the focus of Le Nouveau Jardin Pittoresque shifted from ethics to aesthetics during the interwar period. Under the impulse of landscape architect Jules Buyssens the emphasis moved towards the design of private gardens for the emerging middle class and away from the social role of the garden in the city

En marge… landscape, ecology and urbanization along infrastructure in the Eurometropolis Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai

The paper describes the result of a research project elaborated by the ‘Labo Stedenbouw’ (Laboratory for Urbanism, Department of Architecture and Urban Planning, Ghent University) in collaboration with the Ecole Nationale Supérieure d’Architecture et de Paysage de Lille (En marge… Paysage et biodiversité des délaissés et accotements infrastructurels de l’eurométropole Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai). Subject of the study is the eurometropolis Lille-Kortrijk-Tournai, a cross-border polynuclear region in which the important cities in 2008 have made an agreement to collaborate. Within this region the infrastructure (roads and highways, rail roads, canals) holds an important position: it composes the framework joining the dispersed urban condition. Furthermore, biologists have ascertained that the infrastructure’s margins also hold an important ecological value. Along the infrastructure, multiple “terrains vagues” are situated, sites that have lost their status or function as they were cut through by infrastructure. Also many highway and railway banks, as well as the shores of waterways are little or not accessible, as a result of which a new, but ‘wild’ nature comes into being. A first part of the research, executed by Lille University’s biologists, visualizes the biological diversity of the margins along infrastructure and their possibility to function as ecological corridors. In particular, the hypothesis of considering the infrastructure also as a green and blue network structuring the Eurometropolis is tested. A second part of the research, and this is where the paper focuses on, regards the relationship between these corridors and urbanisation. Which landscape qualities do these corridors offer? How are they used? Can they be made accessible and absorb urban functions? How do they relate towards the neighbouring urban tissue en how can they be a structuring element for the urbanised region of the Eurometropolis

Recollecting landscapes: new media for urban research

Recollecting Landscapes is a rephotograpic survey project which documents a century of landscape transformation in Belgium. It is based on the successive photography of 60 sites at three moments in time between 1904 and 2004. This paper takes the project as a starting point to investigate the use of new technologies for the communication of urban research. The project is marked by two ambitions: first, to analyze the transformation of urban and rural landscapes and second, to communicate this research to other scholars and to the general public. Recollecint Landscapes constructs a specific kind of knowledge in the form of a digital archive that is set up both as an interpretative instrument and as a didactic tool. An important evolution in the course of this project is the transition from print to pixel. The most recent rephotographic series resulted in a proliferation of media: a sourcebook, a multimedia exhibition, a documentary film and an interactive website with an on-line archive (www.recollectinglandscapes.be). Digital technology seems to expose the oscillation between document and discourse inherent to this kind of archival material. On the one hand, web-applications enhance the accuracy of information storage. Web-related databases are an aid to adding unambiguous metadata about the original context of images: year, place and date of production, photographer, institutional context, and so on. On the other hand, the availability of information on the web allows us to recontextualise images with an unprecedented ease. In the age of the internet, search engines such as Google Images have become an important source of information for students as well as scholars. Anyone can now produce an instant powerpoint presentation on any subject from behind their own desk. It goes without saying that in the limitless image archive of the internet, easy access prevails over accurate metadata. This evolution leads to one of the main questions behind this paper: how do we understand the impact of the new technologies on the perception and reproduction of the urban landscape? How do we prevent new technologies such as the web and powerpoint presentations from resulting in a mere rhetorical parade of images without context? More generally speaking: how do we deal with the issue of information control when images migrate from one discursive context to another? We argue that, because of the rise of new technologies such as the internet, the role of the researcher becomes comparable with that of an exhibition curator. Instead of offering one narrative that determines how the public looks at the photos, the researcher offers many layers of information: the researcher becomes a ‘curator of knowledge’. However, we also argue that, even when the web blurs the boundaries of traditional didactical spaces (such as the classroom, the archive and the exhibition space), these spaces can survive in new forms in the digital era

Narratives of loss and order and imaging the Belgian landscape 1900-1945

In their article "Narratives of Loss and Order and Imaging the Belgian Landscape 1900-1945" Bruno Notteboom and David Peleman analyze a number of publications on landscape, focusing on narratives constructed by means of landscape images published in Belgium. With the work of Jean Massart and Emile Vanderwelde as a point of departure, Notteboom and Peleman discuss popularizing publications in the fields of botany, agricultural education, and tourism, as well as an urban planning. They address the three realms of landscape narratives defined by Matthew Potteiger and Jamie Purinton as story, context/intertext, and discourse. Notteboom and Peleman distinguish three recurrent operations or narrative techniques: framing, sequencing, and juxtaposing whereby their main argument is that in spite of their ideological differences the publications they discuss seek a way of dealing with processes of modernization and with the loss of a traditional way of living defined by a direct relation with the land

Photography and the construction of collective memory in Ghent, Belgium

The paper investigates the shifting role of photography in the construction of collective cultural memory. It focuses on urban photography in Ghent, Belgium, at two particular periods of time. The paper is situated within the framework of the exhibition Edmond Sacré. Portrait of a City, curated by Ghent University in STAM (Ghent city museum), and a parallel artistic research project at the School of Arts at Ghent University College (2011-2012). At the turn of the XX century, new monumental squares and historicizing architecture created a new sense of history rooted in Flemish patriotism, especially in the run-up to the 1913 Ghent World Fair. The photographer Edmond Sacré created canonical images of the renewed city centre that went around the world for the promotion of the World Fair. Since the 1970s, the role of photography in the construction of cultural memory in Ghent has altered. In contrast to Sacré, photographers of the late XX and early XXI century have created a more complex image of the city. A number of contemporary photographers who worked on the Wondelgemse Meersen, a brownfield site north of the city centre, depicted the site as the locus of marginalised social groups who did not find their place in the historical city centre. The paper investigates if and how these photographers contribute to a different kind of cultural memory related to ephemeral places and practices in contrast to Sacré’s image of Ghent