With blessed assets in natural resources, cultural legacy, and climatic conditions, a number of regions throughout China are qualified as world-class residential tourism destinations. However, for years, single-purpose tourism-oriented development modes, extensive infrastructure construction, and generic land development strategies have irreversibly destroyed a large number of vernacular natural and cultural landscapes. The author holds that with the increased urbanization level, people’s growing demand for a good life and aesthetic opportunities will boost residential tourism in the near future. To seize the opportunities in current infrastructure construction, it is necessary to plan and build a new type of infrastructure system for vast areas of China where world-class tourist and residential destinations can be created based on vernacular natural and cultural landscapes, and to develop related rural land use strategies proactively. In this essay, the author proposes Three Suggestions to Achieve a World-Class Tourist City to the Guilin Municipal Government, and advocates that in the context of the upcoming infrastructure development and the ongoing rural revitalization, it is the time to build future world-class residential tourism destinations by constructing a new type of infrastructure system. These suggestions can also provide reference for decision-makers of other areas with the same potential.
Urban streets support citizens’ daily commuting and social and recreational activities. Streetscape is also a visual resource and an important part of urban landscape appearance. Serving as an important ecological base and natural components of urban spatial structure, mountains often determine a city’s spatial layout and landscape identity so as to promote mountaincity integration. The study focuses on the historic downtown of Jinan, a typical mountainous city, analyzes the landscape aesthetic visual characteristics of street pedestrian spaces, and measures their landscape visual aesthetic quality by using panoramic images; the research then evaluates the visibility of high-visual-aesthetic-quality urban mountainous landscape to urban streets; finally, based on the overall landscape visual aesthetic quality evaluation results of urban street pedestrian spaces, the paper proposes a series of optimization suggestions of the streets at different levels to improve the harmony with urban mountain landscapes. The study hopes to provide a reference for the creation of mountain–city-integrated urban landscapes, as well as the healthy and sustainable urban development.
The risk of larger, more intense, and more frequent wildfires is growing across the world, especially in the Mediterranean Basin and regions of the world characterized by dry, hot summers, fire-prone and fire-adapted vegetation, and a build-up of fire fuels. These increased wildfire risks point toward a need for more effective and multi-beneficial management techniques. This paper explores two techniques aimed at reducing wildfire risk and bolstering wildfire adaptation through the act of shepherding: 1) „Fire Flocking,” a technique that employs the rotational grazing of animals in overgrown forests to reduce fuel loads and create a bio-based economy, and 2) „Infrastructure Shadowing,” a technique that develops a grazing program under high voltage power lines to reduce the risk of ignition. The study employs a descriptive case study methodology that combines a comprehensive literature review, stakeholder interviews, and spatial analysis; and evaluates the two cases to ascertain technical successes and challenges. While grazing systems are complex and have many variables needing to be considered, findings from the study suggest that creative and strategically designed grazing practices can slow the spread and decrease the intensity of wildfire events in a cost-effective manner, create desired habitats by developing mosaic-like landscape patches, and increase wildfire awareness. While it is clear that more experimentation should be done to explore how grazing can reduce wildfire risk, this study reveals the potential of multifunctional land stewardship practices to foster regenerative, evolutionary pathways with wildfire.
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.
What is the agency of color in comprehending urban landscape space? How could we use ethnography and fieldwork as a method of design research? Why is Design Anthropology considered an emerging field bridging description and action? The color of green in urban environments is sometimes not that green environmentally. This review targets the book Paradoxes of Green: Landscapes of a City-State in which this paradox can be well observed in an arid city-state—Bahrain of the Gulf region. Based on a year-long fieldwork informed by walking, the author Gareth Doherty read the layers of green and different hues in Bahrain’s urban landscape. With nuanced observations and encounters, Doherty interpreted a thick description of this arid geography, its cultural history and the present values of greening the city. The book considers white and beige the environmental colors to facilitate the possibilities of green in Bahrain. Situated in Landscape Architecture, Urban Studies, and Anthropology, this multidisciplinary piece of work would inform both academics and broader audience on understanding the urbanism of landscape around us and how „green” plays the role in it.
Located in Wilmington, Delaware, along the shoreline of the Brandywine Creek in the Greater Philadelphia/Delaware River Watershed, this project responds to a specific and critical need for the site as prioritized by multiple stakeholders. The project applies an innovative approach for quantifying increased flood resilience while simultaneously reducing contamination levels through the implementation of green infrastructure. To solve joint issues related to increased flood risk concurrent with higher potential for exposure to environmental contaminants transported in flood waters from adjacent industrial sites, brownfields, and combined sewer overflows, the research team develops a phased approach to decreasing stormwater runoff and pollutant loads on a 130-acre (52.6 hm2) site along the Brandywine Creek, applying the Long-Term Hydrologic Impact Assessment (L-THIA) model to quantify design impacts and performance of a master plan. Overall, the proposed master plan can reduce stormwater runoff and pollutant loads to levels significantly less than existing conditions or the current land use plan. Further, this research is unique in that it uses outputs from the L-THIA to compare existing conditions, effects of the current comprehensive plan, and impacts related to the proposed neighborhood-scaled master plan to evaluate the effectiveness between each scenario.
Mise-en-Scène is a design research project in the form of a book that expands the ways in which we think about the creative roles of publication and communication, and about our connections as a discipline to the issues and world around us. Taking from its title, Mise-en-Scène is an arrangement of the actors and sceneries that constitute our cities and lives.
This project is characterized by four features. Communication—Distinct from a design monograph, Mise-en-Scène is a collaboration between landscape architect Chris Reed and photojournalist Mike Belleme, directed towards a general audience. Arrangement—An arrangement of photographs, drawings, models, sketches, essays, literary excerpts, and community engagement quotes from designers, activists, and ecologists, offering greater multiplicity to the narrative and provoking new associations across cities, projects, and experiences. Perspective—A reflection of how Stoss Landscape Urbanism observes, investigates, and engages with our urban landscapes. Opportunity—Mise-en-Scène puts forth a new model of integrating interdisciplinary perspectives, as well as public audiences, within the formation of design research.
Built and speculative works, from Reed and the practice of Stoss, spatialize how these conditions coalesce—whether at the scale of a bench or the entirety of the city fabric. And through a foregrounding of human connection, rather than design, Belleme’s photography elucidates both the quotidian and fantastical occupation of these urban landscapes.
In the field of Landscape Architecture, design as research has been frequently addressed in the academic discourse. This article provides a snapshot of how design practice at Stoss Landscape Urbanism contributes to the discourse through applied practice and implementation as a research enquiry into the dynamics of and human response to the everchanging environment. This „design as research” in daily practice emerges as three episodes: 1) demonstration of ideas through experimentations and garden installations; 2) environmental and social dynamics as both research interests and tools with which to tackle challenges in urban environments and change over time; and 3) digital fabrication with biological materials as a tactile media to explore curiosity and creativity in design. The use of these tactics and tools offers a fresh perspective on the conventional definition of research and the methods and means through which designers continue to develop and test innovative solutions to social and environmental challenges. Looking retrospectively at the progression of applied research and its influence on projects across scales, Stoss provides insights into design process and reinforces the importance of continued exploration and testing within design practice.