Closer to Earth: Scales of Planning for Urban Waters

Climatic changes of waterbodies calls for new
scales and approaches to planning of urban surface
waters. Learning from a real-time case of planning
practice, I display and discuss how limitations of
sectorial logics, operational scales and schemes of
planning, in addition to inherent epistemological
prisons of dominant dichotomies, are obstacles of
an actual reorientation of planning practice. On
this background, I call upon further research – of a
designerly and transformative kind, to explore
novel approaches to municipal planning of surface
waters. I speculate how this could evolve around a
multidisciplinary rubber-boot approach with
landscape architects performing as Sherpas,
process instigators and compositing agents.