The 8th annual World inDenmark conference presents key note speakers from landscape architecture, urban design and urbanism,who reflect upon themultiple roles of plants in the future city through their most recent projects. The theme for the 2012 World inDenmark conference is City PLANTastic, which will also be explored in paper sessions. Scholars from a wide range of disciplines are invited to submit abstracts.

City PLANTastic

Copenhagen 27th-28th June

Call for abstracts

Plants are playing an increasingly important role within architecture and urban design. Plants have become both a hallmark and a trademark, an approach that reaches back to the very origin of landscape architecture. However, in the context of the contemporary city the knowledge, aims, means, techniques and aesthetics of plant use are radically expanding and changing. And with high expectations: Today, green cities are synonymous with good cities, with green roofsand walls becoming ubiquitous and urban forestry, urban food gardening, urban ecology etc. promoted as active agents for the greening of our cities. Plants are increasingly seenas technical componentswithin systems such asphytoremediation projects and hydroponic vertical gardens. An at the same time they can be seen as the building blocks of urban ecology and biodiversity typically triggering associations to ‘wild’ nature vegetation. Any intervention in the urban realm, understood as ’the art of cultivation’, is helping to frame models for an urban development wheretemporality and uncertaintyare enduring features. In total these changes raises many questions, which will be explored and discussed at the conference.

Scholars and practitioners working within landscape architecture, architecture, urbanism, green technology, botany, urban forestry, cultural studies, and others with special interest in the role of plants in the physical environment are invited to submit their abstracts reflecting on how we sense, read, understand, measure, overlook, suppress, transform, co-exist and interact with plants in the building, garden, city and landscape. The organizers encourage scholars working with a broad variety of different perspectives to submit abstracts related to the arching theme – City PLANTastic.

The DEADLINE for submitting abstracts is February 15th, 2012.

More info: www.windk2012.dk