Landscape Capacities in Realizing the Concept of Participation in Urban Projects

In recent years, many projects have been implemented that, despite their potentials, have not left any noticeable impact on the tangible quality of the city and have not affected the way the citizens assess their habitat due to various reasons. The current disorganized urban landscapes lack the semantic and qualitative aspects despite the authorities’ efforts for implementing a large quantity of projects. This has led to people’s dissatisfaction since these projects are management-oriented projects that lack public participation. If the urban projects are considered as “landscape” projects, public participation might become more institutionalized. The landscape approach can also guarantee infrastructural participation in urban projects. Therefore, the main research question is, “what specific capacities are there in the landscape approach that makes it appropriate for realizing the concept of participation?” This study aims to investigate the theoretical relationship between the concept of landscape, as a concept related to the audience, and the concept of participation to increase the quality of urban projects and result in people’s satisfaction. In this qualitative research, first, the main concepts of the research (participation and landscape) are examined. The next step investigates the relationship between the concept of participation and landscape and the definition of appropriate participation in landscape projects, using analogy and logical reasoning. The results showed that in landscape definitions, the audience’s perception is the most significant issue. Therefore, the landscape definition is basically a bottom-up definition and is configured based on the audience’s point of view. This view explains the main capacity of landscape in realizing participation because the definition of participation is also derived from a people-oriented view. Other landscape capacities include how the audience affects the landscape or how they are affected by the landscape. The audience’s active role in building landscape and the consideration of landscape as a democratic, social, and people-dependent entity are other landscape capacities. They also emphasize the relationship between landscape and the concept of participation. Finally, it can be indicated that if urban projects are built according to the landscape approach, maximum participation will be achievable because they inevitably focus on people’s mentality.  Overall, participation is a concept embedded in landscape.