11.3 NEW PRACTICE OF PLANNING: INTERFERE EVERYWHERE!
The end of nature as a category is the beginning of the cultures (plural), i.e., assemblages of human beings, things, and natural elements. Therefore, accurate tactics and strategies must, from now on, stand at the center of focus with regard to new tasks in the fields of urbanism and landscape planning, which no longer concentrate exclusively on “nature” or “society” but seek to spawn and enforce new cultures—and therefore need to interfere EVERYWHERE (cf. Latour 2001, 36)! Instead of only attending to human issues within settlement structures and the demands of flora and fauna outside the settlement areas, this new way of thinking is necessarily integral, uniting former opposites, and not seeking to separate with force and ideology. Based on an integral understanding of the urban landscapes of associations connecting the physical-material realities with its natural yet also socioeconomic, political, and cultural-mental dimensions (Eisinger and Kurath 2009, 82), interventions actually start to show productive effects as they do not destroy the “God-given” but extend causal chains in order to create the “new.” Productive approaches can be sketched with the aim of improving “bad” urban landscape construction to make them “better” by adding missing ingredients, such as biodiversity, quality of residence, green space connections, and adequate density relations.†
Such a course of action, however, does not legitimate undiscerning interventions into spatial reality. On the contrary, the realism added here also reveals the delicacy and vulnerability of the system and must promote a responsible way of dealing with the issue. It is therefore imperative to identify new utilization forms, such as energy production, recreation, etc., and to analyze to what extent new, specific cultures can be designed in reality with regard to the delicacy and vulnerability of the system. In accordance with Martin Prominski, a good starting point is to perceive building as an enhancement of environments or, as outlined in this chapter, as an enhancement of cultures and thus to formulate utilization rules that also show regard for the demands of natural elements (Prominski 2004, 145).