ABSTRACT
This book is about landscape, sustainability and the practices of the professions which plan, design and manage landscapes on many scales and in many locations, urban, suburban and rural. These professions are defined collectively in the United Kingdom, through the Royal Charter of the Landscape Institute, as ‘landscape architects’. This is a broader compass than the term often implies, it often being associated only with professionals who design landscapes on relatively small scales. However, landscape planning, design and management are practised directly or indirectly by many others and in many sectors, including land use planning, agriculture, forestry, nature conservation, amenity land management, and so on, and we include all these in our approach. The term ‘landscape’ used here is also broad and includes much more than ‘the appearance of the area of land which the eye can see at once’ (Chambers, 1993). Landscape is an evolving cross-disciplinary area, which draws contributions from art, literature, ecology, geography and much more. We therefore use the term landscape in a broad and inclusive way because we believe it is the holistic and integrated focus on landscape which is the unique and distinctive feature of landscape architects, broadly defined.
