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Figure 1. Diagram of this PhD’s associated research network, collaborators and case study city of Vejle (i.e. my involvement with Vejle Municipality and Kanten/The Edge design competition). My involvement and direct associations are the nodes that are coloured.

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The expert peer review process and access to data

 

The work with the research network from Realdania, Vejle Municipality and other relevant encounters gave me access and exposure to “behind-the-scenes” workshops, meetings and informal peer review processes from various experts and stakeholders in the network (see Appendix 13). These encounters are not strictly like a semi-structured interview; however, they were able to provide other types of “soft” data through participating in and observing workshops and meetings. Therefore, I have had the opportunity to have reasonably frequent feedback from other experts throughout my research, which has helped in dealing with aspects of this research that I am not familiar with or an expert in. One of the key figures is the marine biologist/researcher from the Kanten/The Edge design competition with Vejle Municipality, with whom I also co-wrote a paper and an opinion article. I established good relations with a marine biologist (also an advisor to the judges), who became an informal expert advisor of marine biology for my research.

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Field(s) of study in the Danish context

 

This research is based on the Danish context, focussing on the impact of water due to climate change on the Eastern coast of Jutland (the specific case study is set in the city of Vejle), embedded in its educational, institutional and commercial context. As such, municipalities, architectural practices and educational institutions work in a more integrated, interdisciplinary and collaborative manner, where, for instance, the field of landscape architecture and urban planning are relatively integrated in Denmark (Wiberg, 2018). This is due to the Danish educational system, where architecture schools like the Aarhus Architecture School train future architects, landscape architects and urban planners/designers in a hybrid format between the three. A similar thing applies in municipalities and commercial offices, where these three disciplines are less compartmentalised into silos and collaborate into one broad working field (Wiberg, 2018). Henceforth, the PhD will depart from Denmark's integrated and hybrid tradition of landscape architecture and urban design with a special focus on the interface between landscape architecture, urban design/planning and marine biology.

 

 

Research motivations

 

The initial inspiration to answer the PhD call came from a personal and intuitive place of rethinking how we landscape the boundary between the city and sea from the perspective of marine lifeforms. As a researcher and a practitioner, I have always wondered why there was a strong emphasis on landscaping our cities with trees, flowers and plants but very little, if at all, has been done with seascaping with marine lifeforms such as seaweed, eelgrass and mussels in urban contexts. I was fascinated with the potential of seaweed as the representative “seascaping” element to re-envision how we think about our edge conditions and educate and create awareness about the numerous qualities of seaweed, both instrumental and intrinsic, especially to tackle the current climate and biodiversity crisis. I believe that coastal cities are a critical site of intervention as urbanisation continues to increase because first, this is where most of the impact will be to bridge the interface between humans and nonhumans; second, this is the epicentre of the need to address our current unsustainable habitation for the future.  

Moreover, having grown up and lived in various countries with a strong attachment to the coast due to its proximity to the sea (i.e. South Korea, New Zealand[8], United Kingdom and Denmark[9]), I questioned our current dominant superficial and overt instrumental relationship to the sea and its continual exploitation. Nevertheless, my Korean heritage inspired me to place a particular emphasis on and fascination with seaweed as it has had a strong holdfast on Korean cuisine and culture. I saw the potential of reviving seaweed in the European context, where these cultural traditions around seaweed have been somewhat lost and forgotten. There was a unique opportunity to contribute to original research by exploring the potential of seaweed as a catalyst for urban transformation on the coast.

 

 

For whom is the monograph written, and on behalf of whom?

 

This PhD monograph tries to represent the perspective of seaweed (and the sea) as much as possible in its potential contribution to urban transformation; however, it inescapably is from the human perspective – particularly, myself as a researcher in the field of landscape architecture, urban planning and design. The intention of this research is for those who influence the way our urban coastal shorelines are developed, be it municipal regulators (who in turn communicate with citizens, developers and politicians) or practitioners (landscape architects, urban planners and designers) or fellow researchers and educators (for teaching and research). Although this is still an academic endeavour that needs to fulfil certain criteria as a PhD dissertation, I wrote with the stakeholders in mind, who may use the document to rethink our current B-A-U practices and normative values to instil more alternative solutions. Thus, the academic jargon or technical terms have been defined as footnotes in the section: “Definition of Key Terms.” It is to ensure that non-experts can also approach the research.   

Finally, the monograph intends to capture and filter the immense complexity and richness of the topic at hand while facilitating different points of departure for readers, who can then follow this research journey from hypothesis through analysis to possible future strategies.

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Reader’s guide to the monograph

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The overall structure of the monograph is in five parts, as outlined below, following a well-established IMRaD format (Introduction, Methods, Results (analysis) and Discussion as the organisational structure of the research, albeit modified slightly.

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