Tasting the Landscape, 53rd International IFLA (International Federation of Landscape Architects) Congress
Tasting the Landscape, the title chosen for the 53rd International IFLA (International Federation of Landscape Architects) Congress, calls for the interpretation of the landscape project as an expression of a greater consciousness of the transformation processes and as an opportunity to improve the places where populations carry out their life.
The expression Tasting, according to it’s meaning of savoring, experiencing, trying applied to the landscape, implies an attention given to the sensorial dimension of a place, a consideration of slowness as a value: it urges us to not forget the emotional and perceptive aspects as creative agents for the project. Furthermore, it refers to the experience of discovery, to an inventive attitude that leads to in depth investigating, seeking to understand, to evaluating and re-elaborating images, practices, and signs that can orient the inevitable change of regions and landscapes according to a shared and communal feeling.
Thus, Tasting the Landscape intends to emphasize the landscape project as an instrument that produces quality, wellness, resources, the common good, as well as the central role of the landscape professional in the processes of regeneration and reconfiguration of places and regions.
For participants, the Congress will constitute a privileged field for confrontation and discussion of the dimension of the peri-urban landscape, areas where different practices, lifestyles and forms of change meet and collide. Here, the tensions of transformation of human settlements express themselves with greater intensity and agricultural space tends to lose its productive traditional role: the relationship between city and countryside is destined to recombine itself in renewed multifunctional and heterogeneous layouts.
These instable, hybrid, ambiguous areas, exactly so because they tend to be unresolved, constitute a fertile terrain for research and the application of landscape planning and design: indeed, it would seem that a good part of the sustainability challenge is playing out for the city of the new millennium in these peri-urban spaces. A challenge that calls together administrators, engineers, the citizenry, and farmers to collaborate and that makes the contribution of the landscape professional indispensable.
Starting from this platform of general direction, the 53rd International IFLA Congress will be structured according to four specific lines of thematic investigation, identified with the objective of investigating some emerging questions in the practice of Landscape architecture.
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