Landscape Architecture
Linda Corkery, Kate Bishop
Abstract
This chapters offers a selection of research that responds to specific issues or shared concerns that challenge urban landscape architecture in 21st-century cities. In academia, the landscape architecture discipline draws on the domains of natural and physical sciences as well as the social sciences. At one end of the spectrum, landscape architecture seeks to understand the environmental sciences – biotic and abiotic; from geology, soils, hydrology and climate science to flora and fauna, as well as the ecological relationships and the habitats within which they exist, as well as the essential ecosystem services they provide. Decision making about designing and managing urban environments to support humans and other species, particularly in the face of a changing climate, represents key contemporary challenges for practitioners and academics globally. Increasingly, landscape architecture research is addressing landscape performance and approaches to climate change mitigation and adaptation, responding to rapid urbanization, loss of habitat and associated biodiversity loss that are measurable and have quantifiable impacts.