The Flemish context forms an almost completely domesticated territory that is ex-tremely intensely used, fragmented and marked by splintered private ownership. In this context, the landscape not only differs from a purely natural environment, but also has little significance when looked at as nice scenery or an open empty whole.
Roeselare-West is emblematic of the metamorphosis of open space in Flanders (Fig. 2). Spatial transformations are generated by a forceful agricultural dynamic of specialisation and intensification in an area that, at the same time, is densely inhab-ited and interwoven with commercial and other economic activities. The vicinity of the Roeselare economic and urban node stimulates consumption of open space for dwelling and recreation.
The European landscape convention describes the concept of landscape as ‘an area, as perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interac-tion of natural and/or human factors’ (quoted in Thompson & Herlin 2004, p. 47).
A glance at the landscape of Roeselare-West reveals a colourful variety of fields, patterns of greenhouse agriculture, pig farming and agro-industry, corridors, residential nodes, grids, patches and ribbons of suburban dwelling. This mixed landscape spreads out widely without showing significant changes in the types of landscape elements forming it. Without adapting to its new context, it crosses borders: administrative and natural borders, ownership and spatial structures, etc.
Its large scale indeed turns the landscape into a metaphor for inclusive plurality.
Various contradictory social and spatial practices, policy ambitions, ecological pro-cesses, programmatic claims of actors and consequently also approaches formulated by different disciplines, take place simultaneously and produce, aware or unawares, the whole.
One can interpret the landscape of Roeselare-West as the sum of its many parts, elements and patterns. But when one takes a closer look, it becomes clear that the factor ‘change’ is critical for understanding it. Roeselare-West is characterised and enriched by centuries of accumulated change and modification. Underneath
Fig. 2 Landscape elements. Roeselare-West receives strong inputs from various fields of forces, which results in a complex whole of heterogeneous elements
large-scale elements of intensive agriculture and large patches of sub-urbanism, a dense territorial mosaic is still readable (Fig. 3).
The small plot sizes and the large amount of small-scale farms refer to a tradi-tional cultural landscape on fertile soil. This dense mosaic of parcels and network of farm buildings still determine the contemporary landscape. The dense network of established farms made agricultural land scarce in a period of agricultural intensi-fication, and because of the limited size of the plots, alongside local tradition, the transition to livestock breeding was dominated by pig farms rather than by cattle breeding, which required large amounts of grazing land.
Similarly, the limited scope for expanding farm land, which was aggravated more by land consumption for suburbanisation, led to arable farmers nowadays cultivating soils unfavourable for intensive or large-scale exploitation. In this way the original fine granular mosaic landscape of Roeselare-West is showing continuity in the con-temporary landscape: in its dense morphology, constructions of pig farms and scars of erosion.
Fig. 3 Micro-territories of mid-eighteenth-century farms and farming in the year 2005. The tradi-tional fine granular agricultural landscape shows continuity in the dense morphology, construction of pig farms and scars of erosion of the contemporary landscape of Roeselare-West. Its continuity relates to the fact that its spatial structure has subsequently influenced the transformation mecha-nisms giving form to spatial change
In design, the following quotation from Freud (quoted in Ornstein 1992, p. 181) about the functioning of memory as regards the physical environment helps us un-derstand how the territory is a stage for time: ‘Our psychic mechanism has come into being by a process of stratification; the material present, in the form of mem-ory, traces being subjected from time to time to a rearrangement. . . – to a retran-scription . . . memory is present not once but several times over’. Roeselare-West is a layered landscape and its stratification is not an accumulation of independent layers. Every spatial intervention builds a new layer upon already present layers and every changing habit inscribes itself into or overwrites the existing structure. In this transformation process, the landscape has rather the characteristics of a palimpsest where traces of former writing interact with new words (Corboz & Marot 2001).
Behind every change in the landscape, there are social and economic processes, and the way these develop, interfere and transform space is in turn influenced by the structure of the existing landscape.
The landscape of Roeselare-West is the complex whole of many patterns but at the same time an intrinsically evolving system. This role of change in the landscape becomes more important as the waves of transformation intensify in speed, am-plitude and range and take on more varied shapes. This goes for hybrid territories where multiple activities define the transformations. Moreover, actors often adapt their use of space: the farmer specialises or diversifies; the recreational user desires new programmes (riding school, etc.); the entrepreneur has expansion plans and the shopkeeper wants to follow his/her suburbanised clientele, etc. The interplay of different actors produces a territory that is in a constant state of transformation while its trail is barely predictable or definable. Therefore the focus in our approach shifts to the transformation mechanisms behind the spatial elements and patterns that steer this mors immortalis. We share this type of focus on dynamic landscape qualities with other disciplines. From an ecological perspective, Roy Haines-Young (2000, p. 10) points out: ‘sustainability should be measured or assessed by the change processes active in the landscape – not by the state the landscape is in at any time.’
Therefore, while drawing the lines for a spatial vision of future development, we look for an understanding of the modes of transformation, the logics that steer the transformation of the Roeselare-West landscape system. How do existing landscape structures and social processes interact and give form to spatial transformations? In other words, what are the modes of transformation? Once these are discovered, they become underlying design principles for the urban/landscape designer, the land-scape urbanist: the grammar and vocabulary with which a process of imagining the future can be generated. Because of this complexity, we work out a threefold
‘imagining’ process: ‘an iterative and dialectic process in which allied operations alternate: imagination as reflection, the construction of a mirror, imagination as test, the construction of a hypothesis (. . .), imagination as a projection or speculation of what is not yet, but could be’ (De Meulder & Dehaene 2004, p. 60). In short, what we explore is a design-based approach that combines a multiple reading of the existing landscape, a scenario development of what is possible and a synthesis developed through an integrated landscape vision that expresses what is desirable and feasible.