Kongjian Yu

Landscape is a time-space compound shaped by human activities on natural processes; the persistence of a landscape supports its continuity and stability over time, as well as the stable variety of physical environment. For remaining landscapes, the persistence means the stability of natural ecosystems and the harmony of cultural-social contexts. The former emphasises the ability to maintain the dynamism and stability of the landscape system against external disturbances; the latter one, by regarding the landscape as a man-land composite ecosystem, refers to the ability to maintain localities and cultural legacy in response to changes of natural and social environments. For emerging landscapes, persistence manifests the ability to interact and integrate with and adapt to the remaining landscapes. The rapid urbanisation and population growth have caused tremendous changes in urban and rural landscapes worldwide, increasingly undermining the persistence of landscapes: traditional rural landscapes and urban historic neighbourhoods have been replaced with massive industrial scenes; the lack of innovative design ideas, the stagnation of theoretical study, and the limitation of aesthetic awareness have resulted in the neglect of critical ecological, social, and aesthetic values of such heritages, the damage of ecological security patterns, and the disappear of people’s collective memories about vernacular landscapes. Efforts addressing the pressing issues, e.g. the destruction of natural environment, the loss of landscape values, and the culture shock, are expected. Text in English and Chinese.

There are highly fragmented urban wildernesses remaining and scattering in rapidly urbanised and exceedingly industrialised cities, ranging from crevices along sidewalks to large areas of isolated forests. Although differing in scales with the natural wilderness, urban wildernesses see similar community structures and often offer similar services, with strong vitality and resilience. However, such natural resources are often misunderstood or overlooked as undesirable places and thus, their great ecological, social, economic, and aesthetic values are ignored. Meanwhile, due to constant changes of global and regional ecological environments, lagged design theories and techniques, and limited aesthetic consciousness, urban plantscapes—the most important producer with provisioning and regulating services for both urban wildernesses and constructed ecosystems—are confronting problems such as poor species and structural diversity, high maintenance requirements, and insufficient ecosystem services. This issue hopes to interpret and display the treasured qualities of urban wildernesses and inspire landscape architects to strike the balance between urban wildernesses and human settlements via ecological planting methods that facilitate natural evolution and ecological flows. Landscape Architecture Frontiers attempts to define an “urban wilderness” and its images, connotations, implications, and resources; explore related techniques to provide full play to its irreplaceable role in providing ecosystem services such as biodiversity conservation; and focus on urban re-wilding practices and ecological planting theories, aiming at well integrating urban wildernesses into the naturally constructed urban ecosystem to enhance the city’s ecological sustainability and resilience.

The new urbanisation necessitates the upgrading of urban governance and spatial planning and design. Landscape Architecture Frontiers accentuates the intelligence on urban growth and physical construction for years. In this issue, LA Frontiers focuses on the topics about urban governance and spatial quality improvement under the promotion of inventory planning and governance refinement, including: 1) Urban village (micro-) renewals, waterfront revitalisation, and industrial, cultural, and historical heritage regeneration; 2) Public participation, community engagement, and other polycentric urban governance modes and inclusive design approaches; 3) The resilience of urban planning and design against sudden disasters and public health emergencies and crises; 4) Diagnoses on the working systems/mechanisms that support the upgrades of urban governance and public space construction, through lenses of Economic Sociology. By gathering cutting edge research with international outlooks and presenting latest practice examples among China and abroad, LA Frontiers might offer a new prospective that helps professionals interpret associated governance and planning policies, inform practitioners the goals and roadmaps of public empowerment, navigate planners and designers with flexible implementation and management guidelines, to eventually improve the spatial quality of public places, as well as the overall benefits in society, ecology, and economy.

Cognitive sciences that aim at establishing scientific and explicit interpretations can diversify approaches to exploring users’ feelings and experiences of a specific environment. For example, people’s emotions and feelings change with their environment, closely related to people’s sensory processes and brain wiring, personal experiences, and visiting purposes, etc., can be understood as a prompt intuitive response. Environmental information and responses are processed very fast to support quick decision making in relation to people’s survival and benefits. Environmental Psychology explains the environmental types people prefer and why certain environments make people feel, for example, anxious or excited. Understanding people’s emotional responses to the environment facilitates, or “nudges” (a term usually used in the inter-discipline of Psychology and Behavioural Economics), users to act or make choices as desired. Moreover, research on attention in cognitive sciences can also inform designers: by controlling the spatial elements and intangible elements (such as light and sound) to minimise environmental disturbance or noise, users’ attention can be directed to specific elements, element combinations or series. During this process, users’ specific emotional memories or symbolic implications are activated, which augments desired feelings and experiences. This issue explores the mechanism of how landscape design affects users’ feelings, experiences, and behaviours, as well as usability, by introducing theories, knowledge, and research methods and findings in Cognitive sciences, psychology, neurobiology, and computer science, so as to support landscape architects’ decision making.

Climate change poses challenges for human survival and societal development, including frequent urban disasters such as high wave and urban waterlogging, as well as extreme weather events such as sea level rise, floods, tropical storm, wide-range drought, and high temperature in polar regions. Contributed in part by reducing greenhouse gas emission, and also by the means of improving local resilience, the international community have been working on mitigating the uncertain impact of climate change. Against the backdrop of carbon reduction policy such as Carbon Emission Peak and Carbon Neutrality proposed by Chinese government, regional sustainable progress inevitably calls for resilient strategies for human settlements that address local issues upon climate change adaption and resilience theories. Since the impact of climate change on human settlements, risk and resilience assessment methods, and spatial and technological strategies have already broadly studied by international academia, more attention should be taken into research on spatial planning, urban design, landscape design, innovative engineering, emerging technology application, and interdisciplinary perspective to strive to realize the goals of peaking carbon emissions and achieving carbon neutrality. To this end, this issue expects to discuss the resilient strategies adaptive to climate change for improve human settlements at varied scales. Introducing international perspectives, LA Frontiers encourages the bridging the latest research outcome with application and practice.

In its history of over a hundred of years, landscape architecture has developed many ideas, concepts, methods, and models. In this issue, LA Frontiers focuses on prototype studies by examining those traceable and repeatable landscape theories, methodologies, and pedagogies, and introducing the knowledge from allied disciplines to inspire knowledge innovation, with a particular highlight on the prototypes adaptive to future uncertainties. It hopes to extend the disciplinary horizon and enrich the fruition of disciplinary growth, and to provide designers and scholars with prospective design thoughts and more resilient working methods. This issue explores the following aspects: First, prototyping process, or test planning process, which is characterised for the test-planning-design process and has been widely applied in the fields of computer sciences and industrial design but still being less explored in landscape architecture. This process emphasises the multi-disciplinary collaboration and test procedure before design, which would improve the communication efficiency among professionals from different fields. Second, reflection and innovation on classic theories and models in landscape planning and design, such as Ian McHarg’s Map Overlay and Carl Steinitz’s Six Steps model. Third, research-based design, including design research or competitions with clear goals and boundary conditions which help designers comprehend the essence and implications of design and encourage disciplinary innovation. And fourth, inductive and empirical pedagogies to inspire forward-looking design ideas and working methods.

Urban environments (including built, natural, and social environments) crucially impact children's physical and psychological health, particularly in cities. Now children's mentality and safety, and the freedom of travelling and playing have raised concerns in society. In this issue, trans-disciplinary discussions between scholars and practitioners in landscape architecture and environmental psychology, environmental behaviours, human engineering, public health, etc., as well as city managers, are encouraged to explore the ways to improve urban environments for children's outdoor activities. With such a multi-disciplinary coverage, this issue aims to update landscape architects' theoretical and methodological approaches to issues of children and urban environments, with a deeper understanding of their disciplinary competences, limitations, and challenges thus to find out their irreplaceable role in guaranteeing children's well-beings.

Observation and representation is a foundational subject in Landscape Architecture. Landscape design is a process shaped by the connections and interactions among designers, users, and the real world. This issue aims to explore the ways that help landscape architects: 1) see the scientism of design disciplines and explore the methodological principles of design generation; 2) translate and convey design ideas and emotional inspiration to the users with rich design vocabulary (in size, shape, material, proportion, composition, etc.) through multiple perceptual approaches; 3) read sites from economic, ecological, cultural, and other perspectives to present more convincing and appealing landscape narratives with the aid of emerging technological means; 4) understand various needs of all parties and stakeholders, coordinating interests and benefits and improving the utilisation of public resources through landscape design; and 5) create educational places for improving the public's rational and aesthetic norms.

This issue focuses on: 1) Exploring the significance of territorial spatial planning by stressing its necessity and main ideas under the contemporary background of ecological civilisation construction in China, while re-examining the role of landscape architects in this reform. 2) Strengthening research on related methodologies and techniques of urban ecological planning, ecological security pattern, ecological infrastructure, and ecological restoration to improve cities liveability and resilience and rebuild harmonious human-nature relationship under a mandatory planning framework combined with resilient measures, avoiding inflexible ecological conservation practices. 3) Analysing and learning from diversified efforts made by different countries and regions to promote urban development while protecting ecosystems, particularly their experience on territorial, regional, and urban planning that is significantly valuable to the Chinese counterpart, to leverage the value of territorial natural resources. 4) Exploring feasible approaches that help restore urban ecosystem structure and ecological elements, and improve planning and design methods on specific sites, so as to enhance spatial construction and ecological quality, to eventually improve a national eco-security pattern with scientific and user-friendly planning and design. 5) Encouraging applications of research frontiers in geology, macro-ecology, regional economics, public management, and sustainability science.

This is a book about ideal landscapes and Feng-Shui. Using evolutionary and anthropological approaches, Peking University professor Kongjian Yu - who holds a doctorate degree in Design from Harvard - explores the origin, structure, and meanings of Feng-Shui in juxtaposition to the ideal landscape models in Chinese culture. Using illustrative site observations and literature, Yu argues that Feng-Shui landscapes share similar structures with other Chinese ideal landscapes - the implications of which are deconstructed into terms of geography, anthropology, ecology, and philosophy. As a landscape architect and urbanist, Professor Yu respects the role of Feng-Shui in the making of places, yet still is in opposition to its superstitious nature. Well illustrated and poetically written, this book is a must-read for those who are interested in Feng-Shui, as well as those who care about their daily living environment - especially those who practice architecture, landscape architecture, and urbanism.

This book explains how with careful planning and design, the functions and performance of constructed wetlands can provide a huge range of benefits to humans and the environment. It documents the current designs and specifications for free water surface wetlands, horizontal and vertical subsurface flow wetlands, hybrid wetlands and bio retention basins; and explores how to plan, engineer, design and monitor these natural systems. Sections address resource management (landscape planning), technical issues (environmental engineering and botany), recreation and physical design (landscape architecture), and biological systems (ecology). Site and municipal scale strategies for flood management, storm-water treatment and green infrastructure are illustrated with case studies from the USA, Europe and China, which show how these principles have been put into practice. Written for upper level students and practitioners, this highly illustrated book provides designers with the tools they need to ensure constructed wetlands are sustainably created and well manage

This book explains how with careful planning and design, the functions and performance of constructed wetlands can provide a huge range of benefits to humans and the environment. It documents the current designs and specifications for free water surface wetlands, horizontal and vertical subsurface flow wetlands, hybrid wetlands and bio retention basins; and explores how to plan, engineer, design and monitor these natural systems. Sections address resource management (landscape planning), technical issues (environmental engineering and botany), recreation and physical design (landscape architecture), and biological systems (ecology). Site and municipal scale strategies for flood management, storm-water treatment and green infrastructure are illustrated with case studies from the USA, Europe and China, which show how these principles have been put into practice. Written for upper level students and practitioners, this highly illustrated book provides designers with the tools they need to ensure constructed wetlands are sustainably created and well manage