Common Ground: Experimenting with Atmospheres of Transformation and Adaptation

As a physical platform of enquiry this paper explores the Aarhus RiverCatchment Area (AARCA) as an area of interest undergoing a continued series of adaptations caused by anthropogenic processes and urbanization. The Aarhus River itself is 40 km in length and the catchment area is 354 km2. Apart from being the reason why Aarhus, the second largest city in Denmark, is located where it is, ‘Aros’, the original name of the city, literally meaning ‘at the mouth of the river’, AARCA is also the territory in which the Aarhus Landscape Laboratory is currently being established.Aarhus Landscape Laboratory is placed on Eskelund, which is a 20 hectares urban-industrial woodland placed on a former waste deposit but centrally located along the Aarhus River less than a kilometrefrom the city centremaking it an important future destination for the city’s growing population. It functions as a cross-disciplinary laboratory for biologists, historians, artists, landscape architects to explore urban nature and anthropogenic processes within the territory of AARCA with the aim to raise awareness of the fact that urban nature can be wild and untamed and at the same time deeply sensual and aesthetic. Two of the first experiments are of particular interest (established spring 2017 and autumn 2018):The first experiment consists of a 5.000m2 transplantation of nutrient poor but biodiversity rich habitats from a donor site further downstream to Eskelund as a nutrient rich but biodiversity poor recipient site. The key goals of the transplantation have been to explore adaptation of the donor site to the site-specific conditions of Eskelund and to investigate if and if so,how this adaptation continues in the future.The second experiment consists of the establishment of 8 10 m wide clearings in a 30-year old planting with an overarching goal to explore the relationship between the spatial atmospheres and potential increase in biodiversity.