Fieldwork Across Disciplines – Six Phases Towards Another Situated Design Approach

Abstract

Urban planning and design face mayor challenges in mitigating environmental damages and restoring broken relationships between people and other living species. Interdisciplinary fieldwork (IDF), uniting landscape architects, biologists and other disciplines in co-investigation of urban sites, may open possibilities or deepening the human-nature relationship and motivating the necessary systemic transformative change. We tap into an understanding of ‘sites’ as comprised by thick and precious networks of heterogeneous actors (human and non- human, a-biotic and biotic) entangled in contextual Critical Zones where they collaborate over various timespans to create habitable conditions. Such an understanding calls for approaches to early-phase methodologies of recognizing the broad spectra of site-specific natural values and processes of life, to support them and coexist with them. Here, we discuss how practicing fieldwork across disciplines can create new situated sensitivity towards sites. Utilizing qualitative research methods, e.g. observation and interviewing, along with studies of documents, we explore and analyze the experiences with IDF in a nature-based design studio in Denmark. From the results we draw the contours of a framework for interdisciplinary exploration of project sites in an urban planning and design context.