ABSTRACT
Many books about landscape architecture ask ‘how-to?’ questions: how can we reclaim this site?; how can we get trees to grow here?; how can I be sure that this wall will stand up in a force ten gale? This book, on the other hand, is more concerned with questions of ‘why?’: why is ecology important?; why does community consultation matter?; why is proposal A so much better than proposal B? It also poses the biggest ‘why?’ question of all-why be a landscape architect in the first place? Another way of putting this is to say that the book is concerned with the reasons why landscape architects do what they do, the values that they hold, and the underlying justifications for such values. To put this into academic jargon, it is a book of normative theory.
