Author:

Abstract:

Today, the production of urban nature is often financed through government schemes that aim to compensate for the loss of biological value caused by urban design projects. An exemplary result of such policies is the Park am Gleisdreieck in Berlin, developed during the 1990s, which is an ecological landscape park compensating for the destruction of open spaces for urban development elsewhere in the city. Compensation is usually studied in disciplines other than urban and landscape design, such as critical geography and urban political ecology, which have examined the implementation of compensation strategies as a policy device for nature conservation. However, urban and landscape designers have often shied away from critically reflecting on this phenomenon, despite being involved in the design of parks and landscapes resulting from those policies. In this paper, I aim to stimulate a debate on the role urbanism and landscape design play in the production of ‘compensation natures.’ Historically, compensation has often been a part of urban design and planning elaborations, as it attempted to compensate for the loss of natural and cultural landscapes by guiding urban growth and externalizing some of the harms done by unchecked urbanization processes. I will re-read some urban design and planning practices from the post-war period in Brussels through the lens of compensation and analyze recent compensation landscapes in Berlin, which reveals how negotiations between the state, private actors, ecological science, civil activism, and urban and landscape design are at the basis of compensation landscapes. With this contribution, I aim to set a new research agenda and argue that the critical assessment of compensation natures through the viewpoint of the discipline can bring insights into environmental destruction in urban regions and rethink the role urban and landscape design can play in these processes.