Title: Landscape_urbanism Intelligences: Cultivating Balance for Ecological and Sustainable Futures
Chair:
Assis. Prof. Panita Karamanea
Department of Architecture
National Technical University of Athens
Abstract/Description:
Contemporary climatic conditions urge us to reconsider how the human actions transform space under increasing environmental, technological, cultural and political pressure. Landscape_urbanism, by its capacity to operate across time, scales and systems, plays a crucial role in addressing these transformations. Today, theory, design and practice are not only concerned with shaping space, but with managing uncertainty. Climate change, ecological instability and emerging AI technologies are profoundly altering our understanding of nature, cities and countryside, challenging traditional disciplinary boundaries and pushing further the discourse.
This session aims to host and reflect on current tendencies, contradictions, experimental approaches and innovative research, creating space for an open, multicultural debate on what an intelligent approach to landscape and urbanism might mean today. What kinds of “landscape intelligences” do we require that AI cannot easily capture or replace? Are these data-driven tools helping us deepen our relationship with landscape, or are they making cities, countryside and space more legible, more marketable and ultimately more fragile?
In the context of climate change, intelligence must be questioned not only as a means to manage landscapes, but as a way to care for them in ecological and social terms. This raises further questions: are we designing spaces, or rather the conditions that allow them to evolve? How might we support landscapes in sustaining cultural meaning, heritage identities, ecological resilience and social responsibility towards communities, rather than merely increasing efficiency?
Bringing together interdisciplinary perspectives, the focus shifts away from how landscapes and cities should look, towards how they should behave, adapt, and perform—ecologically, socially and culturally. Rather than seeking definitive answers and recipes, we should explore how multiple “landscape_urbanism intelligences” may act as drivers of hope and carriers of imaginative responses to current crisis, without losing creativity or criticality.
The session welcomes hypotheses, theoretical frameworks, experiments and projects related to teaching approaches, designing and researching on landscape, urban and peri-urban spaces, ranging in a spectrum from conventional mapping and GIS, to representational experiments and AI tools. In a time of accelerating climate change, intensifying tourism and political pressure, landscape_urbanism can offer an alternative model for humanity—one based not on optimization alone, but on balance, care and long-term responsibility. It could reframe the human footprint as a bio-technological network embedded within, and coevolving with, natural processes.