Introduction

This introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters of this book. The book presents the "state of the art" of scientifically based assessment procedures for various significant landscape factors. It presents landscape assessment and planning approaches in a less technical manner. The book deals with the emergence of the concept of landscape planning and discusses its increasing influence on planning in the metropolitan landscape. It describes some of the environmental landscape assessment techniques that have been developed during the past few decades. The book explores some commonly used landscape planning techniques that have been developed to integrate and synthesize the results of the various individual assessment techniques. It describes some of the emerging systems models that seem to have great potential in the area of landscape planning. In some areas, expanding metropolitan regions have grown so large that they have become contiguous, forming what the French geographer Jean Gottman has called a "megalopolis."