This book provides a comprehensive description of the landscape-ecological planning system LANDEP, and introduces the methodical procedure. LANDEP was developed at the Institute of Landscape Ecology of Slovak Academy of Sciences in Bratislava and has been applied in various planning processes at home and abroad. Despite the fact that the LANDEP methodology was defined in 1979, the methodological content, sequence of procedures and the application of concept in practice are still valid. The first two steps – analyses and syntheses – have the nature of fundamental research and result in the design and characteristics of complex landscape-ecological-spatial units. The final two steps – evaluations and proposals – address the needs of planning practice. The intermediate step – interpretations – has the character of applied research and forms the arguments and criteria for the assessment of landscape for its utilisation by humans.
GIS supported Environmental Assessment for Landscape Planning
This book explores the opportunities offered by Strategic Environmental Assessment in the context of guaranteeing the synchronized integration of landscape (in all its aspects) within urban plans, thereby helping to overcome the constraints of rigidly framed, sector-focused laws and a purely aesthetic concept of landscape. In pursuit of this goal, various scholars have previously attempted to construct arrays of indicators relating to the different conceptions of “landscape”. This book critically examines the most complete proposals of this nature, systematizing and comparing them and, finally, offering some guidelines with respect to their codification within specific application protocols. After opening chapters exploring the origins of the problem and analysing the European normative frame for Strategic Environmental Assessment, two case studies are described and discussed. A model is then presented for the evaluation of the effects of urban plans on landscape, including in cultural and perceptual terms. The author demonstrates that, when suitably employed, Strategic Environmental Assessment can indeed facilitate the integration of environmental, economic, and social sustainability into urban planning.
Sustainable Landscape Planning in Selected Urban Regions
This book provides a unique contribution to the science of sustainable societies by challenging the traditional concept of rural-urban dichotomy. It combines environmental engineering and landscape sciences perspectives on urban region issues, making the book a unique work in urban study literatures. Today’s extended urban regions often maintain rural features within their boundaries and also have strong social, economic, and environmental linkages with the surrounding rural areas. These intra- and inter- linkages between urban and rural systems produce complex interdependences with global and local sustainability issues, including those of climate change, resource exploitation, ecosystem degradation and human wellbeing. Planning and other prospective actions for the sustainability of urban regions, therefore, cannot solely depend on “urban” approaches; rather, they need to integrate broader landscape perspectives that take extended social and ecological systems into consideration. This volume shows how to untangle, diagnose, and transform urban regions through distinctive thematic contributions across a variety of academic disciplines ranging from environmental engineering and geography to landscape ecology and urban planning. Case studies, selected from across the world and investigating urban regions in East Asia, Europe, North America and South-East Asia, collectively illustrate shared and differentiated drivers of sustainability challenges and provide informative inputs to global and local sustainability initiatives.
Human well-being depends in many ways on maintaining the stock of natural resources which deliver the services from which human’s benefit. However, these resources and flows of services are increasingly threatened by unsustainable and competing land uses. Particular threats exist to those public goods whose values are not well-represented in markets or whose deterioration will only affect future generations. As market forces alone are not sufficient, effective means for local and regional planning are needed in order to safeguard scarce natural resources, coordinate land uses and create sustainable landscape structures. This book argues that a solution to such challenges in Europe can be found by merging the landscape planning tradition with ecosystem services concepts. Landscape planning has strengths in recognition of public benefits and implementation mechanisms, while the ecosystem services approach makes the connection between the status of natural assets and human well-being more explicit. It can also provide an economic perspective, focused on individual preferences and benefits, which helps validate the acceptability of environmental planning goals. Thus linking landscape planning and ecosystem services provides a two-way benefit, creating a usable science to meet the needs of local and regional decision making. The book is structured around the Driving forces-Pressures-States-Impacts-Responses framework, providing an introduction to relevant concepts, methodologies and techniques. It presents a new, ecosystem services-informed, approach to landscape planning that constitutes both a framework and toolbox for students and practitioners to address the environmental and landscape challenges of 21st century Europe.
