NSL Colloquium: Beyond Maintenance: Responsive Practices for Changing Landscapes

The current separation between landscape design and landscape maintenance is no longer tenable. Unpredictable weather patterns and dwindling water supplies intersect with cuts to municipal budgets and increasingly precarious conditions for landscape labourers. And yet entrenched project structures and practices limit opportunities for exchange and dialogue. Consequently, landscapes are simplified to facilitate repetitive, low-skilled maintenance, limiting their ecological complexity, resilience and aesthetic potential.

In light of this, the 2025 NSL Colloquium Beyond Maintenance investigates the relationship between design and maintenance of living systems, seeking to cultivate practices, terminology, and theoretical insights into ways of maintaining otherwise. On the one hand, innovative management techniques can introduce a much-needed sensitivity and open-endedness to design practice. On the other hand, iterative design thinking can enliven routine maintenance patterns to make the most of limited resources. This intersection is a space of opportunity, both to question disciplinary boundaries - including the uneven distribution of prestige, precarity, and compensation that underlie them - and to move from attempting to control more-than-human nature towards a performative call and response.

Organisation

The colloquium has been made possible by the Netzwerk Stadt und Landschaft and the Chair of Being Alive. It is organised by Claudia Gebert, Luke Harris, Johanna Just, Camila Medina Novoa, and Cara Turett. Graphic design Studio Matthias Wyler.

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