Moving Horizon, Design Praxis through Soil Transformation: A Landscape Manifesto

Abstract

Moving horizon was born as a doctoral investigation that moves across research and design dimension. It explores the relationship between landscape design and soil transformation, focusing on the mutual effects and potential disciplinary developments aiming at structurally linking the two fields. Soil is one of the most complex biomaterials on Earth in continuous exchange with the terrestrial systems. The starting assumption is that the soil is a condition of inherent shifting in landscape evolution both in physical and semantic relationship. The value of soil as an element of planning and design lies in handling live and dynamic physical matter. From being ‘background’ for the built environment, the soil transformations become the ‘foreground’ both in landscape design praxis and in theoretical implications, by embedding the soil as a ‘palimpsest’ in reading and writing the landscape. The framework produced by this assessment has been condensed in ten propositions, collected in form of a landscape manifesto. A first application of moving horizon approach has been developed and tested in the Ravenna Climate Change Adaptation Plan (Italy), by identifying a planning procedure capable of integrating territorial adaptation measures to climate change through an approach based on understanding and transforming the soil as a fundamental material of this process.