SITE MATTERS WORDS Sally Peake NZILA President, Principal at Peake Design IMAGES Glen Jansen
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n this brief discursive article, I will explore how our view of sense of place as practicing landscape architects has changed over time and how this has affected our ability to create sense of place. I should also add that this will be a very personal view and reflects my own journey as a landscape architect and urban designer, although I hope it will also be provocative and relevant to today’s students and practicing professionals. I will start with my ideas on what is and isn’t sense of place - and this means omitting the contemporary part of the question, which may be considered an oxymoron. This is because for successful placemaking to be present it has to be contemporary or relevant – that is “belonging to or occurring in the present” . By this I do not mean that it has to be “timeless”, more that it has to respond to those people using or passing through the space on a personal level. This is in contrast to the definition in Wellington City’s Our Sense of Place, which considers that “sense of place is defined as its unique character or essence”, or Place + Differences = Sense of Place. I have a problem with this definition because it ignores the personal and emotional components of placemaking that I consider to be essential. In terms of how the concept of landscape architecture and sense of place has evolved over time, my 1907 edition of The English Flower Garden and Home Grounds (first printed 1883) , William Robinson says of landscape architects, “stupid term of French origin implying the union of two absolutely distinct studies one dealing with varied life in a thousand different kinds and the natural beauty of the earth, and the other with stones and bricks and their putting together”. This indicates firstly that English landscape gardeners thought that landscape architects were redundant, and secondly that design of gardens, parks, and civic spaces (and discussions about sense of place) were firmly about how best to imitate nature. In the background were debates about art and science or “human – environment relations” . By 1948 landscape architecture in Britain was strongly established as a profession and more influential in relation to wider environmental and social issues. However, debates over the role of technoscientific rationality and aesthetic values continued and the role of “nature” was still important in providing sense of place. Nevertheless, landscape had moved beyond design of gardens and civic spaces, and was considered to be about “the relationship between the use and beauty of nature” and its “proper adaptation” (with reference to protection and planning) . In this way, placemaking had moved beyond imitating nature and was now interconnected with social and cultural influences.
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