Experiential Landscape

Experiential Landscape offers new ways of looking at the relationship between people and the outdoor open spaces they use in their everyday lives. The book takes a holistic view of the relationship between humans and their environment, integrating experiential and spatial dimensions of the outdoors, and exploring the theory and application of environmental design disciplines, most notably landscape architecture and urban design. The book explores specific settings in which an experiential approach has been applied, setting out a vocabulary and methods of application, and offers new readings of experiential characteristics in site analysis and design. Offering readers a range of accessible mapping tools and details of what participative approaches mean in practice, this is a new, innovative and practical methodology. The book provides an invaluable resource for students, academics and practitioners and anyone seeking reflective but practical guidance on how to approach outdoor place-making or the analysis and design of everyday outdoor places.

This book investigates the concept of human landscape in rural settlements in Southern China, where communities and their cultural landscapes are facing contemporary challenges following a period of rapid urbanization in the last 50 years. While metropolitan cities, such as Hong Kong, are experiencing accelerated urban development, underpopulated rural villages are struggling to maintain the cultural heritage of their regions. Rediscovery of Cultural Landscapes in Southern China provides a detailed account into indigenous living cultures in traditional, rural settlements upon natural landscapes. Beginning with an overview of the theoretical framework, the book presents six unique cases, including: Tai O, Yim Tin Tsai, Lai Chi Wo, Nga Tsin Wai, Cangdong, and Meinong, while illustrating a relevant comparison between Hakka and Satoyama landscape systems. The spectrum of theoretical and case analyses allows for a rethinking of the evolving cultural landscape’s positioning with valuable heritages in the context of a post-industrial society. The book is written towards reinterpreting the cultural landscape by conceptualizing the human landscape for scholars, practitioners, and students interested in rural-cultural conservation and revitalization, heritage management, traditional architecture and landscape planning, and urban-rural development.

Exploring the Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. National Memorial (King Memorial) in Washington, DC through a multi-faceted rhetorical analysis of the site's visual and textual components, Jefferson Walker reveals multiple critical, popular, privileged, and vernacular interpretations of the site and Dr. Martin Luther King's memory. Walker argues that the King Memorial and its related texts help to universalize and institutionalize King's ethos - creating a contentious rhetorical battleground where various people and organizations contest the "ownership" and use of King's memory. Walker uses these analyses to uncover how the site contributes to the public memory of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

'Restoring Layered Landscapes' explores ecological restoration in complex landscapes, where ecosystems intertwine with important sociopolitical meanings.

The need for a human-orientated approach to urbanism is well understood, and yet all too often this dimension remains lacking in urban design. In this book the authors argue for and develop socially restorative urbanism – a new conceptual framework laying the foundations for innovative ways of thinking about the relationship between the urban spatial structure and social processes to re-introduce a more explicit people-centred element into urban place-making and its adaptation. Focusing on this interplay between humans and the built environment, two new concepts are developed: the transitional edge – a socio-spatial concept of the urban realm; and Experiemics – a participative process that acts to redress imbalances in territorial relationships, defined in terms of the awareness of mine, theirs, ours and yours (MTOY). In this way, Socially Restorative Urbanism shows how professional practice and community understanding can be brought together in a mutually interdependent and practical way. Its theoretical and practical principles are applicable across a wide range of contexts concerning human benefit through urban environmental change and experience, and it will be of interest to readers in the social sciences and environmental psychology, as well as the spatial planning and design disciplines.

Defining a research question, describing why it needs to be answered and explaining how methods are selected and applied are challenging tasks for anyone embarking on academic research within the field of landscape architecture. Whether you are an early career researcher or a senior academic, it is essential to draw meaningful conclusions and robust answers to research questions. Research in Landscape Architecture provides guidance on the rationales needed for selecting methods and offers direction to help to frame and design academic research within the discipline. Over the last couple of decades the traditional orientation in landscape architecture as a field of professional practice has gradually been complemented by a growing focus on research. This book will help you to develop the connections between research, teaching and practice, to help you to build a common framework of theory and research methods. Bringing together contributions from landscape architects across the world, this book covers a broad range of research methodologies and examples to help you conduct research successfully. Also included is a study in which the editors discuss the most important priorities for the research within the discipline over the coming years. This book will provide a definitive path to developing research within landscape architecture.

Today, more than 50% of the world’s population lives in cities and is subject to particular environmental and economic impacts against the backdrop of an evolving planetary crisis. This book explores the intimate relationship between the quality of life of city dwellers and the quality of urban landscapes, including those regenerated through green spaces and environmental networks. Starting from the concept of “landscape” as defined by the European Landscape Convention (i.e. "an area, perceived by people, whose character is the result of the action and interaction of natural and/or human factors"), it expands upon, in particular, the interactions between the different biotic and abiotic components that contribute to the quality of the landscape and the environment. In the first part of the book, the author examines fundamental concepts and discusses a variety of relevant topics, such as the city under transformation, waste spaces, smart communities, regeneration programs, the role of environmental networks, and new instruments for decision making. The second part is devoted to a case study of the Italian Adriatic city that highlights the need for interdisciplinary interaction among researchers in apparently disparate fields, including ecology, forest botany, chemistry, biology, geology, sociology, economics, architecture, and engineering.​

Exploring sacred mountains around the world, this book examines whether bonding and reverence to a mountain is intrinsic to the mountain, constructed by people, or a mutual encounter. Chapters explore mountains in England, Scotland, Wales, Italy, Ireland, the Himalaya, Japan, Greece, USA, Asia and South America, and embrace the union of sky, landscape and people to examine the religious dynamics between human and non-human entities. This book takes as its starting point the fact that mountains physically mediate between land and sky and act as metaphors for bridges from one realm to another, recognising that mountains are relational and that landscapes form personal and group cosmologies. The book fuses ideas of space, place and material religion with cultural environmentalism and takes an interconnected approach to material religio-landscapes. In this way it fills the gap between lived religious traditions, personal reflection, phenomenology, historical context, environmental philosophy, myths and performativity. In defining material religion as active engagement with mountain-forming and humanshaping landscapes, the research and ideas presented here provide theories that are widely applicable to other forms of material religion.