Unfamiliar Territory_Research

8.0 conclusion and next steps
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Research into the ‘unfamiliar territory’ started off with a fascination into ‘the uncanny’, but quickly became an
ethico-aesthetic endeavour. To think of territory and ‘the unfamiliar’ is to think of openness, freedom and
emergence. Territory production is aesthetic as long as it is creative and insofar it is ordering and articulating,
expressing and affecting. Always incomplete, it never settles for a stable landscape image but rather always
ventures into the unknown, destabilizes fixed relations and moves beyond the familiar and already experienced.
This is when it acquires an ethical dimension – through the creation of new subjectivities based on mutual
interdependence between human and non-human, ‘natural’ and ‘cultural’. It speaks of remaking the earth
through marking. And perhaps even more importantly – remaking it through unmarking, or, in other words,
discovering the possibility of something new by setting things free.
A ‘territorial approach’ to landscape ‘reading’, ‘intervention’ and ‘representation’ should not be understood as
applicable to disturbed sites alone and in many ways it could be rightfully argued that this research placed focus
on the most obvious, most visible places of friction when it comes to landscape or open public space and that in
order to discover all implications and/or misconceptions of the suggested approach a number of perhaps less
evident but equally demanding cases would need to be researched further. Urban areas, for instance. Issues over
growing inequality, social marginalization, erosion of basic democratic rights, gentrification, loss of the public
realm, vacant lands, pollution, urban unsustainability, etc. are more pressing than ever and call for an
alternative to the well-worn western model of public space. Here I should emphasize that I do not believe
landscapes can somehow magically bring about social change. But given the growing awareness of the
interdependence between the spatial and the social, landscapes could contribute to the alternative production of
human subjectivities and forms of life by demanding active participation, remaining open, altering and being
altered by the shifting relations of their wider context and striving to create their own public, a public-to-come
and a human to be constructed by instigating novel forms of publicness, awareness and involvement.
Despite reaching the point of conclusion, I would like to think of it in Simondonian sense: this research barely
scratched the surface of what landscape architecture could potentially become, which design paths it could take
and where its relevance could lie today and in the future. If anything, it presented a possible approach of moving
from enduring conservatism towards alternative futures and provided a starting point from where one could
begin to explore and experiment with what else the field has to offer. I do not know where that would lead or
what the outcomes of such an undertaking would bring. But at this point I can settle for knowing that there is so
much more to discover.
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