Poetic interventions in the open city: Homo Viator and landscape in Houston and Randstad, Holland (Texas)

Abstract

The Haarlemmermeer Polder resembles the Sleeping Beauty awaiting the Prince's kiss: it is a void filled with opportunity in the dispersed metropolitan landscape of Randstad, Holland. Like Houston, it is densely urban, yet its urbanity is for the most part placeless. This dual personality is an exciting constant in a model of transformation into an 'empty' metropolitan area in which urbanity is exploited to its extreme: the density of the void. Two aspects will be significant to its future. The first is Homo Viator who has constructed a new domain linked together by motion. Second, there is the landscape of the open city. Exciting opportunities abound in stretching the contrast between the human and natural orders to an uncomfortable extreme by Dutch measures. The resulting landscape through colonization will be a new chapter in the Dutch tradition of treating the landscape as a work of art, continuously reinterpreted and rewritten