Defining a research question, describing why it needs to be answered and explaining how methods are selected and applied are challenging tasks for anyone embarking on academic research within the field of landscape architecture. Whether you are an early career researcher or a senior academic, it is essential to draw meaningful conclusions and robust answers to research questions. Research in Landscape Architecture provides guidance on the rationales needed for selecting methods and offers direction to help to frame and design academic research within the discipline. Over the last couple of decades the traditional orientation in landscape architecture as a field of professional practice has gradually been complemented by a growing focus on research. This book will help you to develop the connections between research, teaching and practice, to help you to build a common framework of theory and research methods. Bringing together contributions from landscape architects across the world, this book covers a broad range of research methodologies and examples to help you conduct research successfully. Also included is a study in which the editors discuss the most important priorities for the research within the discipline over the coming years. This book will provide a definitive path to developing research within landscape architecture.

This book provides guidelines for those pursuing landscape projects based on integrative concepts – interdisciplinarity and transdisciplinarity – whether they are members of an integrative research team or individuals working on a problem that demands integration. They must define terminology, choose appropriate methodologies, overcome epistemological barriers and cope with the high expectations of some stakeholders while encouraging others to participate at all.

This open access book traces the development of landscapes along the 414-kilometer China-Laos Railway, one of the first infrastructure projects implemented under China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and which is due for completion at the end of 2021. Written from the perspective of landscape architecture and intended for planners and related professionals engaged in the development and conservation of these landscapes, this book provides history, planning pedagogy and interdisciplinary framing for working alongside the often-opaque planning, design and implementation processes of large-scale infrastructure. It complicates simplistic notions of development and urbanization frequently reproduced in the Laos-China frontier region. Many of the projects and sites investigated in this book are recent "firsts" in Laos: Laos's first wildlife sanctuary for trafficked endangered species, its first botanical garden and its first planting plan for a community forest. Most often the agents and accomplices of neoliberal development, the planning and design professions, including landscape architecture, have little dialogue with either the mainstream natural sciences or critical social sciences that form the discourse of projects in Laos and comparable contexts. Covering diverse conceptions and issues of development, including cultural and scientific knowledge exchanges between Laos and China, nature tourism, connectivity and new town planning, this book also features nine planning proposals for Laos generated through this research initiative since the railway's groundbreaking in 2016. Each proposal promotes a wider "landscape approach" to development and deploys landscape architecture's spatial and ecological acumen to synthesize critical development studies with the planner's capacity, if not naive predilection, to intervene on the ground. Ultimately, this book advocates the cautious engagement of the professionally oriented built-environment disciplines, such as regional planning, civil engineering and landscape architecture, with the landscapes of development institutions and environmental NGOs.

The Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture considers landscape architecture’s increasingly important cultural, aesthetic, and ecological role. The volume reflects topical concerns in theoretical, historical, philosophical, and practice-related research in landscape architecture – research that reflects our relationship with what has traditionally been called ‘nature’. It does so at a time when questions about the use of global resources and understanding the links between human and non-human worlds are more crucial than ever. The twenty-five chapters of this edited collection bring together significant positions in current landscape architecture research under five broad themes – History, Sites and Heritage, City and Nature, Ethics and Sustainability, Knowledge and Practice – supplemented with a discussion of landscape architecture education. Prominent as well as up-and-coming contributors from landscape architecture and adjacent fields including Tom Avermaete, Peter Carl, Gareth Doherty, Ottmar Ette, Matthew Gandy, Christophe Girot, Anne Whiston Spirn, Ian H. Thompson and Jane Wolff seek to widen, fuel, and frame critical discussion in this growing area. A significant contribution to landscape architecture research, this book will be beneficial not only to students and academics in landscape architecture, but also to scholars in related fields such as history, architecture, and social studies.

Human well-being depends in many ways on maintaining the stock of natural resources which deliver the services from which human’s benefit. However, these resources and flows of services are increasingly threatened by unsustainable and competing land uses. Particular threats exist to those public goods whose values are not well-represented in markets or whose deterioration will only affect future generations. As market forces alone are not sufficient, effective means for local and regional planning are needed in order to safeguard scarce natural resources, coordinate land uses and create sustainable landscape structures. This book argues that a solution to such challenges in Europe can be found by merging the landscape planning tradition with ecosystem services concepts. Landscape planning has strengths in recognition of public benefits and implementation mechanisms, while the ecosystem services approach makes the connection between the status of natural assets and human well-being more explicit. It can also provide an economic perspective, focused on individual preferences and benefits, which helps validate the acceptability of environmental planning goals. Thus linking landscape planning and ecosystem services provides a two-way benefit, creating a usable science to meet the needs of local and regional decision making. The book is structured around the Driving forces-Pressures-States-Impacts-Responses framework, providing an introduction to relevant concepts, methodologies and techniques. It presents a new, ecosystem services-informed, approach to landscape planning that constitutes both a framework and toolbox for students and practitioners to address the environmental and landscape challenges of 21st century Europe.

A familiarity with the work of Bernard Lassus, the leading French landscape architect, is essential for anyone seriously interested in contemporary landscape experience and design. Now, with this first collection of his writings to be translated into English, the contributions of Lassus can finally be fully appreciated by a wider audience. Perhaps best known for the speculative base that sustains his work and thought, Lassus is an artist whose philosophical concerns precede and determine his design work. For him, attention to the interactive nature of the landscape underlies all projects. He approaches each site in pursuit of the particular opportunities and challenges it presents and is ever mindful of the way in which observers will experience the space. He does not allow experience to be relegated to by-product of design. Instead, as one of his close collaborators explained, for Lassus form is not primary, it is induced from the articulation of intention. The essays in The Landscape Approach afford readers a look into some of Lassus's most important projects--the Butterfly Bridge at Istres, the highway rest area at Nimes-Caissargues, the Park of Duisburg-Nord, the Garden of Returns for the Corderie Royale at Rochefort, and the Tuileries in Paris--and furnish provocative insight into Lassus's unique bonding of theory and practice. As is the case with his garden designs, Bernard Lassus's volume is a true experience. It is sure to become a classic in the field.

The successful realization of diversity, resilience, usefulness, profitability, or beauty in landscape design requires a firm understanding of the stakeholders’ values. This collection, which incorporates a wide variety of geographic locations and cultural perspectives, reinforces the necessity for clear and articulate comprehension of the many factors that guide the design process. As the contributors to this collection reveal, dominant and emerging social, political, philosophical, and economic concerns perpetually assert themselves in designed landscapes, from manifestations of class consciousness in Napa Valley vineyards to recurring themes and conflicts in American commemorative culture as seen in designs for national memorials. One essay demonstrates the lasting impact of the doctrine of Manifest Destiny on the culture and spaces of the Midwest, while another considers the shifting historical narratives that led to the de-domestication and subsequent re-wilding of the Oostvaardersplassen in the Netherlands. These eleven essays help foster the ability to conduct a balanced analysis of various value systems and produce a lucid visualization of the necessary tradeoffs. Offering an array of case studies and theoretical arguments, Values in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Design encourages professionals and educators to bring self-awareness, precision, and accountability to their consideration of landscape designs.