Defining Landscape Democracy

This stimulating book explores theories, conceptual frameworks, and cultural approaches with the purpose of uncovering a cross-cultural understanding of landscape democracy, a concept at the intersection of landscape, democracy and spatial justice. The authors of Defining Landscape Democracy address a number of questions that are critical to the contemporary discourse on the right to landscape: Why is democracy relevant to landscape? How do we democratise landscape? How might we achieve landscape and spatial justice?

The Routledge Research Companion to Landscape Architecture considers landscape architecture’s increasingly important cultural, aesthetic, and ecological role. The volume reflects topical concerns in theoretical, historical, philosophical, and practice-related research in landscape architecture – research that reflects our relationship with what has traditionally been called ‘nature’. It does so at a time when questions about the use of global resources and understanding the links between human and non-human worlds are more crucial than ever. The twenty-five chapters of this edited collection bring together significant positions in current landscape architecture research under five broad themes – History, Sites and Heritage, City and Nature, Ethics and Sustainability, Knowledge and Practice – supplemented with a discussion of landscape architecture education. Prominent as well as up-and-coming contributors from landscape architecture and adjacent fields including Tom Avermaete, Peter Carl, Gareth Doherty, Ottmar Ette, Matthew Gandy, Christophe Girot, Anne Whiston Spirn, Ian H. Thompson and Jane Wolff seek to widen, fuel, and frame critical discussion in this growing area. A significant contribution to landscape architecture research, this book will be beneficial not only to students and academics in landscape architecture, but also to scholars in related fields such as history, architecture, and social studies.

A call for a balancing of economic, environmental, and social concerns in the age of global economic integration.

Shows how to combine the forces of ecological science and participatory democracy to design urban landscapes that enable us to act as communities, are resilient rather than imperiled, and touch our hearts. Over the last fifty years, the process of community building has been lost in the process of city building. City and suburban design divides us from others in our communities, destroys natural habitats, and fails to provide a joyful context for our lives. In Design for Ecological Democracy, Randolph Hester proposes a remedy for our urban anomie. He outlines new principles for urban design that will allow us to forge connections with our fellow citizens and our natural environment. He demonstrates these principles with abundantly illustrated examples—drawn from forty years of design and planning practice—showing how we can design cities that are ecologically resilient, that enhance community, and that give us pleasure. Hester argues that it is only by combining the powerful forces of ecology and democracy that the needed revolution in design will take place. Democracy bestows freedom; ecology creates responsible freedom by explaining our interconnectedness with all creatures. Hester's new design principles are founded on three fundamental issues that integrate democracy and ecology: enabling form, resilient form, and impelling form. Urban design must enable us to be communities rather than zoning-segregated enclaves and to function as informed democracies. A simple bench at a centrally located post office, for example, provides an opportunity for connection and shared experience. Cities must be ecologically resilient rather than ecologically imperiled, adaptable to the surrounding ecology rather than dependent on technological fixes. Resilient form turns increased urban density, for example, into an advantage. And cities should impel us by joy rather than compel us by fear; good cities enrich us rather than limit us. Design for Ecological Democracy is essential reading for designers, planners, environmentalists, community activists, and anyone else who wants to improve a local community.

As a reflection of European identity and diversity, the landscape is our living natural and cultural heritage... Within the meaning of the European Landscape Convention the close links between the notion of landscape and human rights, democracy and sustainable development deserve to be highlighted. Recommendation CM/Rec(2017)7 of the Committee of Ministers of the Council of Europe to member states on the contribution of the European Landscape Convention to the exercise of human rights and democracy with a view to sustainable development, emphasises the need to “consider the importance that quality and diversity of landscapes has for the minds and bodies of human beings, as well as for societies”. The forthcoming opening of the convention to non-European states provides a unique opportunity to reaffirm the universal nature of human rights. The implementation of the convention represents an effective contribution by the Council of Europe to realisation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development, as adopted by the United Nations General Assembly.

Written in collaboration with the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS) and LE: NOTRE, The Routledge Handbook of Teaching Landscape provides a wide-ranging overview of teaching landscape subjects, from geology to landscape design, reflecting different perspectives and practices at university-level landscape curricula. Focusing on the didactics of landscape education, this fully illustrated handbook presents and discusses pedagogy, teaching traditions, experimental teaching methods and new teaching principles. The book is structured into three parts: reading the landscape, representing the landscape and transforming the landscape. Contributions from leading experts in the field, such as Simon Bell, Marc Treib, Jörg Rekittke and Susan Herrington, explore landscape analysis, history and theory, design visualisation, creativity and art, planning studio teaching, field trips and site engineering. Aimed at engaging academic researchers and instructors across disciplines such as landscape architecture, geography, ecology, planning and archaeology, this book is a must-have guide to landscape pedagogy as it stands today.

This Handbook provides a cutting edge study of the fast developing field of international law on the protection of cultural heritage by taking stock of the recent developments and of the core concepts and current challenges. The legal protection of cultural heritage has come under renewed focus from the international community and states since the 1990s. This is evidenced by the adoption of a range of international instruments. Countries are also enacting cultural heritage legislation or overhauling existing laws within their own national territory. Contributions address the protection of immovable and movable, tangible and intangible cultural heritage in peacetime and in the event of armed conflict as well as the interaction between specific regimes of cultural heritage protection with other fields of international law, including international criminal law, human rights and humanitarian law, environmental law, international trade, investments, and intellectual property. The last part of the Handbook covers diverse regional systems of heritage protection.