Urgency Felt: Landscape Practices of the Event is an ongoing PhD research project that examines landscape architecture’s engagement with environmental urgency as affective/bodily valuation. The research attends to the aesthetic, political and experiential dimensions of landscape, and to the ways collective sensibilities participate in the remaking of life and the shaping of public opinion.
The project argues that urgency is, at its core, affective and that the modulation of (environmental) urgency is an aesthetic skill integral to contemporary landscape practice. I am interested in the capacity of landscape practice to intentionally cultivate and hone its aesthetics sensibility, with affective relations seen as socially and politically important design considerations alongside, not instead of, rational deliberation and ecological thought.
By theorizing urgency as a specific 'mode of eventfulness', and examining it in relation to Humphry Repton's Red Books, Geoffrey Dutton's poetry and garden, the National Trust's 1965 Enterprise Neptune campaign, and UK's present-day coastal adaptation efforts, the project seeks to develop a framework for deliberately and responsibly adopting urgency as an object of design.
Most recently, I have been thinking about Norfolk's eroding coastline, the land left behind and coastal retreat as a form of detachment.