Qualifying Urban Landscapes

The article presents an attempt to develop alternatives to the dominant planning and design principles used in building and rebuilding the contemporary urban landscape. The basic idea is that the ‘forces of modernisation’ driving current development might result in a broader and more interesting palette of places and spaces if supplementary principles of design and organisation could be developed. The idea of formulating a normatively oriented theory for practice is based on an ‘almost all right’ approach but moves beyond the purely ‘non-judgmental’ attitude to contribute at a generic level to the task of constructing and improving things. With this goal, a set of objectives based in important insights from recent urban theory are formulated constituting the normative spine of the analysis of a number of found situations as basis for formulating eight generic concepts of qualification for contemporary urban landscape design practice.