How to Design an Urban Ecological Landscape: Sustainability, Efficiency, and Harmony?

Abstract

Urban areas are rapidly expanding across the world, causing many negative environmental effects. A challenge for reaching a sustainable urban socio-ecological system is to understand how urban landscapes could be designed and managed to minimize adverse impacts. Urban ecological landscapes are products of ecological planning and design considering landscape patterns and their related ecological processes across various spatial scales. In this chapter, we firstly introduce the definition of ecological landscape that can be considered as an anthropogenic or managed landscape. Second, we discuss the characteristics of ecological landscapes highlighting their three major aspects, i.e., sustainability, efficiency, and harmony. Last, we develop some guidelines for ecological landscape design that is based on a questionnaire survey we conducted in order to understand the public opinions regarding ecological landscapes. The questionnaires covered various issues such as overall understandings, knowledge of connotation and features, difficulties and challenges, and evaluation guidelines and criterions of urban ecological landscapes. The findings from this work can help develop a conceptual framework for urban landscape studies and also serve as guidance for urban landscape design.