1. Concept and development process of ecological planning
What is ecological planning? Ecological planning is "using biological and social and cultural information to put forward possible opportunities and constraints for landscape utilization decision-making." Or according to ian mcharg's definition,' a certain field can be interpreted as a biophysical and social process in the running of laws, regulations and time. It can also be interpreted as clearly putting forward the opportunities and constraints faced by any particular human use model, and the investigation can reveal the most suitable location and process' ".
Since the industrial revolution, while creating brilliant material wealth, the problems of resources and environment have become increasingly prominent, which have threatened the survival and development of human society. So in the middle of19th century, planners represented by Frederick Lau Homs Ted, George Pei Rickens Nash (1864) and ebenezer howard realized that landscape and ecology are a natural system in the process of continuous reflection, and began a preliminary attempt of ecological planning. From the beginning of the 20th century to the middle of the 20th century, a large number of plans involving open space systems, urban parks and national parks appeared. Ideologically, aldo leopold, Mountford and Benton MacKay successively advocated the "ecological theory" of planning. Technically, Warren Ma Ning and Patrick Gaddis created and improved the method of ecological planning. At this time, ecological thought has penetrated into the field of planning and injected vitality into planning. By the 1970s, ecology and environment had been widely concerned by the public. The paradigm composed of ethical basis, working theory, concept and technology of landscape planning has also been widely recognized by people. Among them, ian mcharg and others established an ecological planning framework, which became a basic idea of future ecological planning. Until today, with the unremitting efforts of countless planners, ecological planning has been further developed. At present, ecological planning has become the focus of planning research in all countries in the world, and a series of monographs have also come out one after another. Living Scenery is one of the highly praised works.
2. Frederick Steiner and Life Landscape
Professor Steiner, the author of Landscape of Life, has rich theoretical and practical experience in landscape design and participated in a large number of community and regional planning projects. From the perspective of ecological environment, this book summarizes the experience of planning technology and planning application from how planners carry out ecological planning and what aspects they should start from. This ecological planning manual, which is very practical today and in the future, introduces the steps, methods and principles of how to carry out ecological planning from scratch and how to determine planning problems and planning objectives. This book also includes landscape analysis on regional scale, landscape analysis on local scale, detail analysis, planning regional concepts and schemes, landscape planning, community participation and civic education, design scheme, implementation of planning and design, and more than 20 case studies, involving cities, suburbs, villages, domestic and foreign environments, etc. In addition, there are detailed workflow, detailed information of environmental impact assessment and various control documents about zoning and land use.
Living Scenery is a reference book that can stand the test of time and is suitable for professional designers. It is also a course suitable for urban and landscape planning and design today. This book introduces the work achievements and theories of many founders of ecological planning and contemporary ecological planners. Such as Macharg, Mountford and Carl Steinitz, the author of this book is also an outstanding scholar in the field of ecological planning. By reading this book, we can not only understand Professor Steiner's own thoughts, but also understand the most classic and advanced ecological planning theory and technology, which is of high reading value. Now, this book has become the designated reference book for related courses in many American universities, and has been rated as "outstanding works in this field". The first edition of the book (published in 199 1) won the Excellence Award of American Association of Landscape Architects, and the second edition (published in 2000) better combined the current planning practice with the new theories of landscape ecology and sustainable development, and won high praise from readers.
3. Detailed description of the ecological planning process
As mentioned earlier, the framework of ecological planning was first established in Machaerge, and "environmental analysis in Christina McHale format ... has almost become a general method and step that must be followed in any form of local planning". However, some scholars also believe that although these analyses are "very important … a more comprehensive and holistic approach is still needed". Therefore, Professor Steiner tries to provide more comprehensive steps and methods in this book.
Professor Steiner believes that the planning process in reality is often not carried out according to the current and rational model, but in order to explain the problem clearly, the planning process can still be expressed as a simple organizational framework. Therefore, he divided the ecological planning into the following 1 1 steps, introduced the possible work of each step in detail, and gradually guided readers to understand how to carry out ecological planning, thus making the planning steps clearer. At the same time, he also pointed out that there is a repetitive process between steps, that is, the work of the next few steps may also lead to the modification of the previous step, and this modification will affect the later steps and need to be adjusted (Figure 1). In order to facilitate readers' understanding, Professor Steiner inserted a series of practical cases in North America for each planning step and elaborated them in detail, which was very vivid.