Environments by Design
Abstract
The extensive Danish coastline is dotted with small and medium-sized harbours. Key activities in each of these harbours vary; based on combinations of, e.g., fishery, local, national or international transportation of goods and people on land and at sea, recreational facilities, offshore activity, and industrial production on land. While to various degrees, these harbours and the activities that shape and sustain them, are embedded in their localities – developed through close interrelationships with site-specific conditions of the sea and of the land, and interwoven with local economies and communities – they are also material manifestations of links to elsewhere and global production and consumption flows. They are national and regional nodes in mobility networks of trade and flows, manifesting as moorings of building and infrastructure at local sites.
This paper maps and analyses material manifestations of externalities and site-specific interrelationships between harbours, towns, and landscapes. Four Danish harbours are the object of study, one an inland port by a fiord, the others located on the east and west coasts of the peninsula of Jutland. Mappings include topography, buildings, structures, infrastructures, and open spaces, and the entanglements of these material manifestations with processes, dynamics and lives of the harbours. These provide a basis to examine the spatial-material composition of the harbours as cultural landscapes.
On the basis of this study, the paper develops thematic deliberations on the material manifestations of contemporary port-scapes in two interlinked trajectories. First, in acknowledging and seeking to unfold the character of these harbours as industrial landscape-changing enterprises, the paper engages a conceptual discussion of the inscriptions of human-nature relationships in their material layout, space, and form. Second, the paper deliberates on the material agency of these layouts, spaces and forms in the ‘port-city relationships’, discussing the controversial conditions of connectivity and disconnectivity between ports and towns.
Søren Risdal Borg is a PhD fellow at the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University (Denmark). He is trained as an urban designer, holds a BA in Architecture and Urban Design and an MA in Urban Design. Currently conducting research, theoretically grounded in urban design with insight of ecology, into the contemporary conditions of urban industrial landscapes, to uncover perspectives, logics, barriers and critical discussions related to their participation in an ecology of interrelationships and linkages. This research is driven by a case study, exploring urban industrial landscapes, as important actors of urban metabolism, yet, underexplored places in the urban fabric. Such spaces are planned for industrial and infrastructural actions, predominantly defined by activities of the manufacturing industries and multiple companies. His main research interests contemplate; urban design, urban industrial landscapes, urban infrastructures, ecological urbanism, Anthropocene urbanism, research by/through design, design for sustainable transition. He formerly participated in research projects on the implementation of driverless busses as part of suburban development as well as rural village futures in collaboration with a local community.
Ida Sofie Gøtzsche Lange is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University (Denmark). She is a board member of the Centre for Mobilities and Urban Studies (C-MUS) and of the Association of North Jutland Planners. She holds a BA in Architecture and Urban Design, an MA in Urban Design and a PhD in Urban Design and Mobilities, entitled ‘Transit City or Living City?’ from 2016; an in-depth mixed methods case study of a Danish port-city. Currently she is the PI of a research project on port-city relationships (REHAB) with point of departure in 7 Danish port-cities. She is also one of the proposers of the COST action: “PortCityTransitions: Interdisciplinary explorations of port city relationships“. Her research revolves around place management and site specific qualities, and is concerned with place and mobility challenges as well as potentials for urban development of port-cities and other highly mobility affected places. Her main research interests are within Port City Relationships, Urban Design, Urban Mobilities, Planning, Place theory and Mobilities Design. Recently, she has co-edited the Routledge Handbook of Urban Mobilities (2020) and Material Mobilities (2020) and is an author in the edited volume Mobilising Place Management (2021).
Ditte Bendix Lanng is Associate Professor in Urban Design and Mobilities at the Department of Architecture, Design and Media Technology, Aalborg University (Denmark). She holds an MA in Urban Design, and a PhD in Urban Design and Mobilities. Ditte’s research interests are within Urban Design and Mobilities Design – a combination of fields that she researches through intersections of socio-technical studies, mobilities research, and urban and architectural studies. In particular, her work concerns ‘mobilities design’, an emerging interdisciplinary research agenda, that seeks to denaturalize and de-objectify transport infrastructures and to open up a space for knowing, and including in future design practices, a wider host of ethical, social, cultural, political and affective agencies of the urban design of infrastructures. In her research, she engages in design experiments as modes of sociocultural enquiry, in ethnographies of infrastructures, and in collective research enterprises with publics, communities, and planning and architectural practice. She has a commitment to merging relational approaches with Urban Design, and develop Urban Design’s and Mobilities Design’s theoretical and methodological streams of materialities as networked and active hybrids. She is the author (with Ole B. Jensen) of Urban Mobilities Design. Urban Designs for Mobile Situations, 2017, Routledge.
7:30 am - 9:00 am
Thursday 17th June, 2021