The MAGENTA Landscape Design Festival
The MAGENTA Landscape Design Festival is about the city in nature and nature in the city. The festival aims to update urbanised nature and strengthen the role of landscape design in creating a better and healthier future for us. The festival is concerned with post-industrial environments, tactical urban solutions and interdisciplinary art that combines design, architecture, history, street art, biology, ecology, psychology and other disciplines. The festival’s wide-ranging events include educational programmes, debates, exhibitions, excursions, public spaces and landscape design objects.
The festival was not born in Kaunas for no reason. Kaunas is a city that is highly dependent on landscape, whose urban development has been influenced by the confluence of the Nemunas and the Neris rivers, river valleys and the slopes of the ravines of small streams, the historic oak forest and the artificial pond of the Kaunas lagoon. Visitors and locals alike call Kaunas the greenest city in Lithuania. The city’s politicians declare a sustainable policy and the public actively visits the city’s parks. However, in recent years, negative trends have emerged, where the fate of public spaces is being decided by sacrificing green spaces, where mature trees and green spaces are being replaced by poor vegetation or hard surfaces due to intensive construction or street reconstruction, and where urban planning decisions are being made ignoring the public’s right to nature and a quality living environment. The city has become devoid of debate, arguments and creative solutions.
MAGENTA aims to fill this gap with ideas and projects from developers, to offer the possibility of opening up seemingly closed plots, to realise subtle projects for the humanisation of hillsides and public spaces, to promote targeted activities and tools to help people feel more in touch with their environment, to raise awareness of the importance of urban nature, landscape design and green urbanism for urban development and the quality of human life.
MAGENTA encourages the city to become a prominent international centre for landscape design and green urbanism, to pursue a targeted sustainable policy and to become the European Green Capital.
