Earth Choreographer is a design methodology that focuses on choreographing, scoring, and de-territorializing the landscape of an obsolete oil field. The project introduced in this article, titled Earth Choreographer, explores the imperatives and opportunities in remediation and repurposing of obsolete industrial sites, aiming to continuously investigate the potential of the land and possible scenarios over decades—even when the intended life cycle of the industrial site is over. It presents a design process that recognizes the ruination of the ground and the landscape. By acknowledging the evolving technologies and ever-increasing preoccupation with natural resources, it answers the following questions: 1) What happens when a productive landscape is sought to be both partially preserved and recreated? 2) How to represent a ground plane that is being constantly reconfigured by machines with ever-changing boundaries of spaces for human and nonhuman occupation? And 3) what does a site that constantly erases and reconstructs itself look like?

With several scenarios from 2025 to 2080, this project acts as a prototype for inhabiting obsolete landscapes by addressing climate change and depletion of resources. Its dynamic design methodology allows the site to constantly evolve and change over time based on the needs and interests of its occupiers.

The concept of “prototype” originated from "essentialism"—the theory holds that everything is found in its own pure realm that can be typically abstracted, described, and represented. In the development of Architecture, essentialism fails to describe the differences between formal variations, and then Typology was born which manifests the new spatial forms that are embedded within the historical, cultural, and environmental contexts through the changes and combinations of architecture. Prototype, stemming from Typology, highlights the qualities of the time dimension and has been broadly used in the field of landscape architecture to address the objects that are often complex and chaotic. Prototyping is to profile and test the spatial order and characterized by a process of “extraction–deduction–test–outcome”: through the scenario analysis upon understanding and perception of the site, the design extracts the elements, deduces the forms, tests the simulations, iterates the strategies, and finally realizes the outcome physically. In the discourse of Landscape Urbanism, designers must understand the specific material language of the site, the design language of the site’s history (past and future), and the design language of the human activities proposed, while considering the changes over time. This article primarily reviews the evolution of the concept of prototype, and discusses its role in benefiting the design of built landscapes, ranging from the design investigation to the conceiving and testing of design strategies.

Over the last 50 years, 370 large cities worldwide have severely depopulated, or shrunk, by at least 10%. Johnstown, Pennsylvania, is the third fastest U.S. shrinking city. Primarily a victim of deindustrialization, Johnstown faces severe decline issues related to depopulation, including social disorder and lowered quality of life. This project develops a framework for urban design for shrinking cities, integrating permanent functions into high development potential areas but temporary functions into declining areas. This approach allows for future development to occur through time as the city recovers. Using a GIS-based weighted overlay model to assess the threat level of decline, 4 sites were identified and strategies for each were developed. Master plans to retrofit new functions integrating residents' desire and demands into vacant / abandoned properties were then generated for each site. Rather than chasing hefty attempted quick-hitting developmental incentives, this approach will bring new long-term economic engines and lifestyles to the city due to a diversity in the economic base; it also pays attention to the social dimension of urban regeneration by providing a structured way to promoting social justice and equity in shrinking cities.

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.

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.

Possessing significant ecological and landscape values, river shorelines are regarded as a region’s most important interface to resist natural disasters while they are also extremely dynamic and sensitive. Therefore, it is critical to follow the laws of nature in design and planning of river shorelines to achieve the harmonious coexistence of human and nature free of flood catastrophes.

This article takes the S River Park on the Living Shoreline of the Rule Lake New Town, Ganjiang New District, Jiangxi Province as an example of nature-based design approach: First, by examining remote sensing maps and water level data in different historical periods of the site, the design team learnt the evolving hydrological characteristics of the river; Second, the relations between the river’s evolution and major human interventions in history are clarified and sorted; Last but not the least, guided by the nature laws of water erosion and sedimentation, a naturebased design solution was approached—Bycatalyzing natural processes with appropriate human interventions, it aims at rehabilitating the damaged sandbar habitats through spontaneous remediation of the river, and creating fascinating riverfront experience out of a rational function zoning of the park based on various natural conditions, thus to make the new town more vibrant and resilient by connecting it with the seasonal waterfront landscape driven by the ebb and flow of the river.

Nature is a cultural construct, and a symbolic form to our cultural landscape. It plays a critical role in the profession of Landscape Architecture, shaping both the practice in the constructed environment as well as the conception of landscape in Pedagogy. This article evaluates contemporary landscape architecture practice in the U.S. through the lens of planting design and ecological design approaches. This retrospect situates selected individuals and their practices in the field of landscape architecture in the past two decades, in parallel with the evolving ecological understanding. These individuals and their works demonstrate the changes in planting design and ecological thinking in the professional practice, and most importantly how these changes contribute to current ecological design methodologies, landscape aesthetics, and public perception of landscape. In addition, the article aims to illustrate a shifting conception of Nature over time and in different cultural context, in which different conceptions of Nature facilitate various approaches to addressing environmental issues. By situating in such context, the article hopes to provide a critical view of contemporary American landscape architecture practice and the current ecological agenda, in order to enable discussions regarding the professional practice in the future.

The landscape renovation project of Shekou School Square in Nanshan District of Shenzhen, Guangdong Province, China is a micro renewal of urban public space. Through a seven-day investigation on user behaviors of the square, the design team recorded various usage needs and learned about the deep feelings of the local residents to the site. The team then conceived a design theme of “Time Story” by opening the boundary of the site and creating recreational spaces and features such as modular seats, school logo display wall, childhood game silhouettes on planters, interactive installations for science education, and physical game patterns on the ground, the needs of various groups were met and more ways to use the square could be developed. The team adopted a research-based method and refined design to create a public space that is conducive to the physical and mental health of children and the elderly, promoting communication and interaction between different user groups, and significantly improving the quality of urban public space. In addition, the team’s post-occupancy observation and reflections on maintenance and utilization provide valuable experience for future design.

Plant communities in mountainous cities play significant roles in revetment protection, sediment interception, water purification, ecological buffer, biodiversity conservation, and landscape quality improvement. Meanwhile, the local complex hydrologic conditions may pose adversity stress to the structure, function, and ecological process of these plant communities. This paper introduces the restoration practices of river revetments in the Jiulong Waitan section of Chongqing employing ecological planting strategies. First, a technical framework was proposed for the re-establishment of riparian herbaceous communities as the multilayered semi-natural meadows that were planted by strips and zones upon hydrologic conditions. Second, principles and modes of these ecological planting practices were elaborated. Third, an evaluation on the communities’ performance indicated that they could adapt to the complex hydrological conditions in mountainous cities, including sharp rise and fall of river level during summer floods, high temperature, and storm runoff. This study may provide a scientific reference for riverfront landscape optimization of the main stream of the Yangtze River, and a paradigm for the ecological conservation and the establishment of ecological barrier for the upper reaches.

The evolution of the Yangtze Riverfront Park in Wuhan, China highlights what many waterfront cities around the world are facing with respect to converging forces of urbanism, growth, resiliency, and ecological degradation. This site emphasizes why the public realm is a critical component in addressing all of these often-conflicting issues.

By re-envisioning the 16-kilometer-longriverfront landscape, Wuhan is creating a new paradigm for its parks by embracing flooding as a regular occurrence and a driving force in the shaping of its public realm. This strategy of working with Nature and not against it allows visitors to understand and appreciate the river’s complex dynamics. The proposed development of the Yangtze Riverfront Park aims to harness the power of natural processes to nurture a rich regional ecology, improve ecosystem services, and enhance public health and recreational amenities.

Informed by an extensive public engagement process and crowdsourced data, the redesign of the park reinforces Wuhan’s cultural identity by preserving decommissioned industrial infrastructure and other artifacts along the river that symbolize the city’s industrial legacy and urban history. The vision for an updated Yangtze Riverfront Park strives to create a socially inclusive, culturally relevant, and ecologically meaningful waterfront that emphasizes Wuhan’s identity of living authentically with an everchanging river.

Tetris Square is a commercial plaza located in a corner of a large mixed-use development in Tianhe District, Guangzhou. Designers treated the site as an urban public space rather than a commercial place simply for children play, with focus on younger users and core families. Landscape architects attempt to respond to a series of community demands with a smarter proposal. Instead of a direct use of finished play equipment, designers create many flexible spaces for diverse play experience, and “hide” a grove by integrating it into the play facilities, which introduces an urban oasis attracting more visitors to the square. This does not follow the conventional design principle of commercial spaces which is to plant as few trees as possible for a maximum storefront display. The grid modules of squares make facility fabrication and installation much easier, helping save the costs and ensure the construction quality. Assembled precast concrete outdoor furniture was used extensively in the whole complex. Landscape architects designed only two basic precast concrete modules, which could be assembled into more than twenty combinations. Now Tetris Square is an urban playground for children and their parents, as well as a public space for other residents in adjacent communities. The project provides children with fun and happiness through user-friendly and naturalized design, encouraging children’s cognitive learning from the external world, and simulating their imagination and creativity in play.

The historical fisheries and the speedy urban development have dramatically threatened the ecological resources of Jianyang Lake in Zhejiang Province—the original texture of the site was largely damaged, the lake was severely polluted, and the Ardeidae habitats were badly degraded. To improve the water quality and restore the habitats of Jianyang Lake, as well as represent the scenery of groups of Ardeidae inhabiting there, the design team restored existing polder wetlands through NatureBased Solutions and set up a 16 hm² Start-up Area of the Jianyang Lake Wetland Park. Applying the proposed design concept of “Retaining-Breaking-Integrating,” an integrated ecosystem composed of forest, pond, farmland, lake, and island was formed. The design team also introduced a high-efficiency wetland purification system which is harmoniously embedded with the local image and resilient to climate changes with low maintenance, facilitating the optimization of the Ardeidae habitats. The long-term monitoring and maintenance would ensure the efficiency of the wetland purification system and spontaneous succession of the plant communities. The design concept, construction process, and performance of the Start-up Area can further offer references to restoration of the other parts of the park.

Looking to Globally Important Agricultural Heritage Systems (GIAHS) sites and traditional ecological knowledge-based infrastructures (Lo–TEK), we find nature-based systems that symbiotically work with the environment. This article suggests that by hybridizing Lo–TEK with high-tech systems, the GIAHS sites could offer designers a toolkit towards economically, ecologically, culturally, and technologically innovative systems that can improve productivity and resilience. Whereas urban development results in the erasure of history, identity, culture and nature, this idea explores how urbanization can be an agent for the migration and reapplication of agricultural heritage systems, rather than their greatest threat. Cities can leap-frog the typical Western model of displacing indigenous diversity for homogenous high-tech. Instead, catalyzing localized, agricultural heritage landscapes like those designated as globally important agricultural heritage systems, as scalable, productive and resilient climate change solutions and technologies. It requires a shift in the thinking about traditional agriculture and about the relationship to Nature, from superior to symbiotic.

The street is a type of important urban public space with multiple social values, one of which is the restorative potential. Based on the “beingaway,” “extent,” “fascination,” and “compatibility” constructs of restorative environments proposed by the Attention Recovery Theory, this study elaborated the significance of restorativeness provided by street environments to people living in high-density cities. It used the traditional restorativeness scale with mobile eye trackers to explore the restorative experience provided by an urban street, and identified the specific streetscape elements related to restorativeness and the degree of their influences. The results show that “greenery,” “people,” and “cars” perform significant influences, and different streetscape elements have different degrees of influences on the 4 constructs of the restorative environment. For example, for the“being-away,” “extent,” and “fascination” constructs, the influence of “greenery” is the most important, while “people” plays the core role in “compatibility.” The findings can help professionals develop targeted design strategies to improve diverse street environments for a better restorativeness.

In recent years, in the context of the transition from urban construction to inventory development, landscape architects have begun to explore an urban micro-regeneration mode with gradual, small-scale interventions based on community building. Through the lens of Landscape Architecture, the project elaborated in this article focuses on everyday landscape, explores strategies for improving urban spatial quality in public space, and discusses the ways that landscape architects engage in public participation and community building. Taking Dashilanr neighborhood as the testing ground, this project experimented on a public space microregeneration framework and an innovative public participation mode based on pop-up practices. In response to current spatial problems in Dashilanr neighborhood, the project team proposed a regeneration framework of 5 strategies for public space: activity implantation, traffic improvement, greening promotion, rainwater management, and event and industry planning. As a test to the framework, project presentation and feedback, interactive experience, community building, and other functions were integrated into temporary urban space installations in the pop-up spaces. Combined theoretical framework with practical experiences, this project paid attention to the discussion of propagation effects and discipline boundaries, so as to compile the Dashilanr Micro-Regeneration Handbook, which provides an experimental sample for the inventory planning of Beijing’s old city.

With the increase of population in big cities, urban industrial districts are constantly seeking new development to realize the conversion from single-functional to multifunctional systems, to equip the city with diverse public spaces. The Port of Houston operates at the dynamic confluence of industry, transportation, and ecological systems, and has been a major driver of Houston’s economic growth over the last century. However, behind the prosperous economic growth, the port suffers from the isolation with the surrounding communities. Based on the “2045 Port Houston Master Plan,” the Landscape Planning and Design for the Port of Houston project focuses on urban space activation and ecological environment restoration through landscape planning and design methods, while facing the challenges of ecological environment, urban spatial pattern repositioning, and other urban issues. The project is expected to build an economically, socially, and ecologically healthy industrial waterfront zone. Port Houston, beyond its primary function as an economic driver, becomes a more visible and substantial force in urban governance of advancing the region’s activation and resilience.

By analyzing master planning of the Overall Improvement Initiative for Tianhe Central Business District, Guangzhou, this paper focused on the overall improvement initiative driven by micro regeneration in the urban public realm. To deal with challenges such as a variety of issues, multiple stakeholders, and long time span in this initiative, the planning team came up with a systematic roadmap including three stages, i.e. fundamental principals, design strategies, and implementation measures. In response, they built a goal-oriented Holistic Quintuple-Value System, drew Three Urban Public Realm Maps on urban governance, and launched the pilot action projects based on the “Influence-Complexity Matrix”. Additionally, the team valued public participation and feedback, and played diverse roles, e.g., consultant and organizer for public participation events, promoter for communication of communities, and propellant for project implementation. The Initiative has been reviewed and legalized in 2019, wherein, the implemented ones by stage since 2020, not only enhance the regional governance in Guangzhou, but offer references to urban governance and space quality improvement of the built areas in downtown metropolis of the same kind.

To balance the ecological–aesthetic relationship in urban river ecological restoration, the research analyzed the ecological aesthetics performance of related practice. By defining „ecological aesthetic preference” and establishing a triple framework of ecological aesthetic preference on urban riverfronts, the research summarized three major factors that impact ecological aesthetic preference. With the Urban River Survey method, 24 typical river section samples in Kunshan, Jiangsu Province were selected. Through correlation analysis and optimal scaling regression model, relevant characteristics and influencing mechanisms were analyzed. The results include that: 1) Individuals’ ecological awareness and knowledge level has the most significant impact, followed by ecological factor characteristics of riverfronts and individuals’ social–cultural characteristics; 2) The respondents having higher cognition on ecosystem services show a stronger aesthetic preference for urban riverfronts; and 3) Vegetation characteristics impact ecological aesthetic preference more than material and physical habitat characteristics, and different combinations would lead to various overall benefits of urban riverfronts. Therefore, urban river ecological restoration should better integrate ecological values and aesthetic values by flexibly combining spatial elements, meanwhile fully consider social demands for urban riverfronts, to promote people’s ecological awareness and knowledge level and provide them with better landscape perception of ecosystem services.

Many of the world’s coasts are becoming increasingly urbanized, with two-fifths of cities with populations of millions located near coastlines. Coastal settlements have always been attractive due to the provision of critical inputs to industries, despite the many threats — floods, typhoons, tsunamis, etc. With the Southeast Asian market expected to become the fifth largest economy by 2020, migration from rural to urban areas is set to increase, putting a strain on existing infrastructures within the cities, one of which is the solid waste disposal and recycling infrastructure within the developing nations in Southeast Asia.

Currently in the age of the Anthropocene, it is clear that human has greatly reshaped the Earth, bending nature into the course of human wishes, terraforming the land with landfills, mines, and patchwork agriculture fields, choking the atmosphere with toxic emissions, and cloging the seas with plastic waste. Inadequate waste disposal management has resulted in poorly managed landfills with waste being washed into water during rainy seasons, jeopardizing the environment and local communities (typically the most vulnerable ones) that depend on it. This project hopes to explore the nature of plastics, by envisioning a “mechanic landscape” that manages waste input within rivers whilst creating a speculative infrastructural network that varies with environmental conditions (such as global warming and sea-level rise).

On October 8, the 2020 Sir Geoffrey Jellicoe Award of the International Federation of Landscape Architects (IFLA) was awarded to Yu Kongjian, professor of School of Architecture and Landscape of Peking University. This highest honor for landscape architects and scholars recognizes their outstanding lifelong achievements. This article is a record of his speech given in the award ceremony that summarized his academic and professional careers. Looking back, Yu held that his village landscape experiences, melded with modern concepts of landscape and urbanism, sustainability and aesthetics, enables him to deal with the common challenges faced by the landscape architecture industry today. At the moment, the global COVID-19 pandemic is a powerful reminder that this is an incredibly sobering time to contemplate the relationship between humans and the nature. He also believed that the pandemic—together with other crises such as climate change—is highlighting the importance of landscape architecture that can not only heal bodies and minds, but also the planet itself.

Recently completed, The Block was constructed over a seven-month period along the Dubai Water Canal in Dubai Design District, providing a much-celebrated public park for the people of Dubai. Through their re-purposing of seven hundred 30-ton concrete blocks left over from the canal construction, landscape architects, desert INK created countless play features for children, outdoor exercise areas, and food and beverage outlets. Breaking all public park stereotypes and incorporating an unconventional approach to design, The Block stands out as one of the most unique and innovative landscape designs in the Middle East, if not the world. With a clear brief to attract a diverse range of new visitors to d3, desert INK set out to create an extraordinary park which would attract children and families to this otherwise design-industry focused district so that different lifestyles could co-exist and the community could thrive.

Verbal drawings, as a particular drawing category of drawings, are discussed in this paper about its history, qualities, and what kind of role they could play in the design communication of contemporary landscape architecture. The definition of verbal drawings arises from the observation and reading of Rupestrian art and its process in making drawings and paintings. Rupestrian art was the first human written communication prior to the emergence of words and spoken communication. For this reason, Rupestrian art drawings and paintings are not just images to be seen; above all, they are texts to be read. They are written drawings using pictograms, ideograms, and psycho-ideograms to compose images with a specific grammar and syntax. These written images have three qualities: a sense of immediacy, a sense of beauty, and a sense of lightness. Representing human activities in particular environments, Rupestrian art drawings are not only the first landscape representations but also the early representations of the act of mapping, opening a connection between the art of cartography and the art of verbal drawings. Using examples, this paper explains the importance of ancient and modern mapping arts in connection with the discourse of contemporary landscape architecture by demonstrating how the senses of immediacy, beauty, and lightness help contemporary verbal drawings compete with the neutral, beautiful, quickly produced and consumed digital representations nowadays. In the end, the text proposes a confrontation between Umberto Eco’s concept of “open work” and verbal drawings — Verbal drawings might be intended more like “open frameworks” than “open works.” It is a concept that considers verbal drawings able to accept new ideas for extending their meanings and significance throughout the design process.

Haikou is a coastal tourist city in Hainan Province of South China with beautiful natural landscapes. During the rapid urbanization in the past decades, the role of natural rivers as city’s water ecological infrastructure has been long-time neglected, resulting in a sharp deterioration of urban ecological resilience and security. Fengxiang Park, sitting at the middle reaches of the Meishe River, is a key ecological node in the watershed, which however had suffered from severe ecological problems. In this demonstrative project, the site was envisioned as an urban park which mitigates urban flooding and water pollution and provides citizens a quality waterfront with pleasant, slow living environment through a substantial ecosystem improvement with means of Design Ecology.

Techniques of green sponge construction and the reinforced constructed wetland system deployed in the park have effectively slowed down the flow of water and nutrients, restored habitats for fauna and flora, and increased biodiversity; the introduction of a diversity of slow traffic system has brought vitality to the city by encouraging green traffic modes among citizens and tourists, creating a new tourism, recreational, and cultural destination for the city. More importantly, in view of increasingly severe issues such as water pollution and shortage around the globe, this project shows an obvious reference significance to other practices in urban water quality improvement, flooding control, and the creation of public spaces to provide social and cultural services.

Against the backdrop of global climate change and in regards of urban sustainable development, enhancing climate resilience has become a critical strategy in adapting climate change for urban areas, where blue-green infrastructure is considered an important means. Although existing studies mention that blue-green infrastructure (BGI) can promote urban resilience by increasing its own diversity, flexibility, redundancy, modularization, and decentralization, questions like where to promote, by what specific means to promote and to what extent it could promote to are still lack of scientific exploration, leading insufficient support for applying resilience theory into planning and design practice. This research recognizes the role of BGI in building climate resilience in the key fields of functioning–urban floods, sea level rise, and high temperature and heat waves–and summarizes that the common functioning mechanisms include the biophysical properties of BGI, forming modular units with other infrastructures of similar functions, and the reliance on networked structures to help the system restore its physical functions and social connections as quickly as possible after disturbances and attacks. This paper also analyzes possible obstacles that hinder the promotion of BGI solutions–the lack of data support to BGI functioning mechanism, the lack of comprehensive assessment on ecological-social-economic benefits, and the difficulty in gaining confidence from decision-makers and the public. Finally, this paper proposes countermeasures from aspects of theoretical development, planning practice, and implementation and management, in order to offer insights for building urban climate resilience.

Tommy Thompson Park in the city of Toronto, Canada was originally a massive landfilling project that extended 5 kilometers out into Lake Ontario. It was constructed from construction rubble and harbor dredge from the 1950s through the late 1970s, when the project was halted due to changing economic conditions. Left to its own devices, the landfill spontaneously evolved into a “nature preserve” when innumerable plants from around the world established themselves and hundreds of migrating bird species descended on the site for nesting and feeding. In the 1990s, the city of Toronto took control of the site and transformed it into a park—Tommy Thompson Park—after a carefully planned design and construction process. The design interventions enhanced public accessibility, wildlife and habitat diversity, and ecological functionality. Tommy Thompson Park is an ideal case study for examining the dynamic interaction between spontaneity and design and for how, over time, these seemingly contradictory processes can come together harmoniously.

The Great Wall is a world cultural heritage and a treasure of human civilization. In 2017, the Government of Datong, Shanxi Province proposed to build a cultural heritage corridor of the ancient Great Wall. Based on deep investigation and meticulous analyses, the planning team envisioned a heritage corridor with a length of 258 km, covering a total area of 186 km2, in which the slow-traveling facility system, as an important component that integrates the construction, operation, and management of related heritage sites, provides sightseeing, recreational, and educational services. This article discusses the strategies to develop the slow-traveling facility system in the cultural heritage corridor, which adopts a low-interference structure according to the spatial distribution of heritage sites along the Great Wall, and applies the minimum cumulative resistance model and other scientific methods to analyze development suitability and ecological environment conditions of the project site. Based on the evaluation results, the slow-traveling facility system and the service node system are adaptively planned and designed, combined with a low-intervention interpretation system. Finally, the scales of facilities are designed based on an estimation of tourist amount to control the impact of construction on heritage sites and natural environment. As such, the balance between heritage conservation and tourism development is achieved.

Urban green spaces can not only offer a wide range of ecosystem services, but also promote public health. Most of existing studies have effectually explored the correlation between urban green spaces and public health, but failed to dig the complex impact mechanism behind. This article firstly goes into the positive and negative impacts of urban green spaces on public health, and proposes a theoretical framework of the impact mechanism from perspectives of physical activity encouragement, stress management, social cohesion enhancement, and regulating / supporting services provision by ecosystems. On this basis, 6 health-oriented urban green space system planning strategies are proposed, including promoting the availability, improving the accessibility, enhancing the visibility, optimizing the spatial composition, constructing a network pattern of urban green spaces, and reducing the negative impacts of urban green spaces on public health. The research results can provide theoretical grounding and reference for public health promotion and sustainable urban development to exert more health benefits with limited urban green spaces.

This article first identifies the current definition of urban heritage that includes both “old” and “young” monuments. Their protection has also shifted from solely preserving “old” values into a more holistic process to retain “old” values and manage the change in their adaptive reuse to gain “new” values, towards a more people-centered and landscape-based approach. Furthermore, a concept of ecosystem for urban planning and development is introduced, involving both the worlds of people, flora and fauna, and the sphere of spatial biography as well as other (in)tangible contexts, aiming to develop sustainable human habitats. The management of the change in human habitats as an ecosystem is built on the protection of place identity, which is the manifestation of historic urban landscape’s tangible and intangible attributes. Public participation is also recognized to be an important tool. To implement such a landscape-based approach, experts need to play an active role in promoting wide public participation while digital technologies open new ways for outreach, co-creation, and citizen-led decision-making platforms such as social media, (gamified) apps, and digital urban commons. Through public participation, local spatial biography can also be better identified, which extends people’s footprints from the community to local individuals at micro-scaled features within urban tissues. Finally, this article proposes recommendations for landscape architects to share the responsibilities of urban planners and heritage professionals, integrating heritage management into long-term sustainable urban development.

Jinan in Shandong Province, China is a city withfavorable location — the Yellow River runs throughthis region from southwest to northeast whilethe notable world heritage Mount Tai is its southbackground. The low reach of the Yellow Riverwhere Jinan is located is a “suspended river,”which is caused by a large amount of sedimentsfrom the upper and middle reaches. Over thepast decades, the levee has ensured the city and villages free from floods. However, it blocks the connection between the north bank area of the Yellow River and the urban town. The problems of ecological imbalance, deterioration of aquatic environment, and fragmented habitats have become more acute. Since 2017, the City Design Practice team of Skidmore, Owings & Merrill LLP (SOM) has collaborated with the Jinan Municipal Government to envision a transformation of the riverfront from ecological, cultural, transportation, and economic aspects and further proposed the idea of building a continuous Yellow River National Wetland Park along the entire Yellow River. The design proposals address the national, watershed, regional, and city scales. From the concept proposed in the plan of the 183 km reach, to the planning strategies of the 30 km core demonstration area, and further to the specific design of the Autumn Colors on the Que and Huabuzhu Mountains Park, SOM has developed step by step from macro-planning to microdesign, to ensure the uniformity and consistency of the entire design at all scales. SOM looks forwards to presenting the Yellow River in Jinan as a proven model for other river cities to follow the construction of the Yellow River National Wetland Park, and providing a practical reference for the planning and design of the Yangtze River Basin and similar watersheds in other countries.

After two years of sporadic lockdowns, northern Laos has fully reopened to travelers. However, communities have shown indifference to ecotourism recovery that provides ecological services; prioritized alternatives such as rubber concession are diminishing indigenous sociocultural values and turning ancestral soils into exploitative grounds in exchange for economic returns. Disappearance of historical traces may ultimately homogenize communities’ indigenous sociocultural significance. In light of such fragility, Development Detours offers an adaptive framework of landscape genealogies by using two tailored formulas externally and internally. The proposal constructs resilience by detouring development progression, interconnecting nodes of chronicle as a rework of presence. Two villages along the Nam Tha River, namely Sin Oudom and Khon Kham, were selected for their ongoing frictions. While formula one emphasizes „differences” between livelihoods by reconnecting nonlinear spatio-temporality into discursive viewpoints, formula two delineates „collectiveness” by acknowledging myths, traditions, and legacies of practices as a celebration of identities. By utilizing account as a forward-minded approach, history is adapted to the present.

As a method of the systematic conservation of historical, cultural, and natural landscape resources, heritage corridor integrates contexts of humanism and nature and provides the public with continuous linear spaces for recreation, leisure, and fitness activities. Most traditional studies on heritage corridor route planning focus on the analysis of physical spatial conditions, while ignoring public perception and public participation mechanisms. Based on the concept of Historic Urban Landscape, this research excavates modern landscape resources that are closely connected with traditional heritages and analyzes users’ digital footprints to incorporate public preferences of recreational behaviors into the process of heritage corridor route planning, realizing the combination of physical and social semantic data analyses. Basically, this study consists of three parts: 1) through analysis of digital footprints, select urban traditional heritage sites and landscape resource spots into the process of heritage corridor route planning, and fit the preliminary routes of urban heritage corridors with minimum cumulative resistance model; 2) construct a co-word matrix consisting of users’ movement flows and online textual data in the digital footprints, to complete the route planning upon social semantic data analysis; and 3) superimpose the results of heritage corridor route planning generated by the above two steps, and optimize according to the reality of urban environment. The study realizes an effective integration of urban landscape resources with public recreational behaviors and spatial perception in the process of heritage corridor route planning, offering reference to the overall protection of urban heritages and the systematic improvement of public space.

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.

Observation and representation are the fundamental and core processes and methods in landscape design. By transforming a historical industrial site into an urban cultural park for citizens’ recreational needs, the Jinhua Memorial Park in the Suining City demonstrates how landscape designers observe and represent in post-industrial renewal practice. Designers continuously deepen their understanding of the site through a process from site observation and perception, research and exploration to systematic analyses. During this process, designers were inspired by the industrial production process and textile products, and then applied such concepts in spatial arrangement and prototype for physical renovation. As the skeleton of spatial arrangement, the main road of the campus connects various functional spaces and landscape nodes of the park. Five design strategies, including in-situ preservation, transposition retention, material reuse, appearance protection, and spiritual revitalization, are applied to protect and reorganize the industrial heritages to recall the past prosperous scenes. Landscape design approaches, intuitive or implicit, are adopted to tie up the past, present, and future of the site while making a park that meets the needs of all kinds of users.

The Dong’an Wetland was designated as the site for one of Sanya’s first pilot projects of urban environmental remediation and ecological restoration because of its key position in the regional ecological pattern, especially for urban stormwater management. The project aims at integrating leisure and recreational functions with landscape elements including ponds, forest on water, terraced vegetable garden, and trail loop, while promoting water circulation, improving water quality, and retaining rainwater and regulating water reuse, acting as a resilient urban sponge for rainwater management. The newly built project transforms an ignored grey place into a new home for egrets, an outdoor classroom for children’s nature education, and a destination for citizens to evoke their memories.

Urban parks are an important part of urban ecosystems and can provide beneficial cultural ecosystem services (CES) to urban residents. The integration of geospatial and online comment data and relevant data mining have become a mainstream approach to the research on CES perception. This paper takes 10 typical urban parks in the central districts of Jinan, China as examples, and collects park users’ online comment data from tourism websites. Based on content analysis, high-frequency CES perception words and their perception frequencies are obtained to reveal the disparity of CES perception in different urban parks. FP-association rules are applied to examine the correlations between the perception of CES categories. Main findings are as follow. 1) Aesthetics and leisure/ecotourism services are the most easily perceived CES categories in urban parks. 2) There are differences in public’s perception of CES categories in different urban parks: aesthetics service in Baihua Park and Wulongtan Park, leisure/ecotourism service in Jinan Forest Park, and education/knowledge service in Quancheng Park, Zhongshan Park, Huashan Lake Park, and Jinan Zoo can be better perceived by the public. And 3) the perception of CES categories of urban parks is correlated. Aesthetics and leisure/ecotourism services have the strongest correlation and are often perceived with the services of cultural heritage, spiritual/religious value, and artistic inspiration. The study enriches the empirical research on CES perception via analyses of online comment data, clarifies the patterns of public’s CES perception in urban parks, and provides a scientific reference for the planning, design, and management of urban parks, showing a significance for improving CES supply and spatial quality of urban parks.

Chinese high cold mountains had long been an undiscovered terrain on maps. One of them was Mount Gongga, the highest peak of the Hengduan Mountain Ranges, elevated seven thousand meters above the Chengdu Plain. Mount Gongga has been experiencing visitor blooming, infrastructure updating, and route reshaping, making it a representative case study to examine how landscape routes and pauses can be curated for future changes in ongoing rural-urban transitions. Geographical remoteness keeps this high mountain a white spot to landscape architects and researchers. Topographic prominence stretches and condenses alpine landscape layers and intervenes field observations. "Trans-Alpine: From the Polar to the Peak", a Master of Landscape Architecture design studio at the Oslo School of Architecture and Design locating in Tromsø, experimented with an approach to inquiring into Mount Gongga from Norwegian alpine zones: a combination of research tools including thematic alpine mapping and fieldwork framework. The tool outcomes informed the landscape researchers to further imagine future pausing or route scenarios. Some of the results were curated in an exhibition space at the Nordnorsk Kunstmuseum, as a reflective display of this landscape exploration across two geographies.

Traditional landscape design studio training starts with the learning of a classic or prominent landscape project, may it be through site observation or a trace-over / imitation exercise. Foundation year students in a landscape program typically take the landscape precedent project as a study ground, to learn about the landscape master’s design through the mimicking process in the trace-over exercise, or to learn about the articulation of spatial design through site observation.

Landscape Architecture, afterall, is a creative endeavor. Thus, an alternative approach is to start the fundamental training with the study of artistic processes, to foster appreciation in art and design, innovative concept development, and articulation in craftsmanship. Also, the contemporary discourse of Landscape Architecture is no longer simply about spatial design, but has transformed to require understanding of process, operation, step-by-step mechanism, movement, and how a system works. The performative and dynamic aspects of landscape are being valued nowadays.

Such ways of seeing landscapes require a different set of observation and representation methods and skills. In this article, the author shares how the pedagogical content and developments of the foundation year landscape design studio in the HKU Bachelor of Arts in Landscape Studies BA(LS) Program help train students with such new interpretations to contemporary Landscape Architecture.

In the context of China’s current policy-oriented Rural Rejuvenation movement, through case studies, the paper reviews protection and renewal strategies and approaches of traditional rural buildings, ranging from preservation and reshaping of traditional architectural formal elements and group characteristics, contemporary interpretation and application of traditional construction techniques, to introduction of semiindustrialized construction modes and new structural organizing approaches. Based on theoretical and technical studies of sustainability, this paper puts forward a new semi-industrialized intervention mode, called “micro-renewal,” which is more applicable for renewal practices in rural China. Finally, illustrating with an authentic micro-renewal case, the “Embedded House” in Dainan Town in Xinghua, Jiangsu Province, the paper demonstrates that this new semiindustrialized intervention offers a paradigm to strategies, techniques, and alternatives for future architectural renewal and protection in rural China.

To understand the attention distribution and visual cognition in streets, this study conducted an experiment on Nanjing Road Pedestrian Mall (Street) using Head-mounted eye-trackers. Participants’ attention distribution were analyzed via Area Of Interest (AOI) during real-life walking scenarios, combining with several experiment tasks (i.e., destination selection, point-of-interest photography, and in-depth interviews), to capture participants’ naturalistic decision-making. The study combined automatic semantic segmentation with manual audit to code participants’ attention fixation duration and proportion by AOIs. A new indicator „information density,” which is the ratio of the attention percentage to the exposure percentage of a given environmental element, was introduced to describe the efficiency of environmental elements on attracting attentions. Findings revealed information density varies across environmental elements: higher information density was found in sign, building entrance, brand name, and poster; the lower was found in building, sky, and ground; while tree and person fell in between. Findings hence suggest environmental elements of higher information density (such as business signs) should be systematically designed to enhance desired experiences. Findings also indicated that personalized experiences are more likely to induce positive associations about environment which eventually lead to place attachment.

An important consideration in designing urban spaces for children is that it should aid children’s development and learning. An extensive literature from Cognitive Science has established that children’s social, cognitive, and motor development is promoted by various, wellresearched types of play. This article reviews the body of knowledge from Cognitive and Developmental Science concerning the benefits of play for learning and explains that it can and should be harnessed by urban designers. First, the review shows that different types of play confer different learning benefits. Urban space design that attempts to maximize learning from play should consider design’s affordance — what types of play are afforded by the design. Second, evidence from Cognitive Science show that children’s learning and exploration are fostered by challenge and ambiguity. Design that embraces these increases learning and creativity. Third, play is critical for children’s social learning, as it gives children the opportunity to practice social interaction. Urban design can catalyze social learning by creating spaces and structures that invite play among peers, as well as parent-child play. Beyond this theoretical review, this article also illustrates how to realistically implement these Cognitive Science-oriented urban design with an authentic case study.

Cities are spatial aggregations of capital and culture that host and serve a vast array of different and often contradictory publics. For this reason, cities need spaces that accept and encourage multiple types of representations and forms of expression: planned and spontaneous, regulated and unregulated, permanent and temporary. This essay argues that emptiness is a spatial quality that can satisfy these needs and that urban voids are a paradigmatic example of empty spaces. The term “void” implies that these spaces are emptied of the value typically associated with cities as places of capital accumulation. But this emptiness (of capital, real estate value, efficacy, or production) is what enables other sensibilities and opportunities to emerge. In other words, a lack of value is what makes these vacant spaces appear as marginal, and this marginality is precisely what gives the urban voids the possibilities for publicness that other urban spaces do not have. Despite the social opportunities offered by urban voids, the evanescence of emptiness ultimately exposes the limits of urban voids.

Located in the suburb of Nanchang City in Jiangxi Province, the Nanchang Red Earth Heritage Park is positioned as a country park that features vast vermicular red earth and Pinus massoniana forest. The off-site review and on-site exploration suggested that the site was confronting with problems of severer soil erosion, biodiversity loss, and intensive human intervention. Both to preserve the symbolic red earth in the site and to reduce cost due to limited budget, a country park requiring low intervention and maintenance was proposed. The park would also engage citizens with geological and scientific education programs and create diverse interactive experience. The design strategies were optimized through continuous site observation and reflection, both with historical and existing data in a broader sense and individual feeling by on-site exploration. This way of dialogue and connection to the site finally gives birth to a natural country park that stays in harmony with nature.

In process-based restoration, the objective is not to create a complex river form directly; instead, interventions are intended to “prompt” the natural processes to restore such forms. The improvements in ecological conditions are actually made over time by flowing water during floods (using the stream’s energy), and by the growth of riparian vegetation (using incoming solar energy). On the Aire River in Geneva, ecological function was restored to a formerly canalized river by providing the river with an espace de liberté. A grid of channels cut into the valley bottom allowed the river to freely flood, erode its bed and banks, and deposit bars, creating complex surfaces on which riparian vegetation established to support the food web of the riverine ecosystem. The diamond-shaped bits of land left between these channels (“lozenges”) gradually erode and evolve as the river migrates, creating complex channel forms. The Isar River in Munich restoration involved adding coarse sediment load, creating erodible bed and banks in place of formerly rigid boundaries, expanding process space for river migration, erosion, and deposition, and increased human access to the river over 8 km. Since restoration, natural transport of sediment has resulted in deposition of gravel bars, whose forms evolve during floods, supporting diverse habitats. The Isar and Aire Rivers provide compelling examples of processbased restoration meeting 4 criteria for process-based restoration: space, energy, materials, and time. They demonstrate the possibilities of urban river restoration to achieve both ecological and social goals through restoration of fluvial process.

The Fourth Industrial Revolution is profoundly changing our cities with a series of disruptive technologies, characterized for the boom of Internet industries and the everyday application and wide integration of intelligent technologies. Individuals’ traditional mechanical thinking has changed into a mindset based on big data, whose cognition also relies more and more on a combination of both virtual and physical reality experience. At the same time, cities, where we live, are witnessing a significant revolution in resource utilization, societal conditions, and spatial use. Along with the surge of new technologies and new data represented by computer technologies and multi-source urban data, the (new) Urban Science, as a transdisciplinary combination of urban computing, Artificial Intelligence, augmented reality, and human-computer interaction, rises over the past decade. Research institutions and programs on the (new) Urban Science are flourishing globally, and increasing related degree programs and courses are offered by colleges and universities worldwide to respond to the needs of this new era.

This article reviews the concepts of child rights and Child Friendly City at first and underlines that essentially Child Friendly City construction is to protect and guarantee child rights. By examining China’s reality of the design practice for children, the author points out that to build a Child Friendly City, two challenges must be addressed: interpreting child rights in different societal and cultural contexts, and mitigating interest conflicts between the protection of child rights with the current urban construction. In response, the author emphasizes the importance to build child’s infrastructure that is devised to serve varied scenarios, purposes, and childhoods, as well as the fact that this is not a once-forall investment but requires an evolving planning mechanism. Finally, the article states that children’s participation is the key to Child Friendly City construction and the greatest challenge to local implementation, which asks for long-term capacity building for children’s participation and strong support by a top-down management system.

Natural wetlands play a vital role in maintaining regional water balance, regulating regional climate, and maintaining biodiversity. Due to urban sprawl in China, the loss of natural wetlands has been dramatic. In recent years, nature-based solutions, including wetland parks, have been advocated to compensate for this loss and to reduce vulnerability and disaster risks. As a result, inspired by natural wetlands or building on existing wetland ecosystems, hundreds of wetland parks have been created in China over the last decade. Most research on ecosystem services of wetland parks has to date focused on technical perspectives, with only a few addressing public perception; the public’s perception of wetland parks is not well understood. This research used social media (i.e. Sina Weibo) to access large volumes of data and provide temporal and geographic granularity. A semantic analysis of microblogs was performed to understand how the public perceives the ecosystem services of wetland parks in Guangzhou. This study explored the public’s perceptions and compared these with the ecosystem services as communicated by professional institutions, and probed into the factors that affect these perceptions. The results showed that the top three ecosystem services perceived by both the general public and communicated by institutions are recreation, aesthetics, and refugia / habitat. There is a strong interconnection between the perceptions of recreation and aesthetics services. Flowering plant species and colored-leaf trees are the most important stimuli affecting perceptions of aesthetics services, and birds are key to the perception of refugia / habitat services. These results provide a basis for better aligning management of projects utilizing naturebased solutions, such as wetland parks, with expectations from the public.

Streets are a focal point of human activities and a major interface of the social interaction between urban dwellers and urban built environment. A better understanding of the urban landscapes along streets is thus important in urban studies. The increasing availability of street-level images provides new opportunities for urban landscape studies to study and analyze streetscapes at a fine level and from a different perspective. In this study, we presented an application of a recently developed Deep Convolutional Neural Network on landscape analysis based on street-level images. Different urban features were identified from street-level images accurately using a trained Deep Convolutional Neural Network model. Based on the image segmentation results, we further measured the spatial distribution of the street greenery and quantitatively analyzed the openness of street canyons in Cambridge, Massachusetts. The proposed combination of Artificial Intelligence and the massively collected street-level images provides a new sight for urban landscape studies for cities around the world.