Landscape interpretations of infrastructure-led developments: Plans, spaces and appropriations in contemporary China

This chapter presents landscape interpretations based on visual media as a method of exploring how infrastructures convey imaginaries, shape new territories, and relate to daily practices. Official documents, critical representations, and photographs are used to investigate plans, spaces, and forms of appropriations. Drawing upon literature on urbanism and landscape architecture, this approach is first examined, and then adopted to address the infrastructuration of the Chinese territory, where non-spatial socio-economic and political readings still prevail. Landscape interpretations offer another level of understanding that opens to new problematisations on the rationale behind infrastructural projects, the spaces and ecologies they produce and are entangled with, and the practices they generate. This understanding is also the first step to embracing an imaginative, design-oriented attitude to new infrastructure-led developments.