Abstract
When Frederick Law Olmsted and his protégée Charles Eliot (1855–97) developed plans for the Fens and River Way in Boston (completed in 1891, resulting in the development of the first metropolitan park system planned around hydrological features and ecological ideas), the processes or methods they employed enabled them to effectively translate ecological ideas into design, although their directives were not as obvious as those that have been utilized over the past fifty years. Scottish biologist and planner Patrick Geddes proposed a regional survey method in 1915, which was refined subsequently by urban historian Lewis Mumford. Geddes’s method was based on understanding the nature of the complexities between human action and the environment. Survey before plan—a maxim well known to planners even today—is a phrase attributed to Patrick Geddes. He contended that planning should be viewed as a problem-solving activity.
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Notes
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Simon R. Swaffield (ed.), Theory in Landscape Architecture: A Reader (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2002).
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Max Nicholson cites Hideo Sasaki’s work in The Environmental Revolution: A Guide for the Masters of the World (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1970).
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Swaffield (ed.), Theory in Landscape Architecture: A Reader, 35.
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Ian McHarg, “An Ecological Method for Landscape Architecture,” Landscape Architecture 57, no. 2 (1967), 105–07.
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Lewis D. Hopkins, “Methods for Generating Land Suitability Maps: A Comparative Evaluation,” Journal of the American Planning Association 43, no. 4 (1977), 386–400.
- 7.
Kevin Lynch and Gary Hack, “The Art of Site Planning,” in Site Planning (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1984).
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Danilo Palazzo and Frederick Steiner, “Processes,” in Urban Ecological Design: A Process for Regenerative Places (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2011), 25–36.
- 9.
Carl Steinitz, “On Teaching Ecological Principles to Designers,” in Ecology and Design: Frameworks for Learning, B. Johnson and K. Hill (eds.) (Washington, DC: Island Press, 2002), 231–244.
- 10.
Carl Steinitz, A Framework for Geodesign: Changing Geography by Design (New York: ESRI, 2012).
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William M. Marsh, “Framing Land Use: A Systems Approach,” in Landscape Planning: Environmental Applications (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 2010).
- 12.
Forster Ndubisi, “A Synthesis of Approaches to Ecological Planning,” in Ecological Planning: A Historical and Comparative Synthesis (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).
- 13.
Ndubisi, “A Synthesis of Approaches to Ecological Planning,” 95.
- 14.
Lynch and Hack, “The Art of Site Planning,” 8.
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© 2014 Forster O. Ndubisi
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Ndubisi, F.O. (2014). Introduction to Part Five. In: Ndubisi, F.O. (eds) The Ecological Design and Planning Reader. Island Press, Washington, DC. https://doi.org/10.5822/978-1-61091-491-8_28
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