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Nazar Research Institute of Art, Architecture and Urban Planning
Abstract:   (21 Views)

In recent decades, landscape design has moved, more than ever before, toward the prediction, control, and management of the future. Many contemporary projects seek to define patterns of use, qualities of experience, and even the very manner in which human beings encounter their environment, before life itself has begun to unfold within a space. Critiquing this approach, this paper argues that the central problem of landscape design lies not in a lack of creativity or technology, but in a particular conception of "possibility" — one that understands the future as a set of pre-existing, realizable states. Drawing on Henri Bergson's critique of the concept of possibility and its further development in the thought of Gilles Deleuze, the paper shows that the new does not arise from the actualization of a pre-existing possibility, but emerges in the very process through which new relations are formed. Since landscape is neither objective nor a product of the observing mind, but a quality that emerges in the encounter between human beings and environment, landscape design should not be understood as the design of a final state or the realization of a predetermined future, but rather as the opening of conditions within which new relations, unpredictable events, and novel qualities can come into being. On this view, the value of design lies not in the degree to which it controls the future, but in its capacity to keep the future open and to preserve the possibility of creating the new.

Article number: 3
     
Type of Study: Applicable | Subject: Special
Received: 2026/07/31 | Accepted: 2026/09/9

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