L-x 2025/26: Matters of Care, Matters of Land

L-x Landscape Lectures 2025 turns its attention to care, in a moment marked by profound socio-ecological urgency. It is a term often used lightly in landscape discourse, yet carrying a depth that both steadies and unsettles. Care, in all its forms, threads through the work of shaping landscapes: caring for places, caring with others, caring as a way of reading and responding to the worlds we co-inhabit. These are familiar gestures in everyday practice, yet far from simple. They reveal how every landscape depends on ongoing acts of maintenance, relation, and response.

Care is more than maintenance; it is an ethical practice of attention, a responsibility toward what is already there, and a commitment that unfolds over time. It invites us to ask who lives within this space, who tends it, who benefits from it, who remains unseen, and how landscapes and structures endure beyond their initial design. And yet care is never innocent. What feels protective can become controlling, well-meant gestures can overshadow the logics already existing in a place and attempts to support can drift toward exerting influence rather than listening.

Thinking and acting through the notion of care brings this complexity into focus. It reminds us that care is always plural, always processual, always made through relationships, between people, materials, infrastructures, species, and the surrounding world. Caring becomes a way of reading and composing with the existing, of attending to entanglements that are never fully resolved, and of imagining landscapes not as fixed objects but as ongoing, more-than-human collaborations.

This edition brings together two lectures from Zurich–Berlin and Ghent, each offering distinct yet interconnected approaches to thinking, acting, and practicing care in contemporary landscape architecture.