It explores the relationship between the shaping of the environment to reinforce the sensual experience of a place (landscape architecture) and the culture of walking as an aesthetic practice. the design of open spaces in suburbia support the implementation of a walking culture? What models and reference systems in land- scape design and art do we know, which allow us to understand the role of walking and the order and quality of these globally continuously growing open spaces? This essay examines the culture of walking in the contemporary design of new public spaces of suburbia.
The development of suburbia opened a new range of space for which our current models and public space approaches are not valid anymore and are still to be developed spaces that are neither city nor landscape, which need to be read at a new scale with a new vocabulary. Urban sprawl creates a new open-space reality, in which the quality of walking - as a sensual experience - is neglected. In turn, the chapter shows how Karen Andreassian’s experimental, web-based artwork “Ontological Walkscapes” enacts the Benjaminian critique, taking the viewer into the ruins of Soviet Armenia’s brutalist public spaces, where the romantic ideal of Ruinenlust is replaced by a cinematic stroll through neglected concrete spaces that have been repurposed by activists opposing the Armenian state’s authoritarian rule. One can see this fascination in Armenian cultural representations from the elite to the kitsch as well as in well-funded international efforts aimed at generating cultural tourism.
scattered throughout Turkey, Armenia, and the wider Mediterranean world carries a capacious presumption about Being in the wake of a catastrophic history: that one can only be fully human once what was shattered by genocide is made whole. The diaspora’s fascination with the ruins of Armenian culture’s distant past. This chapter shows how Walter Benjamin’s 1929 critique of the nationalistic obsession with ruins can unsettle an especially powerful element of the Armenian diaspora’s discourse on genocide: what in German is called Ruinenlust, or the melancholic love of ruins and the manic efforts to recognize, restore, and repair them.
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