Beauty in the flow? Unravelling the messy design process of an urban stream

Abstract

In ‘Sustaining Beauty: The Performance of Appearance’ (2008), and the later ‘Beyond “Sustaining Beauty”: Musings on a Manifesto’ (2015), Elizabeth Meyer advocates for the consideration of aesthetics as a performative factor in landscape, capable of transmitting environmental values and notions of sustainability. They should therefore, she claims, be reintegrated as a central factor in the design of sustainable landscapes. Meyer’s call to action seems to rely on the capacity of landscape designers to translate a coherent set of values into landscape. However, contemporary landscape design processes tend to be messy and take place in multidisciplinary and multi-stakeholder arenas where actors may hold vastly divergent definitions of values and where the landscape designer is far from having exclusivity on spatial intentions. Through an exploration of the recent landscape design process for the daylighting of the Molenbeek stream in Brussels, Belgium, this paper discusses the profound effects such processes can have on the aesthetic experience of the resulting landscapes. It claims that a deeper and more nuanced understanding of these messy design processes is crucial for aesthetic theories to find application in future practice.