ABSTRACT

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.

chapter |11 pages

The role of landscape architecture research

Introduction to the volume

part I|2 pages

Landscape in the rear-view mirrorHistoricizing the field

chapter 1|17 pages

Culture, nature, a punkt in spice

chapter 2|13 pages

Renaissance gardens

Topicality and the scene of nature

chapter 3|13 pages

The birth of landscape from the spirit of theory

Alexander von Humboldt’s artistic and scientific American Travel Journals

chapter 4|13 pages

Flight from modernity

Historicizing the aerial promise in landscape architecture 1

chapter 5|11 pages

Beyond innocence

The norms and forms of colonial urban landscapes

part II|2 pages

The art of archiving landscapes Tools for capturing moving relationships

chapter 7|12 pages

Transareal excursions into landscapes of fragility and endurance

A contemporary interpretation of Alexander von Humboldt’s mobile science

chapter 9|11 pages

“Cloudism”

Towards a new culture of making landscapes

chapter 10|13 pages

The Marnas digital archive

Exploring practice, theory, and place in space and time

part III|2 pages

Urban stories from a green planet

chapter 11|12 pages

The vertical and the horizontal

Combining ethnographic and geographic methods in understanding landscape

chapter 12|14 pages

Toward a somatology of landscape

Anthropological multinaturalism and the ‘natural’ world

chapter 14|9 pages

Enlarging the urban orchestra

Re-thinking current approaches to landscape architecture

chapter 15|10 pages

City, nature, infrastructure

A brief lexicon

part IV|2 pages

Designing with the past in the future

chapter 17|12 pages

Landscape architecture and social sustainability in an age of uncertainty

The need for an ethical debate

chapter 18|10 pages

Coupling environmental and sociocultural sustainability for better design

A case study of Emirati neighbourhoods and landscape

chapter 19|13 pages

Planning with heritage

A critical debate across landscape architecture practice and heritage theory

chapter 20|14 pages

The case to save socialist space

Soviet residential landscapes under threat of extinction

part V|2 pages

Philosophy of landscape architecture

chapter 22|9 pages

Whose city is it?

Public space as agent of change in marginalized settlements in Buenos Aires

chapter 23|11 pages

Khôrographos

Space-scripting

chapter 24|11 pages

Towards new research methodologies in design

Shifting inquiry away from the unequivocal towards the ambiguous