In the bustling heart of Bangkok, Thailand, the design team transformed a former tobacco factory into a vibrant new cultural landmark—Benjakitti Forest Park. The project faced a number of challenges including seasonal floods and droughts on the site, severe water pollution in the surroundings, poor accessibility, limited construction funds, and a compressed timeframe (only 18 months). The design has restored the site into an urban park with a resilient ecosystem that intercepts and reduces the destructive force of storm water, filters contaminated water, and provides much-needed wildlife habitat. Benjakitti Forest Park has not only become the largest public recreational venue for residents of downtown Bangkok and its environs, but also offers a low-maintenance, modular approach for worldwide urban public green space design practice.

Modern cities are constantly growing and evolving. This expansion of urban development bleeds into the surrounding landscapes, causing the displacement and disturbance of native plant and animal species to remote areas where topography limits human access. As a result, metropolitan areas often become gray places with low biodiversity, elevated temperatures, poor air quality, flood issues, and lack of a local identity. Quito, Ecuador is one of the cities facing this important challenge. Perched high in the Andes, Quito is a place of great biodiversity, nevertheless the constructed landscapes are dominated by introduced species due to colonization and to the lack of availability of native species in the nursery trade. This article walks through the creation of a native nursery in Quito and the implementation of initial trial plots, a green roof, and a garden. It explains the discoveries made during the process and provides directions for future goals to reintroduce native plant species into urban environments and contemporary landscapes in order to create more sustainable cities. The goal is to help people reconnect with their natural heritage and to learn about native plants to ensure the continuity of ancestral knowledge of the natural world for future generations.

Pro-environmental behavior (PEB) can help facilitate sustainable development, and PEB intervention strategies are developed to guarantee PEB effects. However, in most cases PEB intervention is attached less importance than environmental education. There is no specific programming for PEB intervention, and a full-cycle framework for planning and design that includes site operation and maintenance stages is still absent. Based on literature review and the authors’ experience on environment education activities, this article summarizes the PEB intervention strategies applicable to landscape planning and design, and comes up with a planning and design framework for environmental education sites, which consists of stages of site investigation, PEB intervention planning, development of design briefs, facility planning and design, maintenance and management programming, post-occupancy evaluation, and adjustment. The framework would provide guidance for the landscape planners and designers to improve PEB intervention effects, and offer new insights and tools for site operators and researchers.

The improvement of the inclusiveness of urban parks can guarantee the recreational opportunities and experience of different user groups, especially the vulnerable ones, and is also an important way to promote the justice of urban green landscape. The research explores the influencing factors to park users’ perception and evaluation on the inclusiveness of urban parks. Through the three-level data coding and analysis, a model consisting of eight main categories (i.e. site conditions, site usage, independent mobility, supply-demand matching capacity of space and facilities, interference and limitation of recreational activities, positive emotional experience, broad social participation, and place identity) which cover 30 influencing factors to individuals’ perception of the inclusiveness of urban parks is established. The model shows that park users evaluate the inclusiveness of urban parks upon their observation of site conditions and usage, and their own recreational experience; while the latter is affected by both physical and psychological factors related to passive exclusion and active exclusion, according to the concept of design exclusion. The disparity of the physical environmental quality of urban parks would lead to users’ different emotions and feelings about recreational activities. The model helps clarify the path and key factors of inclusiveness evaluation and provides a theoretical reference for future research and practice of landscape justice.

With the advance of inclusive city and child-friendly city construction, children’s opportunities to access nature have gained increasing concern. This study explored the play preference of children aged between 3 and 12 years old when they interact with plants, as well as the corresponding environmental characteristics, with four community parks in Tianjin as examples. It collected data on behaviors, plants, and environmental factors in the surroundings concerning children’s play with plants via multiple methods including behavioral observation, behavioral mapping, questionnaire, and semi-structured interview, which were examined under theories related to cognitive development, children’s play, and affordance. Employing methods such as quantitative analysis and cross tabulation analysis, the study further obtained the frequency of children’s various types of play and the affordance provided by different plants in varied environments, as well as the specific play behaviors in these environments. The findings show that due to the biophilic nature, children are able to actively make use of existing green spaces and utilize the perceived affordance, used affordance, and shaped affordance of plants to play various types of games in high-density urban environment. Children’s interaction/play with plants increases their direct connection with nature and can basically meet their daily needs for natural experience; green spaces where there are plants with diverse species and characteristics and varied environmental factors in the surroundings can stimulate more plant affordances. Future landscape design should pay more attention to how to facilitate children’s natural and spontaneous play by creating diverse places for different play needs, introducing rich and distinctive plants, developing supporting functions of other environmental elements, encouraging challenging and adventurous play, and strengthening safety and environmental education.

Climate adaptation research should consider both climate change and regional climate contexts. Research evaluating the regional climate adaptability of urban spaces helps identify weaknesses of climate resilience in spatial planning. This paper constructs a climate adaptation evaluation indicator system for cities in the severe cold zones of China, and evaluates the temporal-spatial changes of climate adaptability in the central area of Harbin. The evaluation outcome reveals that the overall climate adaptability of the study area generally improved from 2008 to 2017 despite staying at a relatively lower level. There are significant differences in spatial pattern and development of spatial elements of climate adaptability by districts. Accordingly, this paper proposes countermeasures supporting future decision-making on climate adaptation planning for the study area, offering a reference for other cities in the severe cold zones of China.

Replacing abstract form-making training with the perception of landscape site has been an important trend in the basic course of landscape architecture. Based on theoretical research and the authors’ teaching practice, this article aims to explore the significance, objects, and methods of site perception training. The authors argue that because landscape design is stemmed from the perception and interpretation of site characteristics, experiencing landscape sites must precede form-making training to become the foundation of design learning. Human-scale spaces that concern elements, structure, processes, and feelings for perception, representation, and design would be a suitable object of focus and the starting point for site perception training in basic courses. Five methods for landscape site perception and representation are introduced then, including sketch of space, sequential sections, notation, sketch model, and spatial structure mapping. These methods provide a visualized and operable pathway for site perception, which also involve preliminary design training, offering a reference for the teaching of site perception in basic courses of landscape architecture.

Liquid Homes: Building, Living and Other Stories of Hong Kong Fishing Villages is a research, curatorial, and design collaboration that explores the culture of Tanka people and their fluid state of living and building, presenting stories from a long overdue reading of the other Hong Kong. This essay, as an ongoing work, intends to reflect on our recent observations of the houses in Kat O fishing village by documenting the self-built additions in relation to the surrounding topography and water environment. These findings evoke an understanding of houses as „amphibious creatures” of hybrid qualities riding on the seams between land and water, and denote the notion of homes as „fluid entities”—physical yet elusive, subject to the floating identity of the community. The research intends to offer an ethnographic reading of Hong Kong coastal settlements and their building typologies, rethink building materialities by their temporal qualities and beyond the physical matter, and imagine a renewed reading on the dialectical relation between the built and the natural, and propose new ways to design sustainable architecture through the landscape.

While making contributions to the prosperity of cities, diverse population groups have the equal right to enjoy quality urban life. However, senior citizens, children, and the disabled are vulnerable when it comes to the access to urban resources and the participation of city’s decision-making. To make the well-beings brought by urban development available to all, it is essential for a city to be inclusive by paying more attention to the needs, benefits, and rights of the disadvantaged groups. The authors believe that the creation of inclusive and friendly urban spaces requires not only new design methods and approaches, but also changes of design philosophy and mindset.

The Mekong Delta (across Cambodia and Vietnam) and the Sài Gòn-Đồng Nai Delta (where Ho Chi Minh City is embedded), like most deltas, are typically considered a vast, relatively flat water-dominated and dynamic territory characterized by always evolving variations of wetness, multiplying by that multitudes of biotopes. Ancient and modern engineering developed with this overly simplified preconception and subsequently radically transformed the entire ecotones into sharp and categorical distinctions of wet and dry, primarily to create productive and protective landscapes for humankind within abstractly ordered and static landscape structures. Fluid gradients in elevation and humidity were systematically replaced by fixed elevations. Extractive monocultures on massive scales resulted simultaneously in gigantic harvests but also the loss of ecology and biodiversity that is largely irrecoverable. The paper critically unravels the historical development of the deltas in relation to their homeopathic topography: how its manipulation framed development agendas—of productive landscapes, of settlement, and of infrastructure—and was linked to both cosmological worldviews and territorial geo-politics. The micro-topographies of the deltas were significantly altered by the mighty Khmer Empire and Nguyễn Dynasty and since the 19th century by French and American occupiers and subsequently by Cambodians and Vietnamese projects. The paper utilizes several case studies to reveal that IKSP (indigenous knowledge systems and practices) have harnessed topographical manipulation for context-specific socio-cultural reproduction. A host of local practices, often in peripheral geographies, has either escaped the relentless “modernization” process or locally adapted to and/or intelligently subverted the imposed supra-order. There is a strong resistance and resilience (subversive by humans and geological by the forces of nature including sea level rise and subsidence) to imposed topographical manipulation. The cases, arranged from the least to the most intrusive and controlling land management practices, underscore that the deltas remain a territory that is culturally, religiously, and productively nuanced by topographical transformation. At the same time, there is clearly an innate, ever-changing nature of deltaic physiography and topography, which is simultaneously an asset and a vulnerability.

Brownfield restoration has become a frontier topic in the research on urban ecosystem governance. Optimizing brownfield ecosystems through proper bioremediation approaches can provide urban landscapes and habitats with sound ecological potentials. Currently, the lagging theory and technique development of brownfield vegetation restoration, the species selection based on single causality, and the neglect of community structure and ecological functions formation have become major bottlenecks of brownfield restoration. Introducing the mechanisms of the assembly of plant communities for theoretical support, this paper proposes a novel technical framework of herbaceous planting for the ecological restoration of urban brownfields, which includes micro-topographic design, adaptive species selection, symbiosis structure design, building quasi-nature community structure, and in-situ planting. This research selected a brownfield site located in Hechuan District, Chongqing City for the application of the herbaceous planting, and evaluated the ecological benefits after restoration. Results showed that severely degraded brownfield vegetation has turned into an herbaceous community with a multi-species symbiosis and a stable structure, effectively optimizing its ecological functions such as stormwater retention and biodiversity conservation. This research can provide scientific evidence and a referable technical paradigm for urban brownfield restoration, and also contribute to the enhancement of urban ecological networks and ecosystem resilience.

Private Chinese gardens in 19th-century Singapore were rarely designed in the same way as their contemporary counterparts in China, though there were a few authentic Chinese mansions in the city. In response to this phenomenon, this paper attempts to use Whampoa’s Garden, the finest and earliest private Chinese garden on the island, as an example, to explain how and why garden owners selectively adopted certain Chinese features while designing the rest of their gardens in a way deviating from Chinese traditions.

The study of Whampoa’s Garden begins with a sketchy introduction to the career and cultural background of the garden’s owner, Cantonese businessman Hoo Ah Kay, addressing his social connections, personal hobbies, and cultural identities. As the garden no longer exists, a study of available pictorial and written records from Chinese and Western sources is conducted in order to reveal the spatial layout and other designed features of the garden, some of which may have facilitated the display of Chineseness. Contemporaneous gardens from Hoo’s hometown will be compared to unveil hidden linkages between Whampoa’s Garden and Chinese garden ideas. Furthermore, the relationship between the selection of Chinese symbols and the identities of their audience is examined as an approach to studying what affected how Chineseness was presented and how the landscape of south China was transplanted to this equatorial colony.

Prompted by increased domestic and transnational demand for Pu’er tea, an emergence of agroecosystem intensification in Southern Yunnan, China has resulted in various agro-ecosystems including tea forests, mixed crop systems, and monocultural terrace tea gardens, in the tea production system. Plants of Camellia sinensis assamica often grow as trees in forests whilst C. sinensis sinensis grow as shrubs in terrace tea gardens. Inspired by the wine industry, the concept „Terroir” acts as a framework that analyzes both environmental and human factors yielding var ying botanic profiles, and hence quantifies values created by the cultivation process. The approach allows economic opportunities of place-based tea products to be driven by the origin in lieu of extrinsic qualities, which has resulted in to the fabricated reputation of terroir. In response to a common gap in terms of botanical and cultural values between tea cultivation and marketing trends, this artic le investigates an alternative scenario in which tea production and promotion model could minimize its environmental impacts and utilize its economic weight to advance land conservation efforts specific to cultural complexity at community scales.

Green space is an important component in urban environment, providing considerable ecosystem services to our socio-economic-cultural activities. Metrics designed to capture green space provision, supply and demand, measuring availability, accessibility, and visibility have been widely adopted to gauge progress toward achieving sustainable development goals from local to regional scales. In this article, we offer eight reflections on quantitative studies of urban green space for mapping, monitoring, modeling, and management (4M) practices in landscape design and planning. The article’s objective is to stimulate fresh and innovative thinking in the conversion of data to interventions. Eight points are made: 1) Green space mapping should be characterized in a multi-attribute conceptual model, including quantity, quality, type, and structure; 2) green space mapping sources, methods, and uses vary by definitions, approaches, and scales; 3) phenology modifies seasonal quality and quantity of urban green space; 4) spatial and temporal green space data cubes will help realize the goal of near real-time monitoring of urban green space change; 5) green space coverage reveals green space supply, but green space exposure can capture effective demand via modeling the supply–demand relationships of human–green space; 6) green space exposure measures should account for spatial, temporal, and social differences; 7) greening optimization by landscape architects and planners should consider both biophysical, biodiversity, and health benefits; and 8) urban green space management should be strategized with a long-term view. Finally, we advocate data–science–decision support systems that can help guide and promote 4M practices of urban green space. These points of reflection have broad implications for research, practice, and theory of urban green landscape design, planning, and management, and altogether constitute a set of principles that can guide scientists, policy makers, and practitioners toward strategizing optimal 4M of urban green space.

Today, for the first time in human history, more than half of the world’s population lives in cities. Coincidentally, within the field of cultural heritage conservation, increasing international interest and attention over the past two decades has been focused on urban areas. This is timely because the pressure for economic development and for the prioritizing of engagement with the global economy have accompanied rapid urbanization. In many societies, economic development has privileged modernization efforts leading to the loss of traditional communities. Accompanying this has been a concentration in the field of urban conservation on famous buildings and monuments rather than seeing cities as communities of people with values and belief systems that are reflected in a city’s overall setting: its cultural landscape. The Historic Urban Landscape approach is intended to address this distinction by critically discussing city communities, and how they are reservoirs of human memory and identity. This raises the question of the role of nostalgia in the field of urban conservation studies: is nostalgia an important phenomenon in understanding how the past is both brought to bear on the present and on the development of social and political agendas for the future? This article explores alternative ways of seeing cities particularly through the Historic Urban Landscape paradigm.

In a high-density, human-centric urban setting, trees are often considered only as materials to structure spaces. The multiple damages and related causalities caused by fallen street trees in Hong Kong, China contributed to a destructive cultural connotation. Instead of ending up on top of a landfill, fallen trees on the Observatory Hill, an urban forest in Charlottesville, the USA are landing on the ground peacefully, nurturing the microcosm and teeming with new life for the ecosystem. It is a dead bounty and just the beginning of the tree’s life. Inspired by such as opposite experience of encountering fallen trees, this project started by challenging the cultural misconception of deadwood.

As a design project for the first foundation studio of the Master of Landscape Architecture program at the University of Virginia, the proposal aims to redefine decomposition as a joyful process and refine people’s general perception of deadwood through light interventions on the ground. Simple manipulations through landform, material assembly configuration, and visual prompts encourage interactions between people and deadwood. By navigating the amplified wood decomposition setting, a reciprocal relationship will be the productive result, acting as the agency for soil incubation. By experiencing the temporal evolution of decay spatially, one can recognize and embrace the beauty of deadwood.

Palm Springs Downtown Park is an inviting 1.5-acre urban oasis for residents and visitors to Palm Springs, a design-forward desert destination nestled along the base of the San Jacinto Mountains along the southwestern boundary of the Coachella Valley in California’s Sonoran Desert of the USA. The site lies in the ancestral homeland of the Agua Caliente band of the Cahuilla people who seasonally migrated between the shady palm groves and meltwater creeks of mountain canyons in summer and the hot springs and temperate climate of the valley floor in winter. The park is also located on the historic site of the Desert Inn, Palm Springs’ first wellness resort. Nellie Coffman, the Desert Inn’s founder, famously promoted the “space, stillness, solitude, and simplicity” of Palm Springs, and the park is imbued with her spirit.

Drawing inspiration from local natural features such as the oases of endemic California fan palms (Washingtonia filifera) in Palm Canyon and the striated geology of nearby Tahquitz Canyon, the park design creates hospitable, comfortable spaces for the community in the extreme heat of the desert. The park features dense palm grove planting with ample shaded areas for seating, two picnicking and event lawns, rock outcrop-like amphitheater seating for community events, shade structures inspired by palm fronds, and a grotto-like interactive water feature for play and cooling. Locally sourced stone, native desert plantings, and creature comforts create a common ground rooted in a hyperlocal use of materials to create a sense of place for the diverse, growing community of Palm Springs and its visitors.

The paper argues that “wasteland” as a colonial land-use classification of India’s Aravalli Hills and its forest system in periurban Delhi and Gurgaon dilutes their socio-ecological contributions to the regional landscape. Over time, the land-use designation has become a means to convert “wastelands” to ecologically insensitive “productive” use. The paper critically describes successive socioecological transformations of the Aravalli Hills with respect to colonial and post-independence land management policies and various episodes of socio-environmental transformations, with a focus on its forests. The research applies learnings from various disciplines towards understanding urban environments and engages the lenses of landscape and urban planning, as well as social and environmental sciences. The paper contributes to building knowledge and recognition of the socio-ecological values of forest “wastelands” in India and broadens the discussion on their future within a transforming urban landscape. The case study provides invaluable lessons for other contexts where the natural resources, particularly forests, are threatened by development.

This research probes into the process, impact, and mechanism of the production of global space in Yiwu under the transnational entrepreneurship, utilizing the „spatial ternary theory” and methods of field investigation and in-depth interview. It focuses on analyzing how the local government, state-owned enterprises, transnational traders, local residents, and domestic migrants act and interact in the production of global space since the 1980s. Results showed that the production of global space in Yiwu goes through a process from delocalization, globalization to relocalization, indicating the local construction and reconstruction of economic, social, and living relationships in small- and medium-sized cities influenced by transnational entrepreneurship. The production of global space in Yiwu is jointly promoted by top-down government power and bottom-up social strength, and local governmental entrepreneurialism that has been directly influenced by globalization is a key engine. Field investigation also discovered that there is a phenomenon of transnational traders’ apparent integration and invisible isolation with local residents and domestic migrants in the new social relationships in Yiwu. These findings will enrich the empirical research on the global space in small- and medium-sized cities in the context of China, and on the dialectical and interchangable relationship of the trinity of ternary elements in the spatial ternary theory; and help deepen the understanding on urbanization and globalization of small-and medium-sized Chinese cities, and optimize the governance of transnational migrants and the ethnic enclaves they live.

Creation of healing environment on university campus can enhance college students’ physical and mental well-being. In recent years, the emotional factors of place attachment have attracted more attention among healing environment research. However, the relationship between the spatial characteristics of different healing spaces and the aroused positive emotions remains unclear. This study investigated the places on the Siping Road Campus of Tongji University that college students most wanted to visit during campus closure and the expected activities and imagined feelings via questionnaires and interviews. Through data analysis with IBM SPSS, this study identified five clusters of positive emotions on university campus—joy, serenity, hope, pride, and interest, mapping them as well as corresponding activities with spatial types and facilities on the campus, and the healing environment spaces were divided into five types: landscape space, sports space, third space, learning space, and living space. Furtherly the interview texts were coded via MAXQNA software, from which representative themes were selected to investigate the differences of positive emotion clusters in each space type. Finally, the study proposes that promoting positive emotions through place-making is an important way to create a healing environment. The findings of this study provide a reference for planning, design, and intervention measures of healing environment on university campus.

Although tree burial has been proposed for decades, it is not yet widely accepted in China, mainly due to the lack of recognition of its embedded ecological ethics and the not fully localized practice. The article suggests that localizing tree burial activities in China should consider regional urban-rural relationship and combine tomb-sweeping activities with the renewal of local traditional ceremonies in rural areas, thus engaging urban residents.

The site selected in this article, Youlong Village of Anhui Province, is located at the origin of the Xin’an River, which is an endowed advantage to attract downstream urban residents. Taking the Bench Dragon as the case study subject, the article analyzes its existing ritual sections and spatial nodes to sort out its ritual structure. Based on this analysis, the article proposes a design of the ritual sections and the marching route of the Bench Dragon for the Chinese Tomb-sweeping Festival, guiding the place-making of tree burial sites and the development of daily management strategies for the ritual landscape.

Appropriate ritual design in rural areas can help perforate the evaluation items in strictly categorized cultural ecosystem services, which, through embodiment, calls for a holistic landscape experience. Additionally, ritual design is supposed to activate the potential aesthetic value in the countryside today, while the ecological ethics it carries may also introduce new meanings to the traditional view of life and death in Chinese culture, ultimately opening a new horizon for contemporary rural construction.

For the field of national territorial planning, to identify and delimit redlines is the primary step to preserve valuable natural and cultural assets from human interventions, harmonizing human-nature and urbanrural relationships. In the reality, however, the dogmatic planning and design concepts, irrational construction standards, and unscientific and rigid management requirements that ignore the diverse localities, market rules, and stakeholders’ needs usually make the implementation outcome runs the opposite to what was wished, leading to “redline dystopias” called by the author that are damaging our homelands. This article presents a dialogue between the author and a farmer in Qicha, Hainan, to reveal how a “capital farmland dystopia,” one of the redline dystopias, comes into being, appealing for a profound re-examination and reflection in the planning and design professions.

In a forest kindergarten context, young children can get boost on their level of physical activity, motor skills, social skills, pro-environmental behaviors, etc. through structured and/or unstructured nature-based educational programs. Most studies mentioned teachers, parents, and researchers as facilitators in the early childhood outdoor learning programs, while landscape architects were rarely considered. However, beyond just being involved in the design and construction of the physical environment, landscape architects can play a more profound role in the long run. This study aims to show that involving landscape architects as facilitators in the nature-based educational programs can benefit the programs in many ways and the effect can be long-lasting. The study is based on the 16 years of collaboration between Miyano-oka, a forest kindergarten, and a team of landscape architects from Takano Landscape Planning in Japan to conduct nature-based educational programs to preschoolers. It presents examples of programs in Miyano-oka and the strategies applied to develop them. In this project, landscape architects employed various design strategies to improve the existing programs and help develop new programs. Among those strategies, participatory design is the primary one. During both the renovation (from 2006 to 2008) and follow-up (from 2009 to now) phases, active participation and collaboration between designers and the educators help achieve the sustainable development of both the outdoor natural environment and educational programs.

Under the call for “all-for-one tourism” development, the focus of regional-scale recreational services is shifting from the construction of individual scenic spots and tourist areas towards the comprehensive planning of tourist destinations, so as to propel China’s rural revitalization and regional coordinated development. In research and practice, however, it is still challenging to identity and evaluate spatial locations for developing tourism according their cultural and environmental resource and characteristics and prioritizing the high-potential ones. Employing the whole western Hubei region as a case study, this paper proposes a method of assessing recreation potential within the research framework on cultural ecosystem services, and uses multi-sourced social-ecological data to develop an SDM model via ensemble machine learning. Through analyses of the environmental features of 336 recreational hotspots in the study area, the model predicts the areas with high recreation potential in continuous areas. This study intends to establish a technique path to examine the regional-scale pattern of recreational spaces via numerical analysis of environmental features, and to provide a reference for relevant spatial development strategies of all-for-one tourism and rural revitalization.

On October 27, 2022, the Act on Accessible Environment Construction of the People’s Republic of China (Draft) was reviewed at the Second Plenary Session of the 37th Meeting of the 13th Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress. This is the first law special for the construction of accessible environments in China, indicating the country’s big advance in legislation progress of such constructions. As an essential component to urban development and the improvement of urban environments, accessible environment construction would better ensure the building of inclusive cities for all. The author believes that an inclusive city for all should be warm, accessible, comfortable, and open. Thus, the construction of accessible environment should be an integral part of social development which needs feasible, high-standard solutions. Only guided by the principles of „equality, integration, and sharing,” can we—planners, designers, builders, managers, monitors, etc.—fulfill our duties to realize the envisioned accessible environments.

Today integrated regional development becomes a national agenda of China. The Demonstration Zone of Green and Integrated Ecological Development of Yangtze River Delta faces a task of exploring a more effective and localized coordination mechanism for the implementation of cross-administrative-area synergic projects under the current administrative regimes. This article reviews the current practice of cross-administrative-area synergic development at home and abroad, and summarizes corresponding mechanisms and key issues; then by focusing on the case of the Yuandang Lake Synergic Eco-Development Pilot Project that sits on the junction of Shanghai City and Jiangsu Province, this article sorts out the key issues and the solutions at each project stage, and proposes the “3P3S” coordination framework for the implementation of cross-administrative-area synergic projects. As an exploration of spontaneous bottom-up approach—instead of administrative orders—the “3P3S” coordination framework can efficiently promote project implementation under the current administrative regimes, providing reference for synergic implementation of regular cross-administration-area projects.

After reform and opening up, Shenzhen Special Economic Zone and its urban construction have an unusual significance for China. However, the prevailing emergence of urban parks built in a super speed in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone is not paid much attention by the academia regarding its historical process of construction. This study examines the history of urban park construction through dual lenses of „nation–state” and „global–local” with a hope to explore the genealogy and reason lying behind the local practice of urban park construction in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone from a transnational global perspective. The authors argue that the construction of urban parks in Shenzhen Special Economic Zone in the 1980s was closely related to foreign capital investment. Moreover, the national form adopted in park design during this period coincided with that of the special economic zones as a node of national rejuvenation. Relying on the global flow of ideas, this research attempts to provide interpretative view to comprehend the construction history of urban parks in China at the very beginning of the reform and opening.

After the “imported” urban forms, which originated from foreign cultures, were transplanted into Chinese cities, they generate brand-new urbanscape but suffer from a lack of cultural roots and a disconnection with the mainstream of contemporary urban planning. Thus, their current value and potential in urban renewal are questioned. The study takes the circular–radial space from the Baroque cities as an example to clarify the motivation of its import from the west to northeast China. It further clarifies their adaptive changes in form and function in the local urban context, through a case study on Dalian City.

The study finds that different geometric patterns of existing circular–radial space were influenced by European, American, and Japanese urban planning theories to varying degrees, but with equal emphasis on symbolism and functionality. Their implementation in Dalian has a continuity in time and space. But due to the changes in topography, traffic, and planning concepts, their forms and functions tend to be independent, their connection weakens, and their importance recedes after the street network. The circular–radial space in Dalian led to distinctive urbanscape. But during their inheritance and transformation, the rationality of new forms and functions, as well as the necessity of continuing the initial ones need to be dialectically considered, so as to avoid dogmatic revival and antique reproduction.

Finally, the study reconsiders the concept of “localization” of “imported” urban form, and constructs a general research pattern to provide a new perspective for understanding the transformation of similar types of urban forms.

Hawaii is on the threshold of collapse. Over a century of American colonization and exploitation of the islands and their people has resulted in the island chain facing critical environmental and cultural catastrophe. This article examines the emergence of Rapid ‘Ōhi‘a Death as a critical aeolian pathogen capable of wiping out the most culturally and ecologically significant species representing over 50% of Hawaii’s forests. Plantation histories are unpacked as foundational tools which directly led to deep alteration to the cultural fabric and landscape of the islands, accelerating the complex issues faced by Hawaii and Hawaiians today. This crisis offers landscape architects and the design professions grounds for a new methodology to approach both ecological and cultural issues as one to tackle the issues stemming from ongoing climate change. Furthermore, the article underscores the need to rethink the American fetishization of the Hawaiian Islands and look instead to how land stewardship and landscape practices can facilitate a self-determinant, equitable, and resilient future.

“From nature to nature” is the major goal of landscape design. The former is the idea of nature, i.e., landscape architects regard nature as the archetype of design; the latter is the experience of nature, i.e., landscape architects hope people can perceive the natural atmosphere through designed landscape. In this sense, the transformation from idea to experience of nature refers to the process of landscape design, which materializes landscape. According to this, this article focuses on the following topics: 1) what role does nature play as the origin of the landscape design theory; 2) how does nature as an idea promote form-giving in landscape design; and 3) what aesthetic experience does designed landscape create. This article draws on two influential landscape architects, Xiaoxiang Sun and Lawrence Halprin, and analyzes their theories and works from the perspective of comparative culture, including the idea of nature and its representation, the inherent mechanism of form-giving in landscape design, and the experience created by designed landscape. It aims to explore the intellectual potentials for contemporary landscape architecture theory through comparing the discrepancies and similarities of the two masters’ paths of landscape design.