Day 5: Friday

Today we had a lecture on some theories of landscape planning, including one by Professor Jorgen Primdahl and another by Professor Cecil Konijnendijk. Professor Primdahl’s lecture was about Ebenezer Howard’s Garden City and the idea of the “three magnets,” which pulled people either to the “old town, country, or town-country.” Furthermore, he presented the two main functions in planning- conflict management and place making, and the different strategies that have been created for containing urban growth. Finally, he presented the concept of “deep structure” relevant to our case studies in Hillerod and how it affected different areas.

Professor Cecil Konijnendijk’s lecture was on “Perspectives for Developing Multi-Functional Peri-Urbam Landscapes: Role of Woodland and Green Space.” It covered important trends in landscape change, challenges to green space, and various case areas where people from the city try to get in touch with nature. Overall, she ended on the concept of a “multifunctional landscape,” a separation between place and space, government to governance, and an interdisciplinary new alliance. 



We also went on an excursion to the Grib Forest National Park, where we saw a lot of relatively new forest development. Most of the forest was arranged according to species and specific time measurements so that they were in squares that had a lot of similar looking trees, which is really productive for timber companies, but looked quite unnatural. Some of the plans for the forest were to create a more diverse area by (mainly) moving trees to different areas, create a restricted area for nature preservation, and add some more wetland areas. I think that the process of creating a national forest was quite interesting and that this trip was quite valuable.

We also set aside a fair amount of time for groupwork, during which we added the concept of the “three magnets” to our project. We were also able to meet up with Professors Thomas Sick and Simon Swaffield, who gave us some recommendations on how we could proceed with our project. I think that the most important critique we got was that we should define the problem as a ways of understanding, where “instead of making a better mousetrap, think of different ways to catch mice.” Therefore, our plan became to analyze “settlement structures” and building types under certain criteria to maximize our rural-urban elements.