Our societies need to solve difficult issues to attain sustainability. The main challenges include, among others, global warming, demographic change, an energy crisis, and loss of biodiversity. In tackling these issues, a holistic understanding of our living space is important. The field of landscape planning and design is at the core the holistic concept and it makes several contributions to achieving sustainability. First, landscape planning and design connects different spatial scales: from site to region to the planet. Second, it focuses on close interrelationships between human activities and nature. Third, it is concerned with people’s values toward their surroundings. This book is based on the presentations made by German and Japanese scholars at the international symposium “New Trends of Landscape Design: Seamless Connection of Landscape Planning and Design from Regional to Site Scales — The Cultural Context” held on November 5, 2012, at the Graduate School of Environmental Studies, Nagoya University.

This reprint, originally published in 1983, draws attention to the important lines of thought that have emerged during the past several decades to offer a portrait of contemporary physical geography which have been drawn together in this text. It introduces conventional terms and topics of the subject and weaves them into a conceptual fabric that rests on three major themes, including the energy-balance concept; a model for understanding the forces and processes in the landscape; the stress-threshold concept; the relationship between the stress produced by forces such as wind and water and the resistance of the earth's materials; and the magnitude and frequency of change in the landscape. Chapter summaries are featured along with numerous illustrations.

The purpose of this book is to present a new proposal for landscape management labor accounts. Many matured countries are now confronting an aging society and a shrinking population. Land degradation in those countries is basically caused by a lack of local labor forces. It is very important, therefore, to consider and develop methods to provide appropriate labor forces for the sustainable management of landscapes or to reduce or shrink landscape management areas sustainably with available labor forces. Landscape management labor accounts provide a foundation for such development.This book consists of four main parts. The first part is concerned with forming concepts, definitions, and overviews. Change in land management policies, research topics, and issues on landscape management are dealt with in the second part. The third part consists of case studies on landscape management labor accounts. Major landscape types chosen for case studies include urban areas, flatland farmlands, Satoyama, and coastal neighborhoods. In the last part of this section, integration methods to develop landscape management labor accounts on different scales are considered. The fourth part of the book is a detailed exposition of contemporary trials to solve issues of land management for the future in the field of urban, rural, forest, river, and coastal planning. Also discussed is the connection of ecosystem service studies and perspectives on the development of landscape management labor accounts with world landscape management research.

Well-being is now firmly established as an overarching theme of key concern to all professionals that work, manage or design the environment. However, well-being is a complex multi-dimensional issue rooted in the ways that we encounter, perceive and interpret the environment. No single discipline can claim to have sufficient knowledge to fully explain the types of interactions that occur, therefore there is a need to draw together a wide range of professions who are exploring the consequences of their actions upon the well-being of individuals and communities. This edited work addresses the above, consisting of a collection of studies which embrace different aspects of environment, landscape and well-being to consider current approaches to well-being research and practice that fall outside the traditional concepts of well-being as part of medical research, making links with architecture, landscape design, environmental perception, social interaction and environmental sustainability. The contributors originally presented at the international conference, ‘Well-Being 2011’ jointly hosted by Birmingham City University and the Royal Institute of British Architects (RIBA); the chapters have been developed to present a coherent series of themes reviewing a wide range of literature, presenting case studies appropriate to diverse audiences.

This is the first book to articulate how to address interlinkages among sustainable development goals (SDGs), which are keys to implementing those goals by 2030. At the heart of the book is a resilience approach to the enabling relevant systems, practices, and education and research. While SDGs are well known at different levels from local to global spheres, a major gap can be seen between goals and approaches, as approaches are lacking for addressing interlinkages among SDGs. The United Nations General Assembly in 2015 acknowledged interlinkages as being of crucial importance in ensuring the purpose of the goals. However, few actual approaches have been specified to address the interlinkages or interconnections at both the policy and practical levels. Thus, it is urgent to face the question of how to address the interlinkages by stakeholders—not only policy communities and researchers but also practitioners and students, especially innovators who can go beyond existing boundaries. By highlighting that challenge, this book lays out a path for addressing interlinkages among SDGs by applying a resilience approach to the issues of a sustainable society. The resilience approach has been developed from combinations of different modes of thinking and practices, including the systems approach, systems and design thinking, and resilience thinking and practices. Based on this overarching approach, innovators seek out the relevance of that approach to their SDGs-related practices at the system, local, and educational levels. The book therefore serves as a guide to how the resilience approach can contribute to accelerating implementation of SDGs by 2030.

In this book an international group of authors reflects mechanisms of the cultural and social construction of landscapes. International migration and global exchange are associated with a multitude of different cultural meanings of landscapes. The logics of multi-cultural perceptions and meanings of landscape call for trans-disciplinary research, and for guidance on addressing culturally sensitive issues and inclusion in practical planning.

This book provides a much needed overview of the agrourbanism topic in the context of territorial studies. It carefully looks at rural, urban, periurban farming in both professional and unprofessional capacities as one of the main sustainable forms of land use and management. This cutting edge text explores the various forms of agricultural and urban planning, as well as the main innovations that the agro-urban approach entails in terms of governance, spatial dimensions and functions. Agrourbanism provides a breadth of information and serves as a practical study of concerns facing policy and decision makers, planners and landscape managers, as well as farmers, managers of protected areas, local authorities and local action groups. As such this book is suitable as a course accompaniment to provide an overview of the complexity of agro-urban issues.