Back to the future, back to basics: the social ecology of landscapes and the future of landscape planning

Abstract

This paper discusses what we believe are the key needs and assets of landscape planning at the close of the century. While landscape ecology and systems approaches have increased our understanding of ecological sustainability, this still fails to constitute a sufficient basis for prescribing overall regional sustainability. If we are to foster strategies that will effectively lead to sustainable regional development, we must, like our predecessors, investigate and advocate for a more critical social ecology of landscapes. While most of us venerate the works of Mumford, McHarg, and Olmstead, we generally forget two facts. First, their real value was in their ability to formulate and articulate socially and ecologically relevant arguments to the problems associated with an aberrant development paradigm. Second, they spoke not of strategy and technique, but of challenging and altering the dominant social theories and practices that have caused the degradation of our landscapes in the first place. Landscape planning is clearly ecologically relevant. Our challenge therefore lies in our social relevance. To become more socially relevant, landscape planners must become aware of, account for, incorporate, and challenge the problems and opportunities that cultural adoptability, economic viability, social equitability, and political relevancy have on the condition of our landscapes. For although natural processes largely determine the ecological condition of our landscapes, social processes will continue to determine the directionality these processes take. Since the fate of our landscapes lies in the hands of humankind, it is imperative that research move beyond traditional descriptions of space, academic divisions, and rational methods. We must also reassert vision, value, and ethic, account for the relationships among the physical, cultural, economic, and political dimensions of space, and finally, better incorporate the knowledges, perceptions, and practices that exist between the places we study and the peoples and communities who call them home.