The Living Landscape: An Ecological Approach to Landscape Planning [Hardcover]

Frederick R. Steiner (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 1990 | ISBN-10: 0070611335 | ISBN-13: 978-0070611337

This third year/postgraduate text for courses in Landscape - or Environmental - Architecture covers the entire planning process from an ecological perspective. It is organized around a series of conventional planning steps, beginning with why to plan, including the identification of problems and opportunities; continuing through the various stages of inventory and analysis; and arriving at the adoption of a plan complete with community involvement, design, implementation, and administration. The ecological perspective of the book stresses the interrelationships between people and nature. Case studies are used to illustrate how planning has been used to address environmental issues.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

A resource for tomorrow as well as today, The Living Landscape is your ecological planning action manual--one that working professionals will rely on time and again, and one that fits perfectly with the practical focus of today's urban and landscape curricula. An American Society of Landscaping Architecture Merit Award Winner, this exemplary, much-praised resource offers: a systematic, highly useful approach to landscape planning that maximizes ecological objectives, community service, and citizen participation; more than 20 challenging case studies that demonstrate how problems were met and overcome from rural America to large cities; scores of checklists and step-by-step methods; hands-on help with practical zoning, land use, and regulatory issues; coverage of major advances in GIS technology and global sustainability standards; more than 150 illustrations.

"A major work in the field."
--Planning, a publication of the American Planning Association.

Landscape goes deeper than appearances, and for many years famed planner Frederick Steiner's The Living Landscape has steered landscape architects and environmental planners toward meaningful, lasting values and aesthetics in design. Now this revised and updated editon of The Living Landscape offers Dr. Steiner's design-oriented ecological approach in a thoroughly practical framework for today's professionals, in today's world. In addition, The Living Landscape continues its award-winning role as a premier teaching tool for planners and architects in training. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

About the Author

Frederick Steiner (Tempe, AZ) is the Director of the School of Planning and Landscape Architecture at Arizona State University. He holds B.S., M.C.P., M.R.P., M.A., and Ph.D. degrees in planning from the University of Cincinnati and the University of Pennsylvania. As a professional planner he has managed a number of urban master plans, including Denver and Phoenix. He recently won a grant from the Environmental Protection Agency's Sustainable Development Program, and he was elected to the 1997-1998 Rome Prize Fellowship. Prof. Steiner is the author of hundreds of papers in addition to the first edition of this book. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Hardcover: 338 pages
• Publisher: Mcgraw-Hill College (November 1990)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0070611335
• ISBN-13: 978-0070611337
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 8.1 x 0.7 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.8 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #722,999 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The Living Landscape, October 13, 2002

By 

a reader - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Living Landscape: An Ecological Approach to Landscape Planning (Hardcover)

The Living Landscape has made a lasting contribution to ecological planning through its detailed documentation of this planning process and thoughtful comparison of the process's application in case studies. Dr. Steiner demonstrates in his book that ecological planning is just not a static plan-making process, but rather a dynamic process that requires consistent and meaningful input from stakeholders. In addition, he sees plan-making as a process that has implications for different scales of the environment, from the nation to the neighborhood. He stresses that the ecological planning process does not end when the plan is finished, but rather the process continues through the linkage of planning concepts to physical design. Given the strengths of this book, it is an essential volume for the library of any professional or student in the disciplines of the built environment and environmental management.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Unique and Useful Contribution, May 5, 2002

By A Customer

This review is from: The Living Landscape: An Ecological Approach to Landscape Planning (Hardcover)

It is a rare planning book that outlines a detailed process for guiding landscape change in a deliberate and ecologically sound manner. The Living Landscape accomplishes this in a robust, clear and convincing way. The second edition improves on the first by including more landscape design information, updating case studies, and deepening the planning method (for instance, by including more on the use of Geographic Information Systems). The liberal use of cases is a strong asset of the book; each step in the ecological planning process is illustrated and explained by way of 'stories' from real places around North America. The Living Landscape is useful reading for students and practitioners in landscape architecture, architecture, environmental planning and natural resource management.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars From a landscape for living to a living landscape, May 5, 2002

By 

"danilocasa" (Milano, Italy) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Living Landscape: An Ecological Approach to Landscape Planning (Hardcover)

The second edition of The Living Landscape has came out nine years after the first. The first, in fact, was published in 1991, it received an ASLA Merit Award for Communications in 1993, and then it was translated into Italian in 1994, where it was very well received among scholars and students of planning as well as in the schools of architecture throughout the country.
The very first difference between the two editions is the publishing series. The first did not form part of a series while the second is now in the McGraw-Hill "Professional Architecture" series. The Professional Architecture series is devoted to giving helpful tools to practitioners who are on the field and The Living Landscape provides a very wide set of how-to and why-to-do-it instructions, where-to-keep information, and best practices examples to learn from, organized around an eleven-step Ecological Planning Model. I consider The Living Landscape a refined, high-level professional handbook devoted to enhance the toolbox of any present or future planning practitioners.
The Living Landscape II edition, as was the first, is built around a scheme of eleven steps called "Ecological Planning Method" briefly presented in the first chapter and used as a step-by-step pattern to guide readers into the organization of a planning process. The "Ecological Planning Method" is a framework for presenting information to decision-makers, and to display "a common language, a common method among all those concerned about social equity and ecological parity" (p. 9). The approach to planning presented by Steiner is innovative for two reasons. The first is the incorporation of ecology in planning - briefly "the use of biophysical and sociocultural information to suggest opportunities and constraints for decision making about the use of the landscape" (pp. 9-10). The second reason is the author's stress on the citizen's involvement in almost every step of his method. These two issues, even if they are the prime themes of the book, are prudently embedded into the body of the full text. Ecology and citizen involvement are the leitmotif of the entire book which is composed of a precise combination of techniques and tools presentation, useful references to literature, light - but effective - revocations of the theoretical frameworks on the issues, and application examples deriving from real plans or projects.
The eleven-step Ecological Planning Model goes from the identification of problems and opportunities (step 1) and the establishment of goals (2) to inventories and analysis at regional (3) and local level (4). It proceeds with the realization of detailed studies (5) and the definition of planning concepts (6). The landscape plan (7) follows and it is directly assessed and criticized by citizens (8), who are involved and educated along the whole process-phasing. Design exploration (9) comes next and the study of the implementation of the plan and projects (10) precedes the administration (11) that is the last step of the model. The Ecological Planning Model is linear in its descriptions (the book chapters - excluding the introduction and the conclusion - are devoted to deepen every single step, with some minor exceptions), but the steps are strongly interactive. In the graphic scheme of the model (p. 11), solid and dashed arrows between the steps emphasize the necessity and the opportunity of feedback and retroactions in order to monitor the previous results.
Citizen involvement is the center of the model. Almost every step is addressed to inhabitants and a systematic educational and citizen involvement effort occurs throughout the process. The model, between the last step - administration - and the first - problem and/or opportunity identification -, presents a dashed arrow in order to accent that problems and opportunities facing the region and the goals addressed that may be altered by time, occurrences and circumstances.
Compared to the first edition, the structure of the Ecological Planning Model and of the book contents remains unchanged in the second, but the book has some 120 more pages. Graphic design of tables and figures has been enhanced - a four-color page section was added to present the GIS maps of the Desert View Tri-Villages Area (Arizona) and of the Camp Pendleton study area (California), two of the many new examples used along the entire book. New photographs, mostly authored by Steiner, follow the entire text. Sources and references have been updated including recent books and articles on the matters. New examples, as said before, have been included in this edition to present more recent application of techniques and tools explained and illustrated along the text. The final glossary, one of the many useful tools of the book, has been enlarged with 46 new entries bringing the total to 350.