Aesthetics were the main passion of early century landscape architects. A focus on the concern with ecology followed, while the late twentieth century landscape architecture developed towards a concentration on restoration and recovery and so focussed more on redeployment than replacement (Campbell 2006). Today, in the twenty-first century, mankind is overwhelmed with issues of global warming, exhausted natural resources, and disappearing ecologies. Landscape architects are focused on providing sustainable landscapes from which both humans and nature can benefit. Attempts to create parks or green spaces for people‟s enjoyment become joined movements to simultaneously restore ecosystems, produce food or energy, reclaiming damaged sites and designing these interventions to be entertaining and interesting to the surrounding communities. Furthermore, landscapes have become catalysts in assisting with urban densification and reducing urban sprawl in their attempts to be multi-functional, process- and environment- focused designs. At last a question remains: do these twenty-first century landscapes relate to the individual? Have these sustainable systems and processes become the new aesthetic? And do visitors to designed landscapes still have rich spatial experiences? This dissertation explores the questions stated above. Part One focuses on the countering of urban sprawl through a process-focused landscape design response on an urban and framework level, while Part Two investigates if this new contemporary notion aids designers to create spatially aesthetic landscapes. A theoretical study and experiential conceptual development strategies are followed to aid in form-generation. The design follows a hypothetical course that starts with process and system planning followed by spatial landscape explorations. This phenomenological investigation will be resolved up to a detailed sketch plan level. / Dissertation ML(Prof)--University of Pretoria, 2014 / Architecture / ML(Prof) / Unrestricted

This thesis explores the ways in which Christian faith ‘adds value’ to the ‘carescape’ and ‘caringscapes’ of statutory hostels for people experiencing homelessness in the United Kingdom. The ways that a distinctively Christian organisational ethos is created and experienced through the material, regulatory and performative dimensions of space, place and subjectivity, are explored through a case study of the Salvation Army’s contemporary statutory accommodation services for single homeless people. Drawing upon Cloke’s notions of ‘theo-ethics’ and Conradson’s concept of ‘therapeutic landscape experience’, the links between spirituality, care and ‘value added’ are examined from the perspective of staff, volunteers and service users. This analysis extends the debate on the potential for faith-based organisations to make a distinctive and valuable contribution to care for people experiencing homelessness, by foregrounding the spiritual and emotional dimensions that texture these organisational landscapes of care. A feminist epistemological approach is taken to illuminate the nuances of care-giving and care-receiving, with particular attention paid to the emotional and spiritual sensitivities underpinning social interactions, and how these dimensions are perceived, narrated and experienced from a variety of perspectives. Using an ethnographic methodology, this study involved the undertaking of 91 semi-structured interviews, a six-week period of participant observation in a specific Salvation Army Lifehouse, and attendance at four professional social service and chaplaincy conferences run by the Salvation Army UK. The research findings suggest that Christianity adds value to these institutional spaces of care in a highly nuanced way, dependent on one’s subjectivity. A second observation is that the potential for faith to add value within statutory arenas of care for the homeless is being compromised due to the pressures associated with the incumbent neoliberal contract culture within which Lifehouses are embedded. A third contribution concerns the potential for a faith-based organisation to act as a crucible for the emergence of postsecular rapprochement: it is suggested that an intersectional approach to analysing this socio-spatial process is necessary, due to the strategic role that gender, age, sexuality and race were revealed to play in fostering, or dissipating, the affective relationships that underpinned fragile moments of rapprochement.

Cette recherche s’intéresse à l’interrelation entre l’expérience de l’art public et celle du paysage. Elle se penche sur l’art public utilitaire, plus précisément sur le cas de quatre œuvres-banc situées dans le Parc linéaire de la rivière Saint-Charles, à Québec. La position assise suggérée par ces productions artistiques occasionne un contact sensoriel direct avec l’œuvre, mais surtout, elle orchestre un retournement du regard vers le paysage selon une posture et un angle de vue définis. L’activation de la fonction de banc par l’action de s’y asseoir, ou du moins la compréhension de cette possibilité d’usage, donne alors accès à une expérience du paysage environnant qui, loin d’être fortuite, fait partie intégrante de l’œuvre-banc. Cette étude analyse ainsi les œuvres-banc afin de mieux comprendre comment elles sont reçues par le public, mais également comment elles participent à l’expérience paysagère. Les réponses obtenues à la suite d’un questionnaire en ligne ont permis d’évaluer les différents aspects de la compréhension et de l’exploration de la fonction de banc des œuvres, selon une grille d’analyse conçue en adaptant certains postulats de la théorie des affordances de Gibson (1979; 2014), de la matrice de préférences de Kaplan & Kaplan (1989a, 1989b) et du modèle environnemental de Carlson (1979) aux enjeux de la recherche. Les données cumulées et traitées ont ensuite permis de démontrer que les œuvres-banc participent à une expérience paysagère de qualité. Cette contribution est principalement liée à la position assise suggérée par l’œuvre, elle qui invite les usagers du parc à s’immerger dans la scène tout en offrant une perception multisensorielle du paysage. En somme, cette recherche a fait émerger des constats sur l’apport des œuvres d’art à l’aménagement de l’espace public et à la qualité de l’expérience vécue par les citadins, deux volets sous-explorés de la recherche en art public. / This research questions the relationship between the experience of public art and that of the landscape. It focuses on utilitarian public art, more specifically on the case of four artistic benches located in the Saint-Charles River Linear Park, in Quebec City. The seated position suggested by these artistic productions causes direct sensory contact with the work, but above all, it orchestrates a reversal of the gaze towards the landscape according to a defined posture and angle of view. The activation of the bench function by the action of sitting on it, or at least the understanding of this possibility of use, then gives access to an experience of the surrounding landscape which, far from being fortuitous, is an essential aiming of the artistic bench. This study thus analyzes artistic benches in order to better understand how they are received by the public, but also how they participate to the landscape experience. The answers obtained following an online questionnaire allowed to evaluate the different aspects of under-standing and exploring the bench function in the art piece. An analysis grid was designed by adapting certain postulates of Gibson's affordance theory (1979; 2014), Kaplan & Kaplan's preference matrix (1989a, 1989b) and Carlson's environmental model (1979). The data ana-lyzed according to this grid then made it possible to demonstrate that the artistic benches contribute to a quality landscape experience. This contribution is mainly linked to the seated position suggested by the work, which invites park users to immerse themselves in the scene while offering a multisensory perception of the landscape.