Romance and Resilience: Landscapes of the Imagination

Just as the landscapes paintings of the Romanticism trained a revelatory disposition towards the natural, cultivating an outlook both whimsical and critical, imaginative and participatory, so too do projects creating resilient landscapes. The work of our hands records our romance with trees and the ways our eyes have been ever-guided towards horizons, in landscapes that enlist and implicate the human observer with nature. Both environmental and cultural practices encode the poetics of resilience, which aims to project an idealised world to which the human is both estranged from and organically connected to. Such an attunement is the deeper implication of a resilient imagination cultivated by a Smartcity, whose ambitions and scope include not only the nourishment of bodies, but of minds, hearts and communities. Trees and other forms of nature are living monuments of our environmental heroism, and not be forgotten or undervalued.