LANDSCAPE AND ECOLOGY

What is landscape architecture?

Central Park, the first major landscaped public space in urban America, was created in the 1850s as an antidote to the turbulent social unrest, largely as the result of the country's first wave of immigration, and a serious public health crisis, caused by harmful environmental conditions.

In 1858, Frederick Law Olmsted, Sr., considered today the Father of Landscape Architecture, initiated a project that would redefine the industrial city.

He understood that the creation of a great public park would improve public health and contribute greatly to the formation of a civil society.

Chosen by the city and the park planners because its terrain was unsuitable for commercial building, the site for the new park offered rocky vistas, swamps which would be converted into lakes, and the old city reservoir

 The American  Society  of  Landscape Architects (ASLA)  defined landscape  architecture as: 

 

a science and an art [which] embraces those professional activitiesrelating to the systematicplanning of land areas, the design of  outdoor  places  and  spaces,  the  conservation  of  our natural resources and the creation of a more useful, safe and pleasant living environment.   (ASLA Handbook of Professional Practice, 1981, p. 19)

Landscape architect

The scope of the profession includes:

urban design;

site planning;

storm water management;

town or urban planning;

environmental restoration; parks and recreation planning;

reclamation of degraded landscapes such as mines or landfills

visual resource management;

green infrastructure planning and provision;

and private estate and residence landscape master planning and design; all at varying scales of design, planning and management.

Landscape architecture is a multi-disciplinary field, incorporating aspects of: botany, horticulture, the fine arts, architecture, industrial design, geology and the earth sciences, environmental psychology, geography, and ecology.

Ecology

ecology is all about- the inter-relationship between living and non-living things and their habitat.

When man builds, he must take both nature and society into account.

With this concept – the ecological approach to landscape architecture-both the natural and man-made environment should be blended to produce a harmonius whole, so that while altering the ‘living system’, the vital inter-relationships between living and non-living things are not distributed.

Lawrence Harpin, the eminent landscape architect says “if one can step for a moment into an outdoor space, no matter how small and get a glimpse of the sky and the smell of the earth, trees and flowers, then the overwhelming scale and density of urban life can be largely overcome”.

Earth is experiencing a so-called environmental crisis (ecological crisis). This crisis is characterized by three major themes:

• Rapid growth of the human population and its associated economic activity,

• The depletion of both non-renewable and renewable resources, and

• Extensive and intensive damage caused to ecosystems and biodiversity.

The environmental problems have boosted the sustainable explorations necessary for protecting ecological system in order to address and find solutions to the problems.

In landscape architecture ecology’s emphasis on natural processes and the interrelatedness of landscape components influenced outlook and method and prompted an ecological approach to design

Carrying capacity The carrying capacity of a biological species in an environment is the maximum population size of

the species that the environment can sustain indefinitely, given the food, habitat, water and other necessities available in the environment.

The carrying capacity of an environment may vary for different species and may change over time due to a variety of factors, including: food availability, water supply, environmental conditions and living space.

Ecological footprint One way to estimate human demand compared to ecosystem's carrying capacity is

"Ecological footprint" accounting.

It represents the amount of biologically productive land and sea area necessary to supply the resources a human population consumes, and to assimilate associated waste

. Using this assessment, it is possible to estimate how much of the Earth (or how many planet Earths) it would take to support humanity if everybody followed a given lifestyle.

For 2007, humanity's total ecological footprint was estimated at 1.5 planet Earths; that is, humanity uses ecological services 1.5 times as quickly as Earth can renew them .

This is a good way of informing a country as to what extent it uses its resources as compared to the available resources

WWF claims that human foot print has exceeded the bio capacity of the planet by 20%.