4x1: 4 km2 over 1 century

“4x1” is a semester-long exercise developed this year by students of the Landscape Architecture master degree studio at the University of Ferrara (Italy). We asked them to select and frame an area of 4 square kilometres (2 per 2 kilometres wide) from anywhere in the world. Two 1:2500 plans were required, representing the landscape context today and in a century from now. There were a few restrictions on the drawings: no raster images, use of greyscale only, no text. Moreover, the selected areas had to meet a building coverage ratio of less than 20%. The main request was to take into account documented forecasts on climate change effects, as well as concurrent social trends (tourism, depopulation, etc.) or actual plans for urban and infrastructure development. In contrast, they have been free to speculate about future configurations according to different attitudes (policies) towards the forces at play: ranging from strong anthropic responses to "do nothing" answers. One purpose of the assignment was to challenge students' tendency to “overminig” design or analysis tasks: that is to take into account too general or generic topics, overestimating them, in the belief they can be transferred linearly from one scale to another. Throughout the research, they had to, and learnt to, continuously change the scale of their investigation, even in order to decide how to frame the chosen context. The final illustrations are a distilled outcome of a wider survey - on data and processes - which for the most part almost disappears during the journey. In the long run, the landscape we try to depict is always something that “withdraws” from our knowledge, perception or any attempt at fully describing it. But this is its fascination.