Urban morphology aims to describe and explain urban form and has the potential to be applied in urban planning and landscape design. However, the Eurocentric perspective of classic theories limits its validity and related design practice in a contemporary multicultural context. The lack of a universal approach to depicting the urban form structure is one of the fundamental aspects of such a theoretical flaw. This article addresses the historical and regional incompatibility of urban form structures and discusses its causes by analyzing the basic standpoints of the historical geography perspective and the construction perspective in urban morphology. Based on the critical review, "separation" and "connection" are established as two criteria for specifying urban form units, and the compositional nature of the built environment is highlighted. Further, by reconciling the functional and morphological aspects, or that is, linking urban form with the agents that shape it, a coordinated approach is proposed with rational parts from classical theories, and a corresponding quantitative method taking the distribution of different sizes of units as a key indicator is also developed to aid urban form subdivision.

This article examines contemporary trends, challenges, and opportunities in Landscape Architecture education in the United States through the perspectives of program administrators at accredited institutions. Building on the foundational 1997 Landscape Journal article by Michael Richard Hodges and Miriam Easton Rutz, which documented the early development of the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA), this study revisits long-standing themes, including faculty development, recruitment, institutional support, and disciplinary identity while documenting how these issues have evolved in the current higher education of Landscape Architecture. Drawing on a 17-question survey distributed to all accredited Landscape Architecture programs in the USA, the study captures responses from 41 program administrators, representing a broad cross-section of institutional contexts.

Survey findings reveal persistent administrative challenges related to student and assistantship funding, staff support, faculty recruitment, and enrollment, alongside emerging concerns about faculty burnout, workload imbalance, and evolving expectations for teaching, research, and service. Studio-intensive curricula, accreditation demands, and the interdisciplinary nature of Landscape Architecture place unique pressures on faculty and administrators, often exacerbated by limited institutional recognition and resource constraints. The study also documents varied approaches to recruitment, new faculty onboarding, and mid-career faculty support, highlighting practices such as mentorship, course releases, start-up funding, and sabbatical opportunities.

In addition, the article situates the USA's administrative challenges within a broader international and theoretical context, drawing on scholarship that frames Landscape Architecture as a synthesizing discipline balancing scientific rigor and creative practice. Emerging technological pressures, including the growing influence of artificial intelligence, further underscore the need for curricular adaptation and professional development. By documenting shared experiences and strategies among program leaders, this article contributes to a growing collective understanding of Landscape Architecture education and emphasizes the importance of sustained dialogue, administrative support networks, and adaptive leadership to strengthen the discipline's future.

This study focuses on a typical old urban block in Rui'an City, Zhejiang Province, exploring the quantitative relationship between urban external morphology and human thermal comfort. The aim is to establish an evaluation index system for urban regeneration that is applicable to old urban blocks in coastal county towns. The study conducted a year-long meteorological observation and microclimate simulations to create a long-term dynamic monitoring sequence for the summer, transition, and winter seasons. It extracted 20 spatial morphology indicators and established an XGBoost-SHAP nonlinear regression model combined with the UTCI. The results indicate that: 1) air temperature, humidity, and wind speed exhibit significant variations across the three seasons due to differences in spatial morphology; 2) sky view factor (SVF), frontal area index (FAI), paved area ratio (PAR), and near-line ratio (NL) are key factors influencing courtyard thermal comfort; 3) the effects of different spatial morphology quantification indicators on thermal comfort vary significantly across different seasons. In winter, the optimal morphological ranges for thermal comfort are: SVF at 0.55–0.75, NL at 0.03–0.10, FAI at 0.3–1.0, and PAR at 0.1–0.3, which strike a balance between shading, ventilation, thermal insulation, and the surface thermal environment. The study enriches theoretical research on the quantitative relationship between microclimates and spatial morphology, providing targeted optimization strategies in practice and offering data support and references for low-carbon urban regeneration and sustainable community development in coastal county towns of southeast Zhejiang.

Flood disaster databases constitute a critical foundation for enhancing disaster risk reduction (DRR) capacities. Although China has achieved initial progress in developing the National Comprehensive Natural Disaster Risk Database, the fine-grained construction of its data systems and the efficacy of its comprehensive service applications require further exploration and refinement. Given the relatively mature disaster database systems in some developed countries, which offer valuable reference, this study adopts a full-cycle management perspective to construct a novel comparative research framework on the differences. The article points out that the development of China’s flood disaster databases faces bottlenecks: inaccuracies in pre-disaster risk forecasting, lags in mid-disaster emergency response, and difficulties in institutionalizing post-disaster experiences. These challenges expose a full-cycle data fragmentation issue. Conversely, countries like the USA and the Netherlands have accumulated extensive pioneering experience in data standardization, dynamic simulation, collaborative governance, and societal application. Simultaneously, its practical bottlenecks regarding data coverage, response timeliness, and equity in resource allocation provide critical reflections for China’s localized exploration. Accordingly, this study proposes a localization pathway for China’s flood disaster database system construction: institutionally, it is imperative to accelerate the establishment of a government-led, multi-departmental collaborative management mechanism; technologically, priority should be given to advancing flood risk mapping and developing multi-source data integration platforms; in terms of social aspect, regional pilot programs should be conducted in key river basins to evaluate strategic feasibility. These strategies aim to steadily enhance the comprehensive efficacy of China’s flood disaster databases, thereby facilitating their progressive optimization.

Diverse biotic components in urban green spaces not only provide fundamental conditions for environmental adaptation but also confer substantial benefits to human health. However, few studies have explored the health benefits of biodiversity in pocket parks—a specific type of urban green space—from the perspective of audio–visual interaction. This study adopted plant diversity (high, medium, and low) as the visual independent variable and bird diversity (high and low) as the auditory independent variable within the biodiversity framework, and constructed six virtual biodiversity scenarios in pocket parks. A total of 60 participants were recruited, and each participant was randomly assigned to experience two distinct biodiversity scenarios. Heart rate variability and psychological scales, including the Profile of Mood States, Perceived Restorativeness Scale, and Perceived Biodiversity Scale, were measured to examine the restorative effects of different types and levels of biodiversity in pocket parks. The results indicate that: 1) rich plant and bird diversity exerts significant positive effects on human health; 2) the combined perception of high plant diversity and high bird diversity produces the strongest restorative benefits; 3) perceived plant diversity as the primary mediating pathway in the impact of biodiversity on mental health; and 4) individuals with higher nature connectedness gain greater restorative benefits in environments with higher biodiversity. Therefore, in the optimal design of pocket parks, improvements should be made to enhance plant and bird diversity, create suitable habitats, implement soundscape compensation, and adopt differentiated intervention strategies to leverage the health promoting effects of green spaces. The study provides a reference for enhancing plant and bird diversity in pocket parks and contribute significantly to improving the health promoting capacity of urban green spaces.

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI) is driving a profound transformation in higher education, shifting conventional teaching models toward intelligent instructional paradigms. This study explores the development of AI teaching assistant systems, their application in educational practice, and the construction of a discipline-based knowledge engine. The results demonstrate that, through the integration of domain knowledge injection, retrieval-augmented generation mechanisms, and optimized text-to-image generation capabilities, AI teaching assistants not only significantly improve the accuracy of professional knowledge question answering, but also exhibit high expressive precision and strong adaptability to Chinese local urban contexts in urban spatial scene image generation tasks. Building upon these findings, this study further proposes a pathway for constructing discipline-based knowledge engines grounded in large language models and deeply customized for disciplinary knowledge systems. A system architecture integrating text generation, knowledge graphs, and collaborative text-to-image generation is developed to facilitate the evolution from general-purpose language models to discipline-oriented intelligent engines. This research provides a replicable and transferable theoretical framework and technical pathway for the digital transformation of higher education, while also expanding the application scenarios and future directions of interdisciplinary research at the intersection of AI and education.

Campus green spaces are critical restorative areas specifically for students, who are under high levels of pressure, and a hotspot topic of increasing interest is how to create a healthy campus environment. However, the extent to which campus green elements affect students’ restorative potential needs to be studied in more depth. This study examined the effects of landscape complexity—in terms of biodiversity, population density, and landscape facility—on college students’ physical and mental health through controlled experiments by combining virtual reality technology, electroencephalography, and other physiological measurement techniques. Analyses revealed that higher biodiversity predicted lower physiological stress and enhanced positive cognitive states. Population density predominantly exhibited negative effects, elevating systolic blood pressure and cognitive stress. The impact of landscape facilities was contingent on social context, alleviating boredom in crowded settings but showing diminished benefit in low-density areas. Critically, interaction analysis identified an optimal configuration for cognitive restoration: high biodiversity, minimal population, and modest facilities. The findings challenge simplistic design heuristics, arguing instead for a synergistic approach where ecological richness forms the essential foundation, social density is carefully curated, and built amenities are strategically deployed as contextual enhancers. This refines theoretical models of restorative environments by specifying the operative mechanisms within academic settings and provides a nuanced, evidence-based blueprint for creating cognitively supportive campus ecosystems.