Interview: Dirk Sijmons

Professor Dirk Sijmons was appointed as the first State Landscape Architect of The Netherlands (2004–2008) and is Chair of Landscape Architecture at TU-Delft University. In 1990, he co-founded H+N+S Landscape architects, which received the Prince Bernard Culture award in 2001, and in 2002 he received the Rotterdam-Maaskant award. Professor Sijmons has worked for several government ministries and the State Forestry Service and curated IABR-2014 with the theme Urban-by-Nature. His book publications in English are Landscape (1998) and Greetings from Europe (2008), and most recently, Landscape and Energy (2014).

What led to The Netherlands appointing a State Advisor on Landscape or a State Landscape Architect, given that this uncommon in most other parts of the world?

A strong, socially democratically-inspired institutional design approach existed following the Second World War until the beginning of the 1990’s in all kinds of state institutions, such as the State Forestry Service (where I was Head of Landscape Architecture). This slowly faded away in the wake of global neo-liberalization. To compensate this loss (and the work either becoming privatized or vanishing altogether), a State Landscape Architect position was created to advise the ministers and to let Parliament know that we are still involved and worried about landscape matters and their new ventures.

While privatization and global neo-liberalization might seem like a rather negative approach, a very positive outcome came from it. The Netherlands had and continues to have a strong tradition in architectural policy. We have had a State Architect for over 200 years. Architectural policy, over time, evolved from architecture itself, to policy of architecture and urbanism, to the jump of architecture, urbanism and landscape architecture. Following this broad trajectory, the State Architect needed the help of some ‘right hands’. I was invited to be the first State Landscape Architect, while another colleague worked on large infrastructure and another on cultural heritage within the portfolio.

During your time as State Advisor on Landscape, what key themes did you focus on? Did you have the scope to determine these yourself, or were they informed by your boss/the Minister?

My direct political boss (as I was independent) was the Minister of Agriculture, Natural Affairs and Landscape. I was able to offer unsolicited advice but was also asked to advise on issues (for example, the up-scaling of dairy farming following concerns about industrialization of the countryside). I jumped on the wagon with two elements I considered the largest concerns we are facing, both linked to climate change: firstly, the adaptation of our country to rising sea levels (and the resultant character change of our rivers) and secondly, the mitigation of the problem by trying to reduce CO2 emissions (synonymous with the transition to renewable energy solutions).

Did you encounter any general resistance to change or reactions based on visual impact on the landscape?

There are all kinds of fears and emotions projected onto spatial effects. I was recently very surprised at the enormously emotional response to wind turbines in parts of the world such as in Australia, which I think has to do with people feeling that we are at the end of what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “era of fossil expressionism” and are very uncertain about what the future will bring (even to the extent of the diagnosis of new bodily diseases resulting from wind-farms—a phenomenon similar to mid-nineteenth century recordings to the response to train travel—which soon disappeared). My intuition though, is that when you dig a bit deeper, we all need to get used to the change from energy being a plume on the horizon from an enormous coal or gas power-plant whereby we only had to flick a switch in our homes to access it, to energy becoming decentralized and closer to our direct living environment. It’s a very new phenomenon.

Do you think that we should be focusing on more decentralization and self-sufficiency?

Decentralization is an option and a real asset for people to take power into their own hands: it is therefore not only electrical power that is to be decentralized, but real power. Ultimately, we need to establish equilibrium between top down and bottom up elements, because we can’t do much without the grid that has to be completely retrofitted. We also need to be able to mitigate or store energy when above 25% renewables are deployed due to production fluctuation. Some of the infrastructure will be big, some small. Tesla are already producing hydrogen cells for domestic use, but that won’t solve the problem completely, as we also need economies of scale. In our part of the world, wind energy will be the main player, in Southern Europe, solar energy. What is required is an exploration of very large scale, centralized, wind turbines parks on the North Sea which is a fantastic possibility and investment opportunity.

Traditionally, this process would have been led by engineering. Are landscape architects and planners taking an increased interest due to the scale of harnessing renewable above ground energies as opposed to in-ground fossil fuels?

I think we as landscape architects must take an increased interest, as all the discussions are about space and horizon and spatial quality. We have a large role to play but we must take it and we must conquer it because the energy world—whether it be centralized or very decentralized—does not automatically have the phone number of their friendly neighborhood landscape architect in their address books so we have to show that our discipline can bring extra value to the field. I am absolutely dedicated to help conquer these new types of commissions for landscape architects.

How do you think we can improve the collaboration between technical experts such as engineers and spatial experts like landscape architects to focus on sustainability initiatives?

First and foremost, the energy world is a very technical world. Space is not on the critical path in a quantitative way, perhaps with the exception of biomass production, which is a very different topic. In its more symbolic guise as landscape, suddenly space is on the critical path because of broad public reactions and resistance (in Amsterdam, for example, we have an action group trying to save traditional roofs from being conquered by blue photovoltaic cells). Landscape architects can mediate to show that by designing the receiving landscape, for instance, wind turbines have to be placed and thus show that there is a difference between good and bad design. We must not, however, be overly ambitious in believing we can solve the problem or bring the discussion to a halt through mere good design. I do believe that bridging being in the field and bringing together discussions between the people affected and the technicians is an important place for us to be and role to play.

When you were acting as State Advisor, was it challenging to integrate this broad, interconnected thinking into more short term political and planning cycles?

In the energy field, yes, I think we are only at the very start of discussions. Beyond the spatial, I believe that landscape architects can also play a cultural and emotional role in ‘national therapy’ following the changes to our energy system. That aside, I believe we have been especially successful working at the frontier of adaptation. A key instance is that of linking hydrological effectiveness, robustness and aesthetic fullness through our large national river program (encompassing 34 projects that are part of the ‘Room for the River’ project). As a State Advisor when this project was being devised, I had the opportunity to broaden the discussion by saying that we not only have to improve our water safety but also have the ambition to increase the beauty the river area and increase land-use functions such as leisure, nature reserves and urban planning. The success of the project was assisted by a long-term vision of the effects of climate change on our low-lying country and narrow watercourses and a long history of debates about spatial quality, together with collaboration between hydrological engineers and landscape architects.

In the anthropocene and as landscape architects, what other key issues should we be focusing on?

One of the reasons that Paul Crutzen introduced and coined the term ‘the anthropocene’, was the change of land-use all over the globe, not only through urbanization but also the reclamation of wild-lands. While I was curating International Architecture Biennale Rotterdam in 2014, I therefore tried to focus on divining urban conditions as containing not only the built-up areas, but also those of food-production, leisure, nature, strip-mining, airfields (and so on) and to view them as one large artifact, perhaps our biggest. This is a new way of working for landscape architects, because urban densities are decreasing the world over and we urgently need to find sustainable solutions. Vitally, for planners perhaps even more than for landscape architects, we need to review the ‘automatic pilot’ of urban land-use, whereby due to the high market value of urban land, agriculture shifts to reclaim wild areas. Instead, we need to find peaceful configurations of urban landscapes where water production, nature and leisure can have their relatively stable position. Future commissions are likely mirror those such as in Europe and parts of the United States where ecoducts are being built to address disconnections such as those between fresh and salt water.

You suggested that planning perhaps needs to take more control of some of these economic issues which have more recently have been left to the market. Do you think we need to try to help the process of reclaiming control of how the city evolves?

We can no longer go back to the heyday of what in Holland we call ‘the era of makeability’—that is, that we can make everything and solve all our problems through spatial means. You could in a way, think along the lines (and I’m not sure whether this is in the scope of landscape architects or planners), that as capitalism is unlikely to radically change we must refine the market within the capitalist system. One such example is the change of a value-added tax to a carbon tax as a sound way of making CO2 emissions fiscal. These are the kind of measures—like decentralizing the CO2 market—that we need in order to create tail-wind for the sustainability movement to make positive changes in time.

Is this part of an increasing urgency around these key issues?

We are moving very slowly in The Netherlands in combatting climate change. Holland is, I believe, in 34th place in-between Latvia and Bulgaria (perhaps partly due to our very strong fossil-fuels lobby). In my book Landscape and energy: designing transition, I outline what would need to be done in order to reach our goals. We are not moving anywhere near fast enough to combat the urgency of staying under 450ppm—in fact, we have already passed the 400 million ppm. The movement simply doesn’t have enough momentum yet.

You’ve have had a very successful career—what insight or advice would you give to young, emerging landscape architects and planners?

I would advise them to not only look at spatial form but to look ‘under the hood’ to see what processes are steering these forms and how these can be influenced, by singling them out and looking at the landscape expression that they could give. I observe that there are a lot of formative forces that only need the landscape architect’s magic wand in order to make their contribution to landscape formation. Ultimately, landscape is a living entity and it is the role of the landscape architect or planner to work, upkeep and constantly garden.

Do you think that landscape architects or other professional organisations should be more active in counter-lobbying?

There is a line of where the responsibility of a discipline lays and I’m not entirely sure if it is right to overstep it, despite having pushed that boundary often during my working career. Do landscape architects just accept a client’s commission and execute it well? It is certainly also legitimate professional view. My opinion has always been that the landscape architect’s job is to mediate between humankind and nature. Not only does this have a symbolic meaning and expression but also one at the core of our discipline and on this basis, we might have a legitimate right of entry into the discussion.