ABSTRACT
The procedures used during the 1960s have been characterized by J. A. Mabbutt, an Australian geographer, as the landscape approach. Key landscape attributes such as topography, soil, and vegetation are often sufficient for some kinds of large-scale decision making. Before landscape planners used it, many geographers, geologists, and other scientists used a landscape approach to land classification. Landscape planners began to adopt this approach in the 1950s. During the 1960s, however, it became much more widely used, in large part in response to the efforts of the Scottish-born landscape architect-planner, Ian McHarg. McHarg and his firm applied the landscape approach to several metropolitan regional planning problems in the United States. They mapped various major landscape characteristics on individual maps and identified the values from highest to lowest of each landscape characteristic. During the 1960s, many other groups emerged in the United States and in Europe that applied similar landscape approaches to problems in environmental planning.
