It is often assumed that more vegetation increases residential landscape satisfaction. We challenge this assumption and conjecture that contested land used, such as plantation forestry, can show negative impacts. To test our hypothesis, we assess in which ways do eucalyptus plantations influence households' landscape satisfaction in Galicia (NW Spain), a hotspot of 'eucalyptisation'. We predicate a series of beta-binomial mixed models upon household microdata on residential landscape satisfaction combined with municipal forest inventories. Our models stratify the sample according to quartiles of plantation cover and control for settlement type, age, education and income. Results show a non-linear and context-dependent impact of eucalyptus on landscape satisfaction. Satisfaction declines where eucalyptus is marginal and again where plantations dominate. Interpreted through a Plantationocene lens, these findings indicate that preferences reflect sociodemographic position and historically mediated landscape meanings. Regular monitoring of residential landscape satisfaction would provide planners with citizen-informed evidence on landscape change.
This study aims to examine changes in the cultural landscape shaped by hidden Christians in Japan since the eighteenth century and to highlight, for the first time, the positive significance of historical transformations in these cultural landscapes. The narrative of cultural landscape change holds lessons for universal issues of persecution and discrimination that humanity has yet to resolve. We have divided the region's cultural landscape into three periods: before the arrival of hidden Christians, after the arrival, and after the latter half of the twentieth century. Up to the first half of the twentieth century, the cultural landscape was impacted by discrimination and persecution between hidden Christians and the surrounding Buddhist communities. This landscape has evolved into a modern landscape as residents have addressed the region's negative history. This study seeks to positively evaluate changes, advocating the 'evolving cultural landscape' concept as a representation of societal maturity and progress.
The elusiveness of aesthetic concepts reduces their role in contemporary landscape architecture. However, human affect cannot be reduced to instrumental rationality, and the poetic generation of space is rooted in lived, embodied experience. This paper addresses this challenge through a phenomenological approach and analysis of designer intent, using Carlo Scarpa's Villa Ottolenghi as a case study. By analysing Scarpa's design sketches, testimonies from collaborators, and the spatial configuration itself, the study investigates how spatial poetics are constructed through the dimensions of bodily movement, position, and perception. The paper reveals how Villa Ottolenghi creates an 'embodied nature' through the dynamic interplay of architecture and landscape in comparison. This approach transcends the traditional binary opposition between landscape and architecture, demonstrating that a poetic space in profound resonance with nature can be achieved through body-centred design, thereby offering a tangible path for the revival of aesthetics in contemporary landscape practice.
This study establishes and applies a cognitive-emotional-spatial framework to examine young people's perceptions of cultural heritage on digital platforms, with Shuhe Ancient Town as the case. Drawing on user-generated content from Weibo, Xiaohongshu, and Ctrip, the research integrates thematic clustering, sentiment analysis, and spatial modelling to build a multi-dimensional cross-platform database. Findings reveal a dual structure in youth perceptions: social platforms highlight identity and emotional expression, while transactional platforms emphasise functional attributes and satisfaction. Although sentiment is overall positive, authenticity and immersive experiences act as key triggers for deeper emotions, anchored in nodes and boundaries that sustain dwelling and attachment. These results delineate a recursive mechanism that extends place attachment theory through a digital mediation pathway and exposes tensions with authorised heritage discourse. Methodologically, the study demonstrates the value of cross-platform comparison, and practically, it offers guidance for heritage landscape design and participatory governance attentive to younger generations.
This study examines how residents of two Latvian national parks express and practice care for forests, distinguishing between active care and letting be care and tracing the care rationales through which these practices are justified and made legitimate. Active care, which was more common, is closely tied to agrarian nationalist traditions that privilege order, productivity, and visible labour as markers of responsibility. Letting be care draws on biodiversity conservation and ecological humility, while also including attachments to familiar species. Using care as an analytical lens shows that similar practices may stem from diverse rationales, ranging from self-protection and aesthetic preference to ecological concern, often blurring boundaries between interest and responsibility for more-than-human life. The findings demonstrate that cultural expectations of order, tidiness, and legibility reinforce active care while marginalising letting be orientations, helping to explain tensions between residents and conservation authorities and informing more inclusive forest governance.
This paper discusses why psychological and/or behavioural responses to landscape must be innate for species survival. While it does not present new empirical data, the discussion is based on neuroscientific work that demonstrated intrinsic responses to landscape stimuli exist. It reflects on the agents that potentially elicit human's affective preferences for defined spaces, primal patterns, and compositions in the landscape, arguing for the significance of spatial and environmental perception to survival and presenting this in a set of 'landskiphilia' hypotheses. With the renewed understanding of how responses to landscape stimuli evolve, the reading of theoretical foundations of garden and landscape design through this new lens can open new and/or specific characteristics of landscape for hypotheses and research. The resulting nuanced understanding of the effects of landscape on psychology, along with the sciences and engineering for sustainability and biodiversity, can better inform the building of liveable resilient cities.
This article re-examines the persistent tangible-intangible dichotomy in heritage studies by examining the Na Tcha Customs and Beliefs in Macau through the lens of cultural ecology. Framing Na Tcha as a dynamic cultural ecosystem, we argue that its resilience derives from the symbiotic relationship between its internal ecology-comprising material, institutional, and spiritual dimensions-and its external ecology, constituted by the surrounding natural and social environments. Our qualitative analysis demonstrates that shifts in the external environment necessitate internal adaptations, while internal cultural innovations, in turn, reshape external contexts. This reciprocal relationship is essential for sustaining the ecosystem's dynamic equilibrium, offering a holistic model for understanding and safeguarding living cultural heritage.
Landscape dynamics pose a challenge to any structure that is considered to be permanent and robust, such as roads. In flood-prone areas in particular, transport infrastructure must adapt to changing conditions and needs. Therefore, integrating a landscape design perspective into infrastructure planning becomes increasingly important. Our study explores the interface between riverscape and roadscape, based on a case study known for its integrated landscape-infrastructure design: the Wachau road in Austria. Employing a qualitative multiple methods approach, the research combines spatial analysis, historical analysis and site observation to explore the spatial consequences of design solutions that emerged at the river-road interface. Key findings are synthesised in a typology of spatial situations alongside their visual and functional implications. Only a few design changes determine whether adaptations can serve multiple needs. Understanding the relationship between dynamic processes, design aspects and spatial qualities can inform future design decisions in road planning.
Often enveloped in narratives of isolation, vulnerability, and marginalisation, islands and archipelagos, however, represent geographic hotspots of connectivity and a culture of the commons, implied and embedded in their landscapes. The crucial historical transition from an archipelagic worldview to the more recent and contemporary state of continental dominance has had significant consequences for islands' collective sense of community, identity, and their landscapes as commons. Synergies, either among islands and coasts or within the islands themselves, seem to have played a significant role in developing a sense of landscape as commons. This article aims to show that the synergistic mind frame and ways of life of Greek islanders during the archipelagic era of the Eastern Mediterranean also applied to their landscapes' stewardship. The article then proposes an island-centric/archipelagic understanding of the pronounced lack of a sense of the landscape as commons, in contemporary Greek society.
Dong Van Karst Plateau Global Geopark (DVKPGG), recognised by UNESCO, is renowned for its geological significance and unique cultural heritage. The Hmong people have long adapted to this harsh environment, developing a distinctive stone cultural landscape based on traditional ecological knowledge (TEK). This study examines how they establish a symbiotic relationship with nature, utilising stone in settlement architecture, agricultural practices, and cultural beliefs. However, this heritage faces threats from environmental changes, economic shifts, and modern influences, endangering TEK and the cultural landscape. Despite these challenges, the region holds great potential for sustainable socio-economic development. Preserving cultural landscapes and promoting TEK, with indigenous communities at the core, is essential for safeguarding this heritage. Ensuring its continuity will maintain the priceless harmony of stone that defines both the land and its people.
This contribution explores the possibility that cultural landscapes can move and what the consequences of this might be for (our thinking about) borders, in particular the borders between nation states. Mainstream landscape research assumes that each cultural landscape has a unique, exclusive and inalienable relationship with a specific area. However, since the 1980s, with the increasing influence of humanistic and new cultural geographies in landscape research, this assumption has been regularly questioned. If cultural landscapes are understood not only as physical manifestations of human ecosystems and cultures, but also as "ways of seeing" and "landscape ideas", then people also carry landscapes with them in their minds and hearts and can physically realise them elsewhere. In the following review paper, both views are explored through a series of case studies. The relationships between (moving) cultural landscapes and borders receive special attention.
Urban plant landscapes shape public aesthetic experience and colour preferences, yet existing research relies heavily on image-based or lab studies, lacking real-world validation. This study investigates demographic differences and temporal changes in floral colour preference through a field experiment where 57 participants created flower combinations under controlled conditions, with a follow-up after six months. Results showed 68% initially preferred red and pink, indicating a strong inclination towards warm colours. Significant variations occurred across gender, age, and education (p < .05), accompanied by an exclusivity effect between warm and cool hues. Notably, 26% of participants shifted preference from warm to cool tones over time, underscoring the dynamic nature of colour choice. These findings offer practical insights for human-centred planting design that adapts to diverse and evolving public preferences in urban green spaces.
A wasteland is a category of urban open space widely recognised as a resource. An apparently abandoned piece of land corresponds primarily to a space for discovery. Even if this is evident, a wasteland is generally considered from a mono-functional perspective. Research on the subject of wasteland is generally oriented towards the application of a single analysis, and this could lead to limitations of vision that are examined by this contribution. This paper reflects on how to fill this gap, taking 'En Ster' wasteland in Li & egrave;ge as a laboratory. It assumes that a wasteland contains more than one meaning that may support a planning and design process, and by activating a dialogue between different landscape analyses on the same wasteland reveals multiple meanings. Rethinking a wasteland beyond its boundaries could support protecting and valorising the ecological and social dimensions of the city.
A garden developed by professors at a French secondary education institution, Lyc & eacute;e Agricole Jules-Rieffel, demonstrates how landscape maintenance can function as a caring practice. Designed in consultation with contemporary French landscape architect and artist Gilles Cl & eacute;ment, this space instantiates the concept of the 'garden in movement'. Cl & eacute;ment theorises landscape design as a set of practices and methods that are grounded in a relationship between human and plant behaviours and labelled a 'humanist ecology'. In addition to fostering a capacity to intervene ecologically and formally on the site, the curriculum develops a personal, subjective relationship between the site and students. This relationship embodies characteristics of an ethic of care as defined by Joan Tronto among other theorists. In this pedagogical context, the garden in movement becomes not merely a space for people to care for living things, but more broadly, a network of mutual caring-with.
This paper examines how landscape design in the City of Melbourne has evolved in response to the shifting political dynamics around issues of climate change. With a focus on two major projects on the Birrarung/Yarra River, the paper examines significant environmental and political developments since the late 1990s. The study begins with Birrarung-Marr, revealing how the Millennium-Drought (1997-2009) prompted revisions to planting schemes and water-sensitive design after the park opened in 2002. It then turns to The Greenline Project, a multi-stage waterfront redevelopment currently under development, which is already engaging with both climatic and political pressures. By comparing these projects, the research demonstrates how extreme climate events have impacted open space design and how designers are adopting tactical strategies to navigate evolving political and environmental challenges. The findings underscore the importance of ongoing integration between policy and design to effectively address the challenges of climate change in public urban landscapes.
While the curative qualities of water are evident in pre-Roman history, their therapeutic properties are often connected with the excesses of the Georgian period. Essex waters were acquiring their own reputation during this period as adjudged by physicians, including Trinder. By the early twentieth century, their status had declined. Christy and Thresh determined that there were only twenty-two significant mineral springs remaining across the county. This article examines the reasons behind this decline, their loss of connection and identity within their community. Landscape and place related theories and models are explored to discover the connections formed between communities and locations, allowing a model to be presented that evaluates the lost spa landscape through archival evidence. Sites discussed by Christy and Thresh are evaluated using this model allowing the development and disappearance of Essex spa landscapes to be examined and awareness of a neglected and vanished landscape tradition revealed.
This article arises from me happening across paintings of marshlands at Pescara's Museo dell'Ottocento. A four-part corpus is the focus of my visual analysis: Alberto Pasini's 'Twilight' (1855); Giuseppe Castiglione's 'Landscape' (1870); Charles-Fran & ccedil;ois Daubigny's 'Landscape with Lake' (1872); Alceste Campriani's 'Sunset with Birds' (1885). I question processes of value attribution and emotional attachment to do with a type of semi-aquatic ecosystem at some remove from capitalist practices. My deep-dive interpretations emphasise the significance of fluxional micro-worlds that would benefit from more caring-about in the present. The results of this Abruzzian observational case-study comprise musings on style and content ranging from waterside vegetation to patterns of species-typical behaviour. I come to the conclusion that such artworks are suited to galvanising observers' sense of empathy and co-responsibility within the Earth System's assemblage of entities spanning the human and the more-than-human.
Landscape analysis has been described as dynamic and flexible, involving and encouraging drawing on and mixing diverse methods to suit project purposes. However, this eclecticism remains black-boxed and is consequently under-examined in recent landscape analysis discourses of its methodologies, prompting the question about what exactly is being done when performing landscape analysis. Drawing on a relational, post-ANT approach, the paper argues that eclecticism can be better understood by attending closely to the practices of landscape analysis. Through ethnographic fieldwork with landscape architects, the paper explores how landscape analysis is enacted. It highlights how eclecticism must be understood to be more profound than a matter of combining clear-cut methods, while suggesting that the concept of fluidity helps distinguish aspects of the eclectic approach and offers implications for developing methodologies for landscape analysis.
