Michael Batty Centre for Advanced Spatial Analysis, University College London Landscapes, like cities, cut across disciplines and professions. This makes it especially difficult to provide an overall sense of how landscapes should be studied and researched. Ecology, aesthetics, economy and sociology combine with physiognomy and deep physical structure to confuse our - derstanding and the way we should react to the problems and potentials of landscapes. Nowhere are these dilemmas and paradoxes so clearly highlighted as in Australia — where landscapes dominate and their relationship to cities is so fragile, yet so important to the sustainability of an entire nation, if not planet. This book presents a unique collection and synthesis of many of these perspectives — perhaps it could only be produced in a land urb- ised in the tiniest of pockets, and yet so daunting with respect to the way non-populated landscapes dwarf its cities. Many travel to Australia to its cities and never see the landscapes — but it is these that give the country its power and imagery. It is the landscapes that so impress on us the need to consider how our intervention, through activities ranging from resource exploitation and settled agriculture to climate change, poses one of the greatest crises facing the modern world. In this sense, Australia and its landscape provide a mirror through which we can glimpse the extent to which our intervention in the world threatens its very existence.

The volume deals with the effects of digitization on spatial and especially landscape construction processes and their visualization. A focus lies on the generation mechanisms of 'landscapes' with digital tools of cartography and geomatics, including possibilities to model and visualize non-visual stimuli, but also spatial-temporal changes of physical space. Another focus is on how virtual spaces have already become part of the social and individual construction of landscape. Potentials of combining modern media of spatial visualization and (constructivist) landscape research are discussed.

A key aspect of town planning, landscape planning and landscape architecture is to identify and then use the distinctive features and characteristics of space, place and landscape to achieve environmental quality. Landscape Analysis provides an introduction to the field both in theory and in practice. A wide range of methods and techniques for landscape analysis is illustrated by urban and rural examples from many countries. Analysing landscapes within a planning context requires both skill and insights. Drawing upon numerous concrete examples, together with an examination of some theoretical concepts, this book guides the reader through a wide range of different approaches and techniques of landscape analysis that may be applied at different scales, from elementary site analysis to historical and regional studies. This is an essential book for students and graduate practitioners working in landscape architecture, planning and architecture.

An overview of issues involved in visualization technologies used in landscape and environmental planning. Covers a classification of the technology as well as a number of specialized applications across agricultural, industrial and urban planning.

If landscape visualizations are applied as tools for participation, they should provide a high level of interactivity to facilitate planning process and outcomes. This book presents evidence for this hypothesis through demonstrative case studies in the Entlebuch UNESCO Biosphere Reserve in Switzerland. In collaborative workshops, interactive real-time visualizations were used to respond directly to the dialogue, and long-term climate change impacts were illustrated through collapsing time animations. The author, Dr. Olaf Schroth, is a researcher at the University of British Columbia and has studied both geodesy and planning in Hanover, Hamburg and Newcastle upon Tyne. Since then, he has been working at the interface of planning and 3D visualization, and the book summarizes his work in the EU project VisuLands (2003-2006) and his PhD at ETH Zurich. His research is not technology-driven but rather raises critical issues from a planning perspective. Therefore, the results and hands-on recommendations address researchers as well as practitioners in planning, architecture, geovisualization, geography, cartography and computer visualization.