Through his recent visits to three cities facing severe and challenging living environment, the author had a deeper insight into the symbiosis between human and nature. In Mexico City, the capital of Mexico, urban construction practices against floods and for water supply encroach on natural ecological infrastructure, resulting in the exhaustion of local water resource, city sinking, and erased indigenous cultural landscape of floating gardens. In Dhaka, the capital of Bangladesh, where water bodies are heavily polluted, scarce urban parks become the only refuge for citizens. Finally in Bangkok, the capital of Thailand, estuary gates built to block floods invade the once prosperous canals, accelerating the decline of floating communities and markets and exacerbating traffic congestion and air pollution. Learning from these cases, cities must become better at territorial spatial planning and have the foresight to develop and grow while preserving and improving existing ecosystems. Essentially, territorial spatial planning and ecological restoration is to work with and by nature that would provide generous ecosystem services for humans, and, eventually, to increase people’s well-being and enhance cities’ development of sustainability.
German landscape planning has gathered many experiences and become an outstandingly working system of the nation’s territorial spatial planning. By reviewing its history, values, and legal framework, this paper summarizes the experience of German landscape planning and draws conclusions for its success into four logics: 1) the normative basis for the evaluation and deduction of objectives is transparent and stems primarily from ethical and cultural values; 2) social development needs are considered in the overall spatial planning and local participation processes; 3) planning methods include ways to effective implementation; and 4) the principle of subsidiary and the scale effect of landscape processes are considered. These logics are reflected and guaranteed by the German legislation. With a profound understanding of China’s reality, the authors argue that China needs more efforts to further separate the right to use and the revenues from the ownership of the spatial resources, and build a balancing mechanism for public-private interest negotiation to ensure the fairness of planning; In addition to enriching the evaluation standards and methodological standards for territorial spatial planning, a greater attention should be given to enhancing the effectiveness and efficiency of public participation at lower planning levels by establishing respective routines of bottom up initiatives and processes; Within the “Five- Level and Three-Type Framework,” China should introduce cross-level and cross-regional planning coordination mechanism that facilitates the paid supply and compensation mechanism of ecological public goods like ecosystem services.
The paper argues for the necessity of a new paradigm of ecological restoration in the face of mining extraction in the Latin American Andes. It begins with a critical reading of the extra-territorial connections between mining sites and settlements and unfolds their ambivalent relations through chronic cycles of ecological destruction. The analysis focuses on the territorial logics embedded in four mining-settlements of the Peruvian Andes and their development from the eighteenth to the twentyfirst century. Potosí, Huancavelica, Hualgayoc, and Cajamarca form part of an extended network of landscape infrastructures and headwater resources, all of which have been (and continue to be) significantly disturbed through mining operations. The sites have inherited a relentless production of Acid Mine Drainage in addition to other hazardous post-mining ecologies. Tangible evidence of ecological misbalance demonstrates the enduring impact of past-mining activities even centuries after mineral extraction has ceased. The paper reflects on present-day practices of post-mining landscape restoration in accordance with current Peruvian legislation. It concludes with a plea for a new form of territorial planning as well as both the conception and perception of post-mining landscapes through inclusion of design strategies for Cajamarca. Such planning needs to reconcile the contradictory elements of mineral extraction, environmental engineering, and self-sustainable ecological development. Intelligent design research is a major support for such an endeavor.
The current reform of China’s territorial spatial planning system is with profound expectation. Key to the implementation of spatial plans, regulatory detailed planning needs an improvement in preparation methods, indicator systems, coordination, and feasibility, etc. More work is urgently needed to make up the deficiencies of land use regulation and ecological restoration of territorial spaces. This paper devises methods for the ecological extension of regulatory planning with the theory of ecological security pattern. With Mentougou District in Beijing as a case study, this paper demonstrates the methods and roadmaps for ecological extension through land use control and community control and management. By analyzing the conflicts of ecological security and construction activities with a balancing mechanism, this study improves ecological control zoning and formulates regulatory principles and indicators. A thoughtful paradigm of preparation methods for the ecological extension of regulatory planning thus comes into being, which would offer references for the implementation and precise regulation of territorial spatial planning in China’s era of Ecological Civilization.
Water adaptive landscape is a typical regional complex formed by mutual adaptation between humans and water systems. As a subfield of adaptation research in the context of global changes, research on water adaptive landscapes emphasizes the combination of research perspectives and methods on water, adaptation, and landscape. This paper first reviews the concepts of “adaptation” in related disciplines, summarizes the primary attributes of adaptation, and puts forward a definition and research scope of water adaptive landscape. While pointing out that research on water adaptive landscapes mainly studies the processes, capacities, and strategies of relevant spatial forms and behavioral patterns, it also presents the research progress and achievements in the experience of spatial patterns and construction, evaluation, and narrative analysis, before proposing a research framework of water adaptive landscape by focusing on Mentougou District of Beijing. Finally, it offers prospects for future study from the aspects of research framework, quantitative methods, social cognition, and feasibility.
Soundscape starts from human’s perception and understanding of users’ needs and expectations of a space in an un-visual observation and expression form. Similar to visual landscape, soundscape costbenefit can be rather attractive. However, how to integrate soundscape approaches into landscape design has not been sufficiently understood or applied by designers and practitioners. This paper aims to discuss the roles of soundscape approaches in landscape design by exploring the research outcomes, national policies, and the state-of-the-art design practice especially across the UK. The design elements of landscape have been demonstrated to be able to form positive soundscape in terms of both noise barrier and positive sound source, although there is still a lack of research on soundscape approaches in landscape design. Besides, relevant policies should encourage appropriate soundscapes and diversity of soundscapes in both urban and rural areas, which could provide more possibilities for landscape designers to create innovative design solutions for noise problems. The landscape design options need further development through collaboration and innovative thinking so that a greater variety of solutions can be implemented. Soundscape approaches are those which take into account interests of different groups, including transport authorities and developers. Coordinated solutions can be defined with the help of landscape and urban architects to fulfil stakeholders’ interests by creating a desirable urban soundscape.
A true understanding of Ecological Civilization Construction is key to comprehend the connotation and goals of China’s territorial spatial planning, which echoes the ideological keynote of the country’s upgrade of socio-economic development mode. Missioned as a means to public policy making, territorial spatial planning develops roadmaps for Ecological Civilization Construction by addressing macro spatial governance problems such as the shortage of resources, severe environmental pollution, and ecosystem degradation. Furthermore, the author interprets the relationship between ecological restoration and territorial spatial planning system, and argues that the territorial spatial planning system should employ a macro-medium-micro hierarchy in scale while focusing on life-circle ecological restoration planning and implementation. In addition to the necessity of developing crossadministrative border plans, the author emphasizes the importance of multi-disciplinary cooperation. Then, he points out that "The Two Assessment Standards" should value regional characteristics and avoid to indiscriminately apply planning and design patterns in different cases. Finally, the author puts forward suggestions to practitioners in Landscape Architecture and other allied professions to prepare themselves by selfretraining with new concepts, methodologies, and technologies to be more competent for the contemporary needs of territorial spatial planning.
By restructuring its planning system and integrating competences of land resource and water management, environmental conservation, agriculture, as well as spatial planning, under a same Ministry of Natural Resources in 2018, China ambitioned to definitively turn the page on inconsistent and sectoral planning practices. However, existing planning instruments are still linked to administrative boundaries and remain statutory and regulatory in nature, which makes them inadequate to address complex and dynamic megacity regions that span across different administrative entities. The Yangtze River Delta megacity region is the subject of an ambitious integration plan which focuses on economic coordination and urban services, however, there is still no coherent vision on its spatial development at the territorial scale. This article presents the “Jiangnan Park,” a university-led and design-driven research project focusing on the vast triangular plain between cities of Shanghai, Hangzhou, and Suzhou. Using the encompassing metaphor of regional “park” and applying the emerging method of regional design, this project combines mapping, visualization, design strategies, and workshop techniques to elaborate a development vision for this historically and ecologically sensitive area. As a pioneering case of regional design in China, this project exemplifies how the use of cross-scale and cross-sectoral collaborative methods can inform the development of integrative strategies for complex megacity regions.
Tropical rainforest, a unique forest ecosystem with the richest biodiversity on the earth, is now suffering from rapid biodiversity loss and ecological degradation. Xishuangbanna is such a typical example in China, where the ecosystem of Sanda Mountain is fragmented by agricultural practices and rubber plantation, and the vegetation productivity decreases sharply, threatening its role in the regional ecological security pattern. For an overall ecological improvement of the study area, since 2017, the project team has examined the existing habitat conditions in Sanda Mountain and proposed a thirty-year planning scheme for the ecological restoration by introducing constructive and pioneer plant species, employing a mixedspecies planting mode, and facilitating the natural regeneration of vegetation community to recover natural succession through ecological restoration planning at patch-, corridor-, and regionalscales. The team simulated the changes in carbon storage, habitat quality, and ecosystem service value before and after planning via the InVEST model to guide the dynamic adjustment of the tropical rainforest restoration. This exploratory ecological restoration planning for such a largescale tropical rainforest may provide research and practical references for other studies in China and abroad.
The Demilitarized Zone (DMZ) landscape between the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea and the Republic of Korea is currently the most dangerous and heavily fortified territory in the world and has produced a series of continuously linked brownfield lands on a divided Korean Peninsula through the continued intense presence of military troops and equipment, a significant amount of defense infrastructure, and pollutant buildup over the last seventy years. The political and social reunification of the two Koreas may occur in the coming years and any work in the future to address the landscape of a unified peninsula would be required to carry out in the DMZ. The work includes a complete characterization of the land area and water bodies and the existing military infrastructure and abandoned equipment, with the proposed remediation of soils, groundwater, and drainage systems as well as the concerns of brownfield land reuse, adding new industrial manufacturing to the area, the increase of tourism into the region, and the development of both traditional and new forms of regional energy generation. The brownfields in the DMZ can be considered an extreme version of the more conventional post-industrial sites that are addressed in other urban or ex-urban venues through the methods and conventions of brownfield regeneration. Or indeed it may become a new type of brownfield site — the “brownfield border” — with its own characterization, on-site pollutants, and methods to address its ongoing remediation and reuse programs. The intention of this paper is to examine the DMZ through a recent academic study carried out through a graduate design studio at Harvard University focused on the outcomes of unification on the Korean peninsula, the remediation of border landscapes as a new type of brownfield practice, and potential planning and design of alternative futures.
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).