Learning through rethinking materiality in a transitional landscape

The post-industrial landscape of Nordhavn, Copenhagen, is rapidly being developed. While innovative and sustainable ambitions are on the agenda, dominant logics of construction and consumption are still prevalent. Urgent needs for stronger resource-awareness when transforming our landscapes and built structures, call for better understanding transitional landscapes undergoing long-term development. With increasingly precarious conditions challenging reliance on modernisation, growth, and progress (see Tsing in Wright 2017, 35), critical-creative practices of responsibility and care are important to nurture.
Can rethinking the landscapes in transition, their materiality, human and non-human communities, help us re-direct, support and envision more resourceful, diverse and resilient paths for Nordhavnen? And what pedagogies support such pathways? In spring 2024 the Urban Intervention Studio, (MSc studio course, UCPH) works with the Tunnelfabrikken area on Nordhavn. At the core of the Urban Intervention Studio is the interaction with collective spaces and commons, their role as publics and semi-publics, but also their transitional and contested state. We therefore explore multiscalar methods of creating new public domains through small-scale architectural interventions, as well as working strategically on impacts and larger horizons. The dynamics, frictions and potentials of the transitional state are fundamental parts of the context-based learning (Wagner & Lamm, 2021). The interdisciplinary research & teaching environment brings together students (landscape architecture and neighbouring fields), academics within practice-based design research, natural and social science and anthropology, as well as art practices and local stakeholders. We explore through spatial and material experiments and themed workshops that challenge perceptions of ‘the user’, site understandings and dominant future visions. This paper presents and analyses the didactical and collaborative setup, contributing to the field of interdisciplinary research & teaching concepts with potential to guide resource conscious site thinking and transformation.