Mobilizing landscape architecture against urban precarity: Framing an applied-philosophy approach through the works of Henri Maldiney, Paul Ricoeur, and Jacques Rancière

In cities today, a growing number of individuals face living situations characterized by precarity, meaning “the absence of the conditions and the securities allowing them to assume fully their responsibilities and enjoy the benefit of their fundamental rights” (Wresinski, 1987). In the urgency of the situation, it is crucial to wonder how landscape architects, who are among the main actors of urban design, could help foster a more interdependent society and thereby address precarity. To date, and since the late nineteenth century (Cranz, 1982), city makers have addressed those problems using an applied-science approach based on empirical data and other verifiable information. To a problem, a solution. That model is imbued by modern faith in scientific methods and technological progress. Today, however, new understandings of agency are reformulating the meaning of expertise, and power is being transferred significantly to social agents (NGOs, skilled citizens, social subsystems). The impetus for action has been resituated in territories where people’s voices are diverse. In that context, and without precluding it, an applied-philosophy approach has become more pertinent than the traditional applied-science approach used in design problems. Applied philosophy can enable city makers to engage more deeply with the complex, interwoven realities of the changing world, taking into account the fundamental hermeneutic of the relationship between human beings, technology, and the environment. As a problem that elicits an applied-philosophy strategy, precarity structures the framework for a case study and appropriate moments of intervention. The applied-philosophy model unfolds in five phases: 1) acquisition of philosophical concepts, 2) development of derivatives, 3) activation within urban landscape, 4) modification of sensorium and alteration of symbiotic milieu, 5) elaboration of new communalities and socialities. Hence, the model first relies on phenomenology to seek for guidance deeply bound up with human experience. Ideas of selfhood and otherness articulated by late-twentieth-century phenomenologists Henri Maldiney (1912–2013), Paul Ricœur (1913–2005), and Jacques Rancière (b. 1940) make evident three significant lines of thought relative to precarity: openness, recognition, and emancipation. Second, from these philosophical concepts, three derivatives—idealects—are suggested to inspire new urban landscape architectural practices mobilized against precarity: indetermination, pedagogical space, and reorganization of common values. At this stage, the research more specifically articulates three speculative scenarios on the unprogrammed versus determinate future, horizontal versus vertical knowledge, and social care versus designed cure, among other postmodern questions in relation to socially just futures. These scenarios illustrate how to instigate cultural change by transforming the sensorium—the environmental, social, historical, and cultural mediation of the senses and the shaping of perception (Hamilakis, 2013)—through dissensus or disturbance to an established equilibrium. Finally, after addressing three axes of recommendations to landscape architecture practice—undoing programming; undoing vertical knowledge; undoing technicity—the dissertation concludes that by reforming the state of symbiosis (McHarg, 1968) in which we dwell, new communalities and socialities are informed, making it possible to redress precarity.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D.

Level thesis:degree_level

Dissertation

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Landscape Architecture

Grantor

University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign

Year dc:date

2024

Author dc:creator

• Champagne, Alexandre

Contributors dc:contributor

• Hays, David L
• Farnell, Brenda M
• Monson, Jennifer
• Deming, Margaret E
• Ruggeri, Deni

• Applied-philosophy
• Applied-science
• Phenomenology
• Selfhood
• Otherness
• Sensorium
• Mutualism
• Signifying Person
• Precarity
• Landscape Architecture
• Recognition
• Emancipation
• Openness
• Indetermination
• Pedagogical Space
• Common Values
• Undoing Programming
• Undoing Vertical Knowledge
• Undoing Technicity
• Maldiney
• Ricœur
• Rancière
• Human Ontology
• Social Issues
• Just Environment
• Ethic
• Upstream Strategy
• Downstream Solutions

Statement dc:rights

• © 2024 Alexandre Champagne

Language dc:language

en, eng

Handle dc:identifier

https://hdl.handle.net/2142/124213

OAI record oai:identifier

https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/oai-pmh?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=etdms&identifier=oai%3Awww.ideals.illinois.edu%3A2142%2F124213