Preface

As generally acknowledged, landscape architecture extends across numerous subject areas from heuristics, aesthetics, and sciences to statistical decision-making, technology, and arts. Landscape architecture ranges from small projects and details to global ecology and ecosystems. For this reason, the profession incorporates information from the social sciences, natural science, natural history, ecology, and the medical sciences. Often a good landscape architect is someone who is interested in many subjects and is able to integrate them thoughtfully. In this regard, landscape architecture, generally described as a multi-disciplinary field that incorporates several branches of knowledge, is perceived as a discipline able to promote the definition of land uses, thus enabling landscape alterations that might promote sustainable development, protect the environment, preserve natural and cultural assets, and improve people's quality of life.

In fact, crossing a wide range of research domains and issues associated with landscape planning, design, and redevelopment, this book covers a large number of topics related to landscape architecture, assessing the impact of contemporary needs and constraints and landscape management strategies on planning, ecosystems, and landscape design. The book presents specific case studies representing a vast array of landscape planning and design projects that go beyond conventional practice, including not only a diverse amount of end uses but also multidisciplinary methodological approaches.

As a landscape architect who then became an agronomic engineer with research interests deeply rooted in the field of sustainability, landscape planning, and development, the main goals of most of my research are directly connected to fitting landscape architecture as a tool to promote and assure that planning and design processes meet the needs and desires of contemporary life. All this, bearing in mind the comprehensive view of the different components of landscape architecture, acknowledging the need for an interrelated analysis of the ecologic, cultural, and socioeconomic issues in each and every single planning and design process.

**II**

**Chapter 7 75**

**Chapter 8 93**

**Chapter 9 109**

**Chapter 10 121**

**Chapter 11 143**

Sustainable Utilization of the Lake Kinneret and Its Watershed Ecosystems:

Planning for Sustainable Tourism Based on Green Infrastructure:

*by Cláudia Oliveira Fernandes and Giulia Olivetti*

*by Szewczyk Grzegorz, Krzysztof Lipka, Piotr Wężyk, Karolina Zięba-Kulawik and Monika Winczek*

in Hunting Area Categorisation

in Major European Cities

A Review *by Moshe Gophen*

Environments

*Sérgio Lousada and Luís Loures*

A Multiscale Methodology for Revitalizing Depopulated Rural Landscapes

Methods of Landscape Valorization and Possibilities of Its Application

Assessing Ecosystem Services Delivered by Public Green Spaces

Promising Water Management Strategies for Arid and Semiarid

*by Adel Zeggaf Tahiri, G. Carmi and M. Ünlü*

*by Rui Alexandre Castanho, José Cabezas, José Manuel Naranjo Gómez, José Martín Gallardo, Luis Fernández-Pozo, Sema Yilmaz Genç,* 

> **Luís Loures** VALORIZA – Polytechnic Institute of Portalegre, Portalegre, Portugal

> > **Mustafa Ergen** Faculty of Fine Art and Design, Department of Architecture, Siirt University, Siirt, Turkey

**1**

Section 1

Introduction

Section 1 Introduction

**3**

landscape sustainability.

**Chapter 1**

*Luís Loures*

**1. Introduction**

environment.

Introductory Chapter: Landscape

Architecture - The Gatekeeper of

The connection between man and the natural world is no more that of a harmonious accord, but it is often a relation of contrast which has caused and which still causes two big problems that sometimes look not being solvable: the problem of the environment pollution and the problem of the progressive exhaustion of the resources, thus imposing to the community high social costs [1–3]. This results in a new attitude towards the environment, which is not a utopic return to the past but, instead, the attitude of identifying the meaning of a sustainable development as a process of change, in which resource utilization, investment, technological development, and institutional changes are in a reciprocal harmony, increasing current and future potential of satisfying human needs and aspirations [4–6]. This repurposes a renewed connection man-nature, according to an ecosystem approach, meant to promote the identification, protection and enhancement of natural resources, in order to reinstate the necessary equilibrium between the built and the natural

This necessary equilibrium, coupled with the impossibility of an unlimited growth in a world of limited resources and the extensive diffusion of sustainability as a crucial conceptual approach towards development, constitute a distinctive mark that led countries to operate sustainable development as one of the main planning paradigms of the last decades. Thus, landscape must be understood as a global entity, which have several components, that must be analyzed, managed and protected in order to achieve sustainable development though the application of specific planning and design strategies based on landscape architecture principles. Still, regardless of the conceptual approach used, the fact that the landscape constitutes a dynamic structure in constant transformation, highlights the fact that any intervention aiming at its management, planning and/or alteration must be based

on a deep knowledge of its characteristics, history, structure, and services.

This reality is increasingly acknowledged, in a society in which, production and consumption patterns have become completely unsustainable, accelerating the exhaustion of natural resources, fostering environmental pollution and promoting landscape loss, thus hastening problems that impose high social costs to citizens and communities all over the world. It is therefore necessary to take up a new attitude towards landscape and the environment, by using and implementing sustainable design principles and approaches, anchored in landscape architecture as gatekeeper of sustainable development, therefore promoting the coordinates for environmental management and protection, social equity and economic prosperity, as the base for

Sustainable Development

## **Chapter 1**
