Xiaoya Liu
Stability as a Misplaced Practice of Care
The landscapes of urban landfill sites are increasingly being transformed into public parks through remediation, engineering reinforcement and landscape design. In this process, care is often translated into stability, frequently achieved through sealing, surface levelling and risk management. Although these approaches have successfully addressed pressing environmental and safety concerns, they also raise a crucial consideration: while certain forms of care are being actively practised, certain landscape processes are being neglected or deferred.
This paper critically examines the relationship between care and stability in contemporary landscape architecture through a conceptual analysis of Appleton Park, a post-landfill landscape situated in the Kaiwharawhara Valley near Wellington. Drawing on theories of landscapes of care and relational landscape processes, it argues that stability represents only one modality of care rather than its endpoint. When care is reduced to stabilisation, long-term ecological dynamics, subsurface material processes, and historical discontinuities may be rendered invisible, despite their continued influence on landscape performance and meaning.
By reframing care as a relational, temporal, and ethical practice, this paper proposes an expanded understanding of landscape responsibility that extends beyond surface stability. Through a critical case-based reflection, it demonstrates how stabilised landscapes can simultaneously function as sites of care and sites of concealment. The paper will contribute to ongoing debates on planetary landscape architecture by challenging stability-driven paradigms and advocating for care as an ongoing, multi-dimensional commitment to landscape processes over time.
Supervisors
Dr Bruno Marques & Jacqueline McIntosh