The Ocean at the Bottom of the Garden

<p dir="ltr">Oceans are good for cities, but historically cities have been mostly bad for oceans. Oceans feed cities, create pleasurable environments for citizens and hide or disperse waste readily (to a point). But the progressive deterioration in oceanic environmental quality that we have experienced with the evolution and expansion of urbanisation has to date spawned few ways of improving, cultivating and repairing the urban/marine relationship. This could be in part because the framework through which cities seek to respond has been mostly centred around engineering and the sciences, whereby oceans are either examined as pristine environments to be protected, or conversely as a threat from which cities need themselves to be guarded.</p><p dir="ltr">For coastal cities, the urgency of climate change combined with the cultural, physical and economic investments which are the means of their existence, the problem of marine landscapes is a pressing one.</p><p dir="ltr">What are we doing to identify new futures for the urban marine landscape through practices of design? In the field of landscape architecture we could start by asking whether the marine environment a ‘landscape’ able to be shaped, and if what conventions we might carry forward or need to develop in order to engage with it.</p>