CREATIVE LINES
- The challenge of a landscape creative project for high voltage lines and road infrastructures: public action, landscape architecture and biodiversity
The challenge of a landscape creative project for high voltage lines and road infrastructures:
public action, landscape architecture and biodiversity
CREATIVE LINES inquires territorial, landscape and ecological accompaniment mechanisms, for road infrastructure and electric transport lines, setting up a comparison between France and the Netherlands. The main policy references are the French “1% landscape and development” and the Dutch “1% art and landscape”. These policies have been applied for several decades to highway infrastructures, aiming to bring landscape, territorial, cultural dimensions in the upstream or in accompaniment of the project. It intended to foster a complex approach, breaking with classical regulatory instruments that often prevail even in the field of landscape architecture policy. Nothing of the sort has been applied to the energy transport infrastructure: environmental legislations have been mainly implemented, dominated by the objective of reducing the impacts rather than by planning and design of new landscapes. Trying to link ecological and landscape architecture approaches, a request for a reconciliation is strongly emerging for roads and electric lines, through an accompaniment from upstream to downstream of the project, living conditions and landscape issues with the ecosystems ones and with the improvement of ecological functionalities. The research is organized through three axes:
- To compare two types of infrastructures (roads and high voltage lines) and two legal and design cultures (French and Dutch);
- To evaluate practical situations which permit to understand stakeholder games, as well as results of the implemented actions;
- To accompany operators, in order to engage a research by action approach. The idea is to experiment, on an ongoing project, a procedure of co-creation of a territory project aiming to optimize landscape and ecologic factors, based on the territorial design approaches.
The expected results of CREATIVE LINES are first of all an assessment of a public apparatus of accompaniment schemes aiming territorial and project objectives, from both points of view of landscape architecture and ecology. Then, conditions for a hybridization between ecological and landscaping approaches should be enlightened. At another level, the objective is a best territorial accompaniment for projects: we will search to produce recommendations to encourage a positive atmosphere of co-creation of new landscapes through these infrastructures and including both ecological dynamics and perceptions and social practices.
In order to achieve that goal, ENSP and WUR have programmed a three years’ research by action involving, besides researchers: an internship student, two post docs and other students mobilized during workshops in France and the Netherlands, who will interact with political stakeholders, inhabitants and planners. The project includes a state of the art and a history of territorial apparatus of accompaniment of infrastructures. The analysis of chosen cases will rely on comprehensive interviews, as well as on the realization and the results of the workshops on two of the sites. The crossing of research between social sciences and research by design will compose original results exposed during the final symposium.