Laura Edwards
"With the adoption of the Localism Bill in England in December 2010, there has been a significant shift in power in the way our landscapes are shaped. As part of David Cameron’s ‘Big Society’, communities now have the power to decide the fate of their own local community in a decentralised 'bottom-up' approach. The community’s subjective aspirations for the place that they inhabit is a stronger force than ever. Datascaping (created by MVRDV, 1999), is a 'top-down' decision maker that aims to remove the subjective from its process ensuring that measures we impose on the landscape are truly necessary and truly fitting to the needs of humans and thus ensuring our survival. The rationalist method responds to the extreme pressures of globalisation, urbanisation and climate change aiming to simplify these complex relationships we face in the landscape through the extrapolation of data. This thesis aims to discuss objective and subjective approaches to decision making and poses the main question: Could datascaping be a viable or more intelligent approach to strategic planning as opposed to proposals indicated in the Localism Bill?"
| laura_edwards_dissertation_2011.pdf |
