Designing Emotive Urban Landscapes

Webinar Description:
The experience of landscapes is a holistic phenomenon, a bodily experience that takes place in time and space that has a big impact on emotions. It is a flow of experiential qualities, images, thoughts, and meanings. For a landscape experience, the physical configuration of a design becomes the vehicle of expressing something, an idea, an emotion etc. Landscapes are designed as a medium to communicate and express to their users a wide range of emotions contributing to their mental well-being and awakening their senses. In this sense, when entering an urban landscape, we instinctively engage on how it makes us feel.



This seminar addresses how designed urban landscapes can evoke users’ emotional responses. Emotions are reactions of stimuli coming through the sense of sight, taste, smell, thermal conditions, pain, pleasure, balance and motion. Collective or shared emotions are particularly relevant to designed landscapes. This projection of emotions onto the external world allows for a shared urban space environment to be created between the users and the landscape architects. Landscape Design Strategies such as figures of speech, narratives, cinematic principles of editing and other strategies of the extended consciousness are instrumental in enhancing the experiential qualities of urban landscapes by retrieving ideas, associations, and images. With its enhanced focus on creating sensory experiences, contemporary landscape design can be argued to induce bodily, mental and psychological stimuli to its users by bringing them into intimate relation with these spaces. Several urban landscape vignettes will be examined to discover how they produce sensory experiences by choreographing and staging natural processes such as seasonal change and the agentic capacities of weather, water, sky and plants. When paying attention not to what people see, but how the landscape instructs performances and experiences with which the users see, feel and act, contemporary landscape architects inform us about the various ways employed to embed such processes through urban landscape design.

Learning Objectives:
1. How designed urban landscapes can evoke users' emotional responses
2. How landscape experiences contribute to the users' mental well-being
3. Landscape strategies to design emotive urban landscapes