ancient cities

432 Landscapes of Power
draws on environmental psychology and behavioral
research in the creation of spaces that are
comfortable and attractive for human activity.
When working in existing communities, landscape
architects typically strive to integrate their work into
the fabric of the community in ways that respect and
enhance cultural values and local sense of place.
Often serving as the technical experts in the
real estate development or redevelopment process,
landscape architects can enhance community life
by supporting community investment through
planning and design. However, this traditional
role is inadequate in addressing the needs of communities
lacking investment or communities whose
interests are not served by redevelopment efforts.
In such situations, community-based design has
emerged as a small but critical tradition within the
field of landscape architecture.
Advancing social justice is a fundamental concern
of community-based designers, primarily
through responses to inequities that disadvantage
communities. As with the broader environmental
justice movement that emerged in the 1960s, early
community-based design efforts responded to
environmental negatives that disproportionately
affected disadvantaged communities, such as pollution
and locally unwanted land uses. Design and
planning efforts either eliminated or ameliorated
the adverse impacts of these negatives. More recent
efforts in landscape architecture have broadened
the justice framework to address the distribution
of environmental positives, such as access to recreation,
open space, safe community spaces, and
opportunities to experience natural areas. The
influence of both negative and positive environmental
factors on perceptions of justice have led
some to conclude that ecological sustainability
should be advanced in landscape architecture as a
social justice issue: Disadvantaged communities are
disproportionately affected by the adverse impacts
of unsustainable practices in society, so strategies
that promote ecological sustainability in urban
environments also have the potential to promote
social justice, if consciously recognized and
addressed by practitioners.
Community-based design differs fundamentally
from more traditional practice models of landscape
architecture. Due to its focus on justice, the work
often closely resembles community organizing, as the
process of inclusion, participation, and empowerment
of local communities becomes as important as the
resulting plan or design. This contrasts sharply with
more traditional perspectives of the landscape architect
as a highly trained technical expert who may
engage local communities for input, but owns, analyzes,
and synthesizes the information in developing
external solutions or recommendations. Such diversity
of viewpoints on the role of landscape architects
in the stewardship, planning, and design processes
illustrates another dimension of the diversity of landscape
architectural work. For this reason, many
scholars argue that professional identity stems as
much from shared training, shared processes, and
shared values in response to ecological and social
challenges as it does from the outcomes or products
of the work itself.
See also Parks; Renaissance City; Sustainable
Development
Further Readings
Kyle D. Brown
Cantor, Steven L., ed. 1996. Contemporary Trends in
Landscape Architecture. New York: Wiley.
Corner, James, ed. 1999. Recovering Landscape: Essays
in Contemporary Landscape Architecture. Princeton,
NJ: Princeton University Press.
Crewe, Katherine and Ann Forsyth. 2003.
“LandSCAPES: A Typology of Approaches to
Landscape Architecture.” Landscape Journal
22(1):37–53.
Hester, Randolph T. 2006. Design for Ecological
Democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Pregill, Philip and Nancy Volkman. 1999. Landscapes in
History. New York: Wiley.
Rotenberg, Robert. 1995. Landscape and Power in
Vienna. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.
Swaffield, Simon R., ed. 2002. Theory in Landscape
Architecture: A Reader. Philadelphia: University of
Pennsylvania Press.
Treib, Mark, ed. 1994. Modern Landscape Architecture:
A Critical Review. Cambridge: MIT Press.
La N d s c a p e s o f po w e r
Sharon Zukin’s 1991 book, Landscapes of Power,
developed an argument that the creative destruction