Landscape planning

Landscape planning, a branch of landscape architecture, is a multidisciplinary field that analyzes, evaluates, and guides landscape change across area and time scales. It links scientific data with land-use regulations and spatial design, along with stakeholder goals to support how landscapes should develop and evolve. because landscapes function as social-ecological systems, landscape planners try to balance ecological integrity, cultural values, and human well-being while dealing with pressure from urbanization and climate change and the amount of resources available to them. Landscape planning typically follows a structured sequence, starting with goal development followed by landscape analysis, development and evaluation of alternatives, selecting the preferred options, implementation, and monitoring. The planning process follows long standing and established ecological planning methods which use landscape structure, function, change, and scale to diagnose current conditions and predict future scenarios and potential outcomes. Landscape planning was originally used in the context of non-urban land use, but it has evolved to be commonly used to address urban, peri-urban, and rural environments and treat them as interconnected systems instead of independent environments. The field has evolved because scientists now understand that most landscapes exist as urbanized social–ecological systems which result from ecological processes and cultural practices and economic activities and institutional frameworks. Despite the practical importance of landscape planning, it is widely described as an under-theorized field. Compared to adjacent fields such as ecology or geography, relatively few journals explicitly address landscape planning theory. Landscape and Urban Planning is one of the only major journals dedicated to landscape planning and even it emphasizes practice more than theory, which contributes to a weak conceptual framework of the whole field. Landscape planning draws from ecology, sociology, economics, engineering, and design. While the interdisciplinary nature is essential to the practical application of landscape planning, it also means that landscape planning lacks...