ABSTRACT
In its commitment to serve people and society the field of landscape architecture has generated substantial knowledge through practice and research, especially in the last twenty or so years. The field has become very diverse in the topics it addresses, the areas and regions it develops, and the scales it covers. Moreover, the type of contributions that landscape architects make to planning, design and management processes are changing and today landscape architects fulfil a number of different roles. These changes to the substance of landscape architecture and the broadening of the role of landscape architects in society call for the generation of new knowledge. As a consequence, the scope of landscape architecture research includes a wide array of different research domains, many of which considerably overlap with each other as well as with the domains of a number of 'neighbouring disciplines' such as architecture, landscape ecology, geography and environmental psychology. This calls for a discourse on specifying and prioritizing research that would, without sacrificing the field's diversity, contribute to the promotion of landscape architecture as a discipline with a specific identity, defined by its own body of knowledge (van den Brink and Bruns 2014). To do so, landscape architecture must strive to focus and sharpen its research agenda, and to address the grand landscape challenges of our time successfully, it must continue to develop its body of knowledge.
