Landscape and Sustainability

John F. Benson, Maggie H. Roe, John F. Benson, Maggie H. Roe

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2005
• ISBN:
  9781135804039
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Architecture
• Subtopic: Urban Planning & Landscaping

This unique book is about landscape, sustainability and the practices of the professions which plan, design and manage landscapes at many scales and in many locations; urban, suburban and rural. Despite the ubiquity of 'sustainability' as a concept, this is the first book to address the relationship between landscape architecture and sustainability in a comprehensive way.
Much in the book is underpinned by landscape ecology, in contrast to the idea of landscape as only appealing to the eye or aspiring cerebrally to be fine art. As this book argues, landscape is and must be much more than this; landscape architecture is about making places which are biologically wholesome, socially just and spiritually rewarding.

1
The Scale and Scope of Landscape and Sustainability

John F. Benson and Maggie H. Roe

Introduction

This book is about landscape, sustainability and the practices of the professions which plan, design and manage landscapes on many scales and in many locations, urban, suburban and rural. These professions are defined collectively in the United Kingdom, through the Royal Charter of the Landscape Institute, as ‘landscape architects’. This is a broader compass than the term often implies, it often being associated only with professionals who design landscapes on relatively small scales. However, landscape planning, design and management are practised directly or indirectly by many others and in many sectors, including land use planning, agriculture, forestry, nature conservation, amenity land management, and so on, and we include all these in our approach. The term ‘landscape’ used here is also broad and includes much more than ‘the appearance of the area of land which the eye can see at once’ (Chambers, 1993). Landscape is an evolving cross-disciplinary area, which draws contributions from art, literature, ecology, geography and much more. We therefore use the term landscape in a broad and inclusive way because we believe it is the holistic and integrated focus on landscape which is the unique and distinctive feature of landscape architects, broadly defined.

Landscape architects cannot save the world (at least by themselves), but they do, we believe, regard themselves as important players or potential players in the local, regional, national and even international efforts to protect the environment, to promote sound development and to improve the quality of life for people now and in the future – commonly known as sustainable development. However, when we thought about the apparent interest in sustainability among landscape architects in the UK, at least based on published material, conferences and professional meetings, it brought to mind a famous Roman emperor, a capital city and music-making! In the 60-page report on the Landscape Institute Awards in 1997 (Landscape Design Trust, 1997), the word sustainable appears just four times and sustainable development and sustainability once each (the latter dismissively). So far as we can see, sustainability was not a criterion for judgement in any category, nor was it uttered (so far as we remember) at the awards ceremony. By 1999, the position had hardly changed (Landscape Design Trust, 1999). The word does appear once in the Royal Charter granted to the Landscape Institute in 1997 (Landscape Institute, 1997) but if you log-on to the Landscape Institute’s web pages it is hard to find the word, except among the advertising puff by some professional practices. Also, in a recent review of the Future for Landscape Research, the academic journal of the Landscape Research Group (Burgess, 1996), the word is used but twice. More encouragingly the American Society of Landscape Architects includes commitments to the concept in their Code of Professional Practice and several policy declarations, but even then a search of two major North American-based web resources for education and practice in town planning, architecture and landscape fails to deliver any information on the search combination of ‘+landscape+sustainable/sustainability’. With two notable exceptions (Lyle, 1994; Thayer, 1994), there is relatively little written about sustainability or sustainable development by or for landscape architects.

In sharp contrast, the sustainability/sustainable development word-set is used so much elsewhere throughout academic, professional, political and social circles that complaints of over-use and dis-utility abound. A search of the world-wide web for ‘sustainability’ and ‘sustainable’ and ‘sustainable development’ produces almost 1 million pages using the Alta Vista search-engine, fewer than a search for ‘sex’ which produces more than 10 million pages, but impressive nonetheless. Searches of academic databases show a similar epidemic. However, it has become common to hear people complain that ‘sustainability is meaningless’ (and can therefore be ignored) or ‘I wish someone would define it’ (and I’ll ignore it until they do) or ‘not another conference (book, meeting) about sustainability’. There are arguments that ‘sustainable development’ (SD) is an oxymoron, like ‘political science’, ‘business ethics’, ‘government organisation’ and ‘military intelligence’ (and one of our contributors, Tom Turner, has also claimed another oxymoron in ‘landscape architecture’ but we’ll let that pass). Kristina Hill points out in Chapter 14 that Gro Harlem Bruntland has claimed that SD was an intentional juxtaposition of two irreconcilable notions in order to bring opposing camps to the same conference table. It is therefore becoming something of a cliché to remark that sustainability is a cliché, a stereotypical, hackneyed term used to justify such a bundle of dislocated, contradictory and ill-defined notions that the term has lost all value and should be confined to the dustbin by all right-minded people.

What can we read into these observations? Have the discipline of ‘landscape’ and the landscape architecture profession no interest in sustainability and no contribution to make? Or is the profession so content that it has been practising it all along that there is little more to be said? Or is it still looking for someone to bring light where there is heat, confusion and darkness? In fact, our view, and that of the contributors to this book, is that there is much to be said about landscape and sustainability, that ‘landscape’ is a concept par excellence for thinking about sustainability and that the landscape architecture profession does have a significant contribution to make. The aim of this book is therefore to shed light and to address some of these questions, perhaps even to try to begin to answer the bigger questions and weave together the interlocking parts of the grand puzzle which is landscape and sustainability. Landscape architects can think globally and act locally to make a difference. The real question is how to do it. Despite the ‘sustainability’ epidemic, there is no text which addresses the issues from the point of view of landscape architecture in a comprehensive way. Sustainability has been around long enough for several things to occur. The field is over-worked and over-populated to the point of confusion and a developing cynicism – it needs interpretation for landscape architecture. The time is ripe for the epidemic to be digested, to take stock, to set new agendas for landscape research and practice, and to look forward. We try to do these things in an introductory way in this chapter, setting the scene for what follows.

Landscape and the Scope of Landscape Architecture

The word landscape has entered our vocabulary as a noun, adjective and verb. Laurie Olin, a well-know American landscape architect, has described it as that ‘vast, difficult, slippery and mercurial subject’. The Oxford English Dictionary cites its first use in its major modern sense – ‘a tract of land with its distinguishing characteristics and features, esp. considered as a product of shaping processes and agents (usually natural)’ (Burchfield, 1976) – in a book of 1886 by Geikie, a geologist. Before that it had been used in an evaluative sense to mean ‘an ideal place’, the use prevalent in the art, landscape painting and landscape design of earlier centuries. We have come to realise, of course, that human agency has shaped the landscape too and not just in the patently man-made rural, urban and industrial landscapes of a place like the UK, but also the allegedly natural landscapes or wildernesses of the American great plains or the Australian outback. The term is now used in a wider sense to mean a tract of land shaped over time by geological and biological processes and by human occupation and agency and by human imagination, for the essence and unifying value of the concept is the way in which it signifies and captures both natural and cultural features and values, with a special emphasis on the relationships between these. It is, we believe, different from ‘environment’ which is either, unhelpfully, the world minus oneself or more usually the physical, chemical or biological components and processes which comprise the planet.

However, the apparently unbreakable, dominating link between landscape and visual matters – ‘scenery’ and ‘art’ and ‘aesthetics’ – with an emphasis on how we see landscapes and treat them, by the act of ‘landscaping’, as a wholly or mainly visual act concerned with beauty and art (to the exclusion of our other senses and values) is an unfortunate throw-back to an earlier time. It is perpetuated by the landscape professions themselves, by their institutions, by their competitions and their prizes, and by a sectoral policy focus on these things. Small wonder then that other, larger, more powerful and influential professions ignore landscape and landscape architects (a perpetual navel-gazing cri de cœur in the professional press) or think that what they do, professionally, is add the plants between the buildings and not much else. But as this book argues, through its wide ambit, landscape is and must be much more than this. As a noun its original use as a term of geologists and geographers is still used to refer to a tract of the earth’s surface but expanded to include natural–cultural relationships. It is used as a theoretical concept and social construct around which an array of disciplines including geography, art, literature and science coalesce to explore these nature–human interrelationships. It is used as an adjective to qualify the shape or scene of almost anything, but there is a political landscape of sustainability explored in Chapter 6. It is also used as a verb (‘to landscape’) – much deplored and abhorred by many in the landscape professions – to signify the practice of designing, making, using and managing landscapes and places. However, Turner (1998) has offered an intelligent, spirited and imaginative critique of this narrow, conventional and rather restrictive notion of landscape architecture, offering instead at least twelve avenues of practice through which landscape architecture can truly be the science and art of making spaces (and ultimately places) which are biologically wholesome, socially just and spiritually rewarding.

As Ian Thompson explores partly in Chapter 2 and more fully in Thompson (2000), landscape architecture draws its theoretical foundations and approaches from many sources and this book is similarly eclectic. However, there is a strong underpinning to much in this book by landscape ecology, a relatively new and emerging disciplinary area developed further by various contributors, especially in Chapters 6–8. In a sense, this captures the view offered here of landscape and sustainability, in contrast to landscape as appealing mainly to the eye or aspiring cerebrally to be fine art. More succinctly, landscape architecture is about making fit places which fit. Perhaps this is why the profession might be inclined to feel that it has been practising sustainability for decades, although Ian Thompson challenges this complacency in Chapter 2. We believe that the sustainability agenda needs a new mind-set among professionals, landscape architects included. We need to stop – or postpone – asking, first, Is it affordable? Is it beautiful? Is it what the client wants? Is it art? Will my professional colleagues approve? – and instead start asking, first and foremost, is it sustainable? Or at least, is it less unsustainable? We try to bring some semblance of order to definitions and terms in the next section, but because sustainability is such a multi-faceted concept, and there are few (no?) absolutes, we hope readers will tolerate the use throughout this book of the terms sustainability, sustainable and sustainable development when, by any strict definition, the authors sometimes mean ‘less unsustainable’ and sometimes they mean an integrated and coherent approach which is different from ‘business as usual’. In many ways the diagnoses and lessons for the landscape profession in this book are familiar, and many will undoubtedly say, fine, we know that, we do all these things already – we’ve been pursuing integration, a sense of place, local distinctiveness, protecting the environment, aiding economic and social regeneration for decades – so what’s the problem? Our reply is that even if this were true, and we only acknowledge that it is partly true, previous and much current policy and practice is only very weakly sustainable and its impact has been modest. Creating new or restoring damaged landscapes need not always involve sustainable practices and the tyranny of small decisions applies in landscape just as in every other sphere of human endeavour. As the sustainability debate shows, and as our contributors develop the various dimensions of landscape and sustainability in more detail, the issues are complex and challenging. The scale of thinking and action needed is large and this distinguishes landscape architecture from many other professions. In a way that is both the strength and the weakness of both the concept and the profession.

Sustainability and the Scope of Sustainable Development

It has often been remarked that Prime Minister Gro Harlem Bruntland and her United Nations Commission performed a remarkable feat in offering a definition of sustainable development (SD) – ‘development which meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs’ – which must be the most oft-quoted definition in the whole debate (we’ve just done it again) and which has (apparently and at least superficially) gathered world-wide political consensus on the need for a new approach in almost every sphere of human activity. But many have argued that that consensus has only emerged because the definition offered, and its many progeny (e.g. Pearce et al., 1989), is an oxymoron and can mean anything one wishes. The harshest critics will argue that SD is an idea and label so over-used, manipulated and debased as to be worthless without some definition and precision, from which has developed a large industry on sustainability indicators designed to provide the measurable criteria needed to allow individuals and groups with widely differing ethics and values to find common ground. The focus on indicators is based on the quite reasonable notion that if judgements are to be made on whether we’ve achieved sustainable development, or whether this or that policy or project is moving us in the right direction, then we need to make measurements to give us the answer. Indicators have of course been used for years in many fields – biologists measure species diversity or species richness (the trendy term is now ‘biodiversity’), hydrologists measure flow rates or pollution concentrations, foresters count trees or measure growth rates or seek to estimate maximum sustainable yield – while in the social sciences and in the economy generally we measure jobs created, houses built, roads widened or Gross National Product, inflation and interest rates, and so on. All of these indicators are used routinely in policy evaluation and formulation, so it’s no surprise that SD has attracted much work on the use of indicators as a means of operationalising the issue. But even here analysts argue that this is trying to measure the immeasurable (Bell and Morse, 1999).

So the landscape of sustainability is just as vast, difficult, slippery and mercurial as landscape itself. An important starting point is to realize that the term SD has ideological and political content as well as a more familiar ecological, economic and social content. We do not explore the complex ideological and political dimensions in detail here or in this book because other books and reviews abound (e.g. Pezzoli, 1997a, 1997b; Baker et al., 1997), but Chapter 2 does deal with aspects of philosophy and ethics related to landscape. We would, however, commend the view that SD is a social and political construct, like ‘democracy’, ‘liberty’ and ‘social justice’ and that society – and landscape professionals – need to move forward beyond a sterile search for a single, precise definition, or single measuring rod, into the interpretation and application of SD in practice.

To sustain means ‘to hold up, to bear, to support, to keep going, to support the life of and to prolong’ and sustainability, as a noun, means ‘that which is capable of being sustained’ (Chambers, 1993). Time is therefore crucially important because sustainability focuses on long, inter-generational timescales, in contrast to the alleged short-termism and intra-generational emphasis of contemporary societies (of course Bruntland’s definition captures both but our neo-classical economic systems, discussed by Colin Price in Chapter 3, reflect the fact that presently-living humans do have time preferences and they discount the future in myriad ways). SD requires us to look to the long term while our present systems and behaviour are designed for the short term. However, strictly nothing is sustainable forever, socially, politically, ecologically, geologically or cosmologically, and so sustainability cannot, technically, be infinite; most commentators would probably settle for ‘to all intents and purposes forever’, that is, far beyond a future which is conceivable by the present.

Commentators (e.g. Kidd, 1992) have traced the roots of contemporary sustainability into several conceptual areas, including ‘ecological carrying capacity’, ‘resource–environment links’, ‘the biosphere’, ‘the critique of technology’, ‘no/low growth’ and ‘eco-development’, all of which have a primary focus on concerns for the environment, especially the global resource base, humankind’s place within it and the social and physical environments. A series of seminal reports and developments starting in the 1960s and 1970s (e.g. the Club of Rome report The Limits to Growth in 1972) pointed out the long pedigree and the diversity of environmental concern but called for zero-growth strategies. The term ‘sustainable development’ was invented to describe a notion that rather than zero-growth, what was required and was feasible was a strategy which developed a mutual compatibility between environmental protection and continuing economic growth (a common but inadequate metric for ‘development’). These multiple histories and debates are endlessly described and discussed elsewhere and will be familiar to most readers.

The debate has now developed to the point where three key components of SD are defined – economic sustainability, social sustainability and environmental sustainability, each with a strong focus on equity and futurity. The strongest roots derive from biological or environmental debates, especially discussions about harvesting and managing renewable resources such as crop plants, forests and fisheries. Such biologically renewable resources can, theoretically, be maintained in perpetuity, while harvesting a maximum sustainable yield and of course while protecting the integrity and resilience of the resource and the biophysical components on which each depends. Sadly the history of human exploitation of such resources (exploit is now used mainly in a pejorative sense) is not a happy one, whether one focuses on the exploitation and exhaustion of common resources such as fish stocks, or the contamination, pollution and degradation of water and soils by both the internal and external impacts of human sectoral activity including agriculture and of course industrial development. The diversity of the biological resource, beyond the monocultural crop, timber or fish stocks which have direct utility for humans, are now also a major focus of attention; extinction, as they say, is forever (but then those accursed genetic engineers weaken the conservation imperative by holding out the prospect of resurrecting species from DNA fragm...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• Preface
• Notes on contributors
• List of figures
• List of tables
• 1 THE SCALE AND SCOPE OF LANDSCAPE AND SUSTAINABILITY
• 2 THE ETHICS OF SUSTAINABILITY
• 3 THE LANDSCAPE OF SUSTAINABLE ECONOMICS
• 4 THE SOCIAL DIMENSIONS OF LANDSCAPE SUSTAINABILITY
• 5 INTERNATIONAL POLICIES AND LANDSCAPE PROTECTION
• 6 LANDSCAPE SUSTAINABILITY AT THE NATIONAL AND REGIONAL SCALES
• 7 LANDSCAPE PLANNING AT THE REGIONAL SCALE
• 8 MANAGING WHOLE LANDSCAPES IN THE POST-PRODUCTIVE RURAL ENVIRONMENT
• 9 LANDSCAPE PLANNING AND CITY FORM
• 10 RESOURCES: THE RAW MATERIALS OF LANDSCAPE
• 11 SUSTAINABLE LANDSCAPE DESIGN IN PRACTICE
• 12 THE COMMUNITY AND THE LANDSCAPE PROFESSIONAL
• 13 SUSTAINABLE LANDSCAPE MANAGEMENT
• 14 VISIONS OF SUSTAINABILITY
• Index