Landscape as Urbanism

Gareth Doherty, Harvard University, Cambridge USA LANDSCAPE as URBANISM PART ONE I want to start off this lecture with some reflections on landscape urbanism in general as a way of situating some projects within the emerging field. And I would like to begin with Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe (1900-1996), the English landscape architect and coauthor of the seminal textbook he Landscape of Man. Jellicoe predicted that within the first half of the twenty-first century   andscape architecture would overtake architecture as, what he termed, “the mother of the  Arts”. Initially trained as an architect and a former Chairman of the Architectural Association (AA) in London, Jellicoe became convinced that landscape rather than architecture is the real organizational force not just of built environment but of the human spirit as well. i  Choosing to spend the final years of his life in Berthold Lubetkin’s Highpoint modernist apartment building in Highgate, Jellicoe was inspired by the view of north London from his fourth floor flat: an incredibly diverse urban mélange held together by trees. Ten years after his death, Jellicoe’s prediction is within reach. Landscape, as we all know, has gathered huge attention in architectural and urban design discourse, pedagogy and practice. ii Rather than the object, what really matters are the relationships between objects in space, and their meaning. Jellicoe had anticipated the increasing importance of landscape through his writings and projects especially in his Motopia project from the early 1960s. iii  Motopia was in many ways a precedent for landscape urbanism, because it dealt with real issues like cars, infrastructure, housing and open space that confront us today. Rather than resisting the pressures of urbanity by tending to beautify it, the practice of landscape ought to be bolder and much more assertive in spatial organization of the urban fabric. It needs to grapple with hard issues. The concept of landscape urbanism was largely developed at the University of Pennsylvania during the 1990s in the aftermath of Ian McHarg. While Chairman of the Department of landscape Architecture and Regional Planning during the 1960s and 70s, McHarg built a reputation as one of the leading landscape architects of his day. However, as Elizabeth Mossop points out, McHarg so domineered the field that, to a large extent, the profession ignored the design aspect of landscape architecture as well as the relationship between planning and design. iv James Corner, a successor of McHarg’s at Penn, points out that McHarg saw the city as bad, and the natural environment as good. The concept of urban was anathema to McHarg, and served to divorce the practice of landscape architecture from the city, arguably weakening rather than empowering the profession. The answer is not quite as black and white as McHarg thought or preached and is, probably, presented through the grays of landscape urbanism. The term landscape urbanism was first articulated in the late 1990s by Charles Waldheim, who had studied at Penn and was then on the faculty at the University of Illinois at Chicago (and is now of the University of Toronto where he directs the MLA program). The first major event was a symposium of the same title at the University of Illinois and speakers included McHarg, Corner, and Waldheim. Since then it has gathered currency in contemporary discourse and practice and educational programs, such as the Landscape Urbanism graduate program at the AA in London. In the book, Landscape Urbanism: the machinic landscape, published by the AA in 2003, James Corner likens the fusion of landscape architecture with urbanism that created the hybrid discipline of landscape urbanism to the “combination of biology and technology to spawn biotech, or of evolutionary science with business management to produce organizational dynamics”. v However, it is less the merging of two extremes as suggested by Corner, and more a meeting of like minds. Landscape ecologist, Richard T.T. Forman, defines a landscape as “a mosaic where the mix of local ecosystems or land uses is repeated in similar form over a kilometers-wide area… Thus, a repeated cluster of spatial elements characterizes a landscape.” vi This sounds like urbanism but the landscape architect has a specialization in ecology whereas the urbanist perhaps has the edge with economics and political maneuvering. Both together provide a powerful mix. Landscape urbanism arose as a mechanism to deal with a specific set of problems: 1.) Increasingly decentralized cities, such as the post-Fordist landscapes of urban edges and the low density landscapes that the majority of us now live in, and enjoy living in (over 60% of Europeans live outside traditional city cores). While cities are spreading, the countryside is becoming increasingly urbanized. Decentralized landscapes are increasingly important for the practice of industry, commerce and everyday life. 2.) Brownfield and former industrial sites that are usually outside the purview of traditional development. 3.) Large-scale infrastructures and the integration of landscape with these infrastructures to create new hybrid forms of public spaces, and 4.) Landscape as a remedial agent within urban areas, in the developing as well as the developed world, as championed by Kenneth Frampton. In order to affect wider change, these issues need to be tackled on an interdisciplinary way. In a 1961 sketch entitled “A Table for Eight”, Jellicoe played out the dilemma facing a host, a landscape architect, arranging the seating at a dinner table. There are seven guests: a philosopher, a planner, a horticulturalist, an engineer, an architect, a sculptor, and a painter. The landscape architect must decide first of all the shape of the table, should it be square, long, or round? And then who to sit next to whom, and why? vii  Jellicoe’s point was that the effective practice of landscape architecture requires collaboration between all these disciplines in a process led by the landscape architect. In bringing these different fields together, the agency of landscape not just to be shaped by the world, but to shape the world, is recognized. Landscape becomes a medium of immense capacity to generate change. If the host were a contemporary landscape urbanist, the guest list might well be even more diverse and may include a politician, an ecologist, a property developer, a social scientist, a psychologist and a local resident or two, depending on the project in hand and the anticipated results. Two overarching themes bind landscape urbanism together. Firstly, that landscape urbanism is seen as a synthetic and multi-scalar discipline leading a range of other disciplines and interests. And secondly, the recognition of landscape (as ecology, infrastructure, etc.) as the “primary ordering device” of the city. This involves either the design of landscape as one entity or, more reasonably, the design of specific part of a landscape to have effects that may affect the whole. Put simply, landscape is shaped by complex urban forces within a matrix, all of which may operate on local, regional or global scales, and secondly, landscape has the reciprocal agency to shape its context outwards under the same criteria. It is the creative aspect, in pulling the disparate forces together through the creative act of design, that distinguishes the contribution of the landscape urbanist. I think Jellicoe would approve of this current trend in the field. PART TWO This second part will survey three landscapes in Ireland that I have observed or had a hand in. Broadly speaking, the first relates to the issue of how to think about landscape. The second  ow to design with it. And the third, how to organize it. They are all situated on the borderland between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. 2.1: Way of Thinking: Catalytic Design: Political Murals in Northern Ireland Rather than attempting to resolve or neutralize conflicts, landscape may stage them or even set up conditions from which resolutions might come about. The Northern Irish armed conflict raised tensions throughout the British and Irish Isles which was manifest in local spaces. The larger struggle over the place of the province within a United Kingdom or a United Ireland was played out on a local level through political murals, flags and painted curbstones. Symbols and symbolic events were used by both traditions in the appropriation of public space. Society was divided and so was open space. Derry is one of the most graphic illustrations of the divided society and urban landscape: the western bank of the city was Catholic, while the eastern bank was Protestant, and these communities became ever more segregated as the troubles developed. Today, at last, the barriers are coming down. Wall painting can have as much an affect in transforming public space than, say, a multi-million euro project. The act of painting of a mural has the power to totally transform a space. A gable wall suddenly becomes a focus of attention, a rallying ground, a meeting place. These murals, often with sinister messages and symbols, vie for attention as they assert, or attempt to assert control over territory. Murals spatially compete for attention and predominance, peeking here and there for attention across public space. viii New murals are often painted in response to provocations of another tradition, creating a spatial parlance as such: if murals could speak, they would be having a heated dialogue over space and time. Within the political climate arising from the 1998 Peace Agreement, new murals are still being painted but with more neutral messages and the debate over whether to depoliticize or  eutralize them has heated up. Some want them removed altogether. Others see their historic value, and in fact alternative tourist tours of segregated areas are becoming increasingly popular. Often, commercial messages adopt the media of murals. Across the province, murals now promote commercial activities using similar language and style of their political forebears. But they all still represent a sort of dialogue in space and time. 2.2 Way of Designing: Comhrá Maps / The Clonmany Area Pilot Project Ever-increasing local, national and international flows of people, ideas, goods and information are shifting territorial boundaries and identities and changing how we use, and see, the Irish landscape. Emergent perceptions of territory demand new ways of designing and managing their complex dynamic over time. Interventions demand a more all-embracing, proto political, approach. Territory can be both subjective and very real. Notions of territory and borders cause conflict. Conflict creates a dynamic that becomes embedded in culture. The Irish landscape has been shaped by conflicts for millennia, affecting both the national psyche and the land: the Viking, Norman and Elizabethan invasions all left very definite spatial consequences; ruined castles and monasteries; placenames; and a network of towns and villages that can usually be traced back to one conquest or cultural condition or another. What are the current conflicts? How can they be managed and utilised to give physical form and a new nomenclature to contemporary Irish society? Who, in fact, is that society, given that now that there are almost half as many residents in Ireland as tourists annually? Such questions demand a system of working that can cater for and manage the desires and agendas of differing individuals and user groups existing in a place and give them a voice in its future. Some people claim that traditional master planning has failed - by zoning in activities, other activities are zoned out and society can actually become further segregated and divided. Society, moreover, no longer stays still enough for master plans to be completed. How can progress be made by not creating or reinforcing boundaries? How can voice be given to all? And how can a flexible enough system, one that changes and morphs over time depending on the forces affecting it, be devised? Raoul Bunschoten of CHORA architecture and urbanism, based in London, and I were commissioned to prepare a parish development strategy for the Clonmany parish in County Donegal. ix This brought us into contact with many of the thirty-eight organizations that exist in the parish. The renewal strategy evolved into a wider research on the territory inhabited by the organisations leading to a project about territory, identity and what we normally call proto urban forces - forces that create the conditions for urban change. The challenge was to find a way to bring all the community groups together and the only way we could find for them to agree to that was to propose a mapping strategy. The result was to be a map where the thirty-eight organizations would negotiate new projects around a table. CHORA is in the process of developing a prototype planning tool, called the Urban Gallery, that combines aspects of public space, the pooling of knowledge, negotiation processes and joint communal action. The Urban Gallery has four levels: knowledge, innovation, cooperation and action. We have not introduced this tool overtly in Inishowen. But we did use the  ethodology behind it and especially the criteria for testing prototypes in the innovation layer, criteria of: branding, earth, flow and incorporation. We introduced these in one of the projects, the map project in the Clonmany area, as basic ingredients for the initiation of innovative projects, or prototypes. The Urban Gallery, or its concomitant methodology, is aimed at tapping into local conflicts and harnessing their dynamic energy. The product is always more than design or construction: it aims at an effective management of the ongoing changes generated by single projects, and at coordinating the dynamics of the environment in which projects take place. The Urban Gallery is a prototype for an interactive planning tool and curatorial device (further explained on www.chora.org). But the Urban Gallery itself is an incubator of prototype projects for a village, town or region. Prototypes, being the first or primary type of something, are projects that trigger further reactions, processes and events. They do not sit in isolation, but are networked into space and society. The maps are organized under the headings of Branding, Earth, Flow and Incorporation – the fours terms CHORA use to describe prototypes. Raoul Bunschoten likens the categories to a chest of drawers: individual urban processes are sorted and placed in each of the four drawers as a way of starting to reorganize and intervene in the landscape. Branding is where issues of identity, culture, art, naming are placed; Earth - the environment, ecology, land, territory, geography and climate; Flow - movement of economics, traffic, migrations of birds, people; and Incorporation - political structures, business, and agencies that have a say and control over the land. x They resulted in several prototype projects some of which were incorporated into the Ballyliffin, Here We Go! five-year development strategy, below. 2.3: Way of Organizing: Ballyliffin, Here We Go! The Ballyliffin Residents’ Association (BRA) commissioned this five-year development strategy to be developed through public consultations. The plan is presented in the form of nineteen catalyst projects that can be pursued at different paces. Like a game of golf, some projects will be a hole-in-one while others will be treacherous and may get delayed with bunkers and high winds. It is a game intended to be celebrated with the creation of the nineteenth hole, “The Ballyliff Inn”, a new restaurant / village information amenity to be situated within the village. The project uses the agency of catalysts as a strategy for landscape design and planning. A catalyst, being an intervention “that precipitates a process or event”, triggers further effects that can be anticipated, although not necessarily pre-determined. The ripples caused by a catalyst facilitate an ongoing catalysis as new possibilities and opportunities unfold over time and space. Having nineteen distinct but interlinked projects has real advantages for funding as well as for providing a more flexible approach. The BRA can raise financing for lighting independently of funding for surfaces, even though both projects may act as catalysts for each other. Master plans are increasingly uncompleted in the contemporary world because society and the economy often do not stay still enough for them to be realized. This project attempts to provide adaptable approach to a village plan. Ballyliffin, 20km north of the Northern Ireland border, is representative of an Ireland under great change. As the second biggest tourist destination in the North West the Ballylififn Golf Course is an attractor for many of the visitors to the area. The 800 local residents are supplemented by many tens of thousands of non-locals who bring with them new spatial practices and new ideas of identity and authority. Questions must be asked about who owns the place and why? Who are we designing for? And how to respect local and non-local traditions. The nineteen projects attempt to answer these questions. Some projects are underway, others remain on the drawing board. Flexible plans, respond to changing politics and economics and still have the dynamic to push ahead. /03 Back to Front Street (2005-) Ballyliffin lacks a public square. The village has the appearance of being two rows of largely derelict houses on either side of a busy through road called Front Street. The highest priority is the resurfacing of Back Street. This will have the effect of redefining the space as a village street lined with existing mature trees. More importantly, it will act as a catalyst for further paving. Houses with their backs to the Back Street will create frontages to it, and a new public space will be generated. Back Street will become Front Street, and vice versa. /05 Street Furniture (2003-to-date) Recycling bins with 4 compartments for recycling (Fig. 4a opposite). Benches to be distributed throughout the parish area, their positions predicting a future network of paths. Sites for the benches will be conducive to the activities they are designed for: loving, reading, picnicking and sky-gazing (Fig 4b: below, Loving / Reading). /06 Public Art (2006 -) Play Walk One, or 3 Acts in 117 Signs: Can landscape animate text as well as text animate landscape? Can they help interpret each other? The entire text of local playwright Brian Friel’s “Translations” is to be placed on signs along 6.2km of footpaths in three locations, or acts. Instead of scenes, there are 117 signs, each 300 x 560mm, erected on poles 50m apart. The signs will be photographed in-situ and published as a new edition of the book. Each character’s text is colour coded allowing walkers to act out roles among themselves. The ubiquitous signs reflect an accepted roadside aesthetic and hint of a cheeky improvisation inherent in Friel’s work. Each sign is an epiphany of sorts and reminds us of the old local practice of the ‘turas’ (project 02). /07 Footpaths (2006 -) Constructing footpaths along the INSIDE of hedgerows, offering a much safer approach for pedestrians who would be protected by the buffer of the hedgerow. It is also a much more economical approach than traditional road widening. The pilot project will be located along the road to the Golf Club. /09 Village Signs (2003) Mindful of the tourists who flock every year to the Ballyliffin Golf Club, the BRA wanted to brand their village as an international destination. As a first step, they wanted to mark the village entrances, till then marked by a standard road sign. The introduction of the English language to this rural Irish landscape over two hundred years ago ensured the anglicizing and sometimes translating and transliterating of placenames from Gaelic to English. Until now, standard road signs existed with both the English and Irish names, black text on a white background. The new village sign, based on the standard directional road sign, is accompanied with Japanese, Chinese and Greek translations of the village name on a  Telemagenta” background. Tourism brings with it new variations on how we name places, coloring our spatial relationships. /13 Derelict Sites (2006) Don’t (bother to) cut the grass! Ballyliffin regularly achieves a respectable score in the annual “Tidy Town’s Competition”, a nationwide contest across the Republic of Ireland. But there is room for improvement in the “Landscaping” category and much room for improvement in the section for “Wildlife and Natural Amenities”. With a resident population of 800 of which less than 1% are actively involved, the Ballyliffin Residents’ Association (BRA) have real problems garnering the necessary support to achieve a higher score. So, the BRA erect signs which attempt to absolve them from maintenance in the name of environmental responsibility. They subvert how the place is viewed, and thus what is seen. /14 The Beach (2005-) For half the day the five kilometer-long beach offers fantastic opportunities for walks along its level sandy shores. For the other half, the tides restrict the walk, forcing would-be-walkers to stroll on the stones or on the hilly dunes - a practice which is not (yet) forbidden. We suggest highlighting the positive aspects of the walk along the beach by publishing tide times, in a booklet and on signs in the car park, therefore providing information on when it might be possible to walk comfortably along the beach but not directly telling people. /18 From Moonshine to Sunshine (2008-) Historically Clonmany’s (legitimate) economy was based on fishing and small mixed farms producing oats, potatoes, barley, sheep and dairy. As is the case throughout most of Western Europe neither fishing or farming are economical any longer. A small home-knitting and shirt factory industry thrived in the past but it has also declined and operations shifted to countries with cheaper labor costs such as the Ukraine and Morocco. An illegal poteen industry exists to this day. Just eight and three quarter miles long and seven miles wide and nestled between mountains and sea, the terrain and remote location of Clonmany provides an excellent hiding place for illegal whiskey making. Irish whiskey, a product characterized by the subtle nuances of ingredients and craft, has over the past centuries been polarized into two distinct modes of production: the large-scale distillery which exports globally recognized brands and an illicit, highly localized, industry producing poteen, or moonshine, where quality and ingredients are unregulated and taxes go unpaid. Facilitated by recent legislation permitting the private production of whiskey under license, this project sets out to liberate Irish cottage whiskey production and restore it as alegitimate, endogenous industry and a support for ancillary seasonal industries including the traditional farming, fishing and the more modern industry of tourism. The slide shows a map of some of the placenames currently in usage in Clonmany. Since they roughly correspond to farms, perhaps the different cottage brands could be known by a local placename. A Whiskey Trail would bring the visitors between the farms. One scenario would see a costal trail and a hill trail linking the various farms and intersecting at the proposed central assembler, the pub / tasting room (/19). Proximity to spring wells may also be an  dvantage in finding distinctiveness. The new boutique cottage whiskey industry becomes a driving force for the new public square (in Back to Front Street) which it will frame and be the driving force of. We see that industry is inherently interlinked with public space which in this rural economy is driven by a curious mix of the local with the global and landscape with urbanism. /19 The Ballyliff Inn (2007-) Situated in the village centre, the Ballyliff Inn will offer refreshment in a nonthemed ‘local’ way. It will serve as a centre for locals to gather and meet and talk over a beer or orange juice, or cup of tea, offering everything an old-fashioned pub will offer, and more. It will be interlinked with projects 03 and 04, acting as catalyst for urban renewal. A building is in the process of being bought by the BRA in autumn 2004. It’s back yard will become it’s front garden and in time the remaining buildings will follow suit, creating a new public plaza by coercion. PART THREE 3.1 Some Observations on the Commodification of Landscape in the Arab Gulf This research focuses on recent projects in the Arab Gulf, especially the Kingdom of Bahrain and the Emirate of Dubai in the United Arab Emirates and touches upon some of the ideas presented earlier. Master plans have little currency there today – development is moving at too fast a pace. When projects are seen in relationship to each other, certain points in a matrix may affect a wider landscape change than trying to order the whole landscape which is often impossible for reasons of land ownership, political tensions or economics. Critically, it is not the intervention that is the landscape but the spatial reactions it brings about. We can see from the slide that the concept of the catalyst / prototype applies in Dubai city and in terms of Dubai and the region. Mega-projects in Dubai - a city which has had sixty master  lans prepared for it, none of which have been implemented - exist in relationship to each other, and in relationship to the rest of the Arab Gulf. Bahrain, Kuwait, Doha and Abu Dhabi are all competing with Dubai in a similar vein. Why are the open spaces of Arab Gulf cities so green? Aerial photographs, and urban proposals of Dubai, Manama, Kuwait, Doha and Abu Dhabi, show city landscapes interspersed with generous patches of greenery. For instance, 5.8% of Dubai is currently green and, through an ambitious park building program by the Dubai Municipality, this will increase to 8% by 2008 (as compared to 30% of London). These curious landscapes are typically comprised of neatly manicured lawns and luscious green vegetation interspersed with apartment blocks, hotels and leisure developments. Date palms are never far away. They look like decadent urban oases in stark contrast to the harsh indigenous desert landscape beneath. These landscapes, if we might call them landscapes, are green because they are sustained by irrigation systems. They are irrigated because green is a sign of development, of overcoming the desert. Such urban oases have little or no environmental value, in fact, they have a negative environmental value because they are so heavily dependant on the energy-intensive desalination of seawater and in fact are largely in conflict with the local ecosystems. xi Often parks, such as the recently opened touristic Al- Zabeel Park in Dubai, are private green spaces that require an entrance fee, and have a limited social value. (In any case there is no great tradition of public parks in the Arab region, due in part to the extreme climate and to social practice.) But these green spaces do have an economic value, and ought to be understood in relationship to the massive urban development underway in the Gulf region. They are usually built to sell a particular lifestyle or property to visitors and residents. xii Brochures show the latest buildings set in a vibrant green carpet of manicured grass and exotic shrubs. Even the iconic “Palms” and “The World” projects are green to look at but certainly not in composition. Landscape becomes a commodity, bought and sold on global markets, looked at but not used, and watered daily to conserve economic value. We have the choice to accept this and work with it (a concept driven by the image of the mirage)  CONCLUSION Landscape urbanism may take some cues from another hybrid discipline that emerged in the 1980s, that of landscape ecology. xiii Landscape ecology looks at landscapes and regions from a human ecological perspective, often aided by aerial photography. In his seminal book Land Mosaics: The ecology of landscapes and regions Harvard professor Richard T.T. Forman describes landscapes as being made up of an interlinked series of patches such as woodlands linked together by corridors such as hedgerows and organized within a matrix such as an agricultural landscape. If isolated from one another the patches are considered as islands, or else they are described as nodes if connected to other nodes and corridors. Nodes can be either a source of objects dispersing outward, or “implosion-like flows toward a node acting as a sink.” Forman reveals a world where landscape is composed both formally and operatively as a series of networks. Formally it relates to the landscape mosaics as seen in plan from above (such as from aerial photography or Jellicoe’s fourth floor vantage point) and, operatively, to how ecology works in unison as part of a complex whole. xiv Forman identifies six types of landscape network, each comprised of nodes and corridors (linkages), organized by a matrix.xv Frederick Steiner ecological planning professor at the University of Texas applies the concept of networks and systems thinking to better understand the variability and complexity of urban areas. xvi According to Steiner, a system such as an ecosystem is “ a complex whole, a set of connected things or parts”. He goes on to explain that systems are organized through networks that are comprised of “channels of communication” that gain strength from each other and together form part of a larger whole. xvii Steiner stresses that the political economies of agriculture, agribusiness, banking, real estate, and government at the local level are all related to the local natural environment and contain ecological adaptive-control mechanisms. Presumably this also applies to the global forces working on a landscape. The increased use of flexibility in design is something that is responding to the needs of the present age: a time of risk, individualism, globalism and globalisation. In the introduction to Organization Space: Landscapes, highways and houses in America Keller Easterling says a felxible approach to design is an appropriate response to the network society. xviii She stresses that the importance of a design project lies in its relationships to other projects around it: “…it is possible to understand sites as separate agents that remotely affect each other – that is, the way one can affect point C by affecting points A and B...”xix David Harvey, distinguished professor of anthropology at the City University of New York, argues that urbanization consists of a “distinctive mix of spatialized permanences in relation to one another” and that efforts should be directed into intervening in these processes and their relationships as a way to bring about change, rather than into form per se. xx While none of the projects I have presented today really falls within the common perception of landscape urbanism, I am showing them to make the point that landscape ought to be synthetic and break out of preconceived moulds. It needs to adapt to the culture driving it. Landscape can have a real role in issues of public identity, community negotiation, urban development and industrial restructuring. The key to the effective application of landscape urbanism lies in working between disciplines, scales and agendas. As Joan Nassauer says in her book Placing Nature: Culture and Landscape Ecology: “if landscape ecology is about ecosystems inhabited by humans –then it must be cultural, biological, and physical in the way it formulates questions”. Landscape urbanism is even more synthetic and complex but it has the capacity to afford real ch’ange.  i Jellicoe, 1975. ii But not to the same extent with planning. See also, Jellicoe, G.A. “The landscape architect’s relationship to planning: filling the gap between town planner and architect. Municipal Journal. London. Nov. 13, 1942; vol. 50, p.1390 and Jellicoe’s address to the ELASA conference in Cheltenham in 1995: www.elasa.org/archive/ iii See Jellicoe, 1961. p.13–21. where he explores the impact of the motor car on city planning: “The advent of the internal combustion engine at the beginning of the century may prove to be as significant to man's material way of life as anything that had happened before, except perhaps, the invention of printing.” iv Mossop, 2006. p.168. v See Corner, 2003 vi Forman, 1995, p.13. vii See Jellicoe, 1961. p.13–21. viii see: Jarman, N. (1998) Painting Landscapes: The Place of Murals in the Symbolic Construction of Urban Space in Buckley, Anthony D. (ed.) Symbols in Northern Ireland, Belfast: Queens University Press, pp 81- 98. and Rolston, B. (1992) Drawing Support: murals in the North of Ireland. Belfast: Beyond the Pale Publications. ix Parish in this context refers to an administrative boundary rather than an ecclesiastical one. x Bunschoten, 2001 and also Bunschoten, 2003. xi On discovering oil in the 1960s, and the consequent processes for desalination, the United Arab Emirates planted one million date palms. xii Over 35 million tourists are expected by 2018, and the population is expected to increase from 1.2 million today to 3.5 million by 2012. xiii Landscape ecology differs from McHarg’s approach in that the emphasis is on understanding the landscape, rather than on the practical application of the knowledge. xiv Ecology is after all the study of interrelated systems: “The science of the relationships between organisms and their environments. Also called bionomics.” dictionary.reference.com/search xv Which he terms corridor, braided, plosion, rectilinear, dendritic and irregular, Forman 1995, p.256. There are two kinds of node: intersection nodes that occur at intersections and attached nodes, patches, located at or between intersections. ibid. p.259. xvi The seven other systems are: language, culture, and technology; structure, function, and change; edges, boundaries, and ecotones; interaction, integration, and institution; diversity; adaptation; and holism. Steiner, 2004. p.180. xvii “For a system to exist, there must be ordered, connecting channels of communication, the essence of the interaction process. Human societies add up to more than the sum of their parts, that is, interactions among elements create something larger. Ecosystems then can be described as interacting wholes”. Citing Odum, 1983; Young, 1998, 1999; Young et al., 1983, 1994; Capra, 1996. xviii Easterling situates prototypes within network theory as discussed by Manuel Castells and Saskia Sassen, among others. xix Easterling, 1999. p.2. xx Harvey, 1986