A Landscape Approach: From Local Communities to Territorial Systems

The book promotes a landscape approach as a method for understanding and addressing the complex interdependent issues of environmental and climatic change, ecological degradation, and socio-cultural inequalities.

The twenty-three book essays are structured into five sections around concepts of urban landscape systems, ecology, politics, territory, and practice. By linking individual sites and local communities to territorial socio-ecological systems and processes, they discuss issues of urban growth and development, remote areas of extraction and production, environmental degradation and transformation, and social inequality and discrimination. While the book allows for parallel readings of such issues in multiple cultural and geographical contexts, a geographic focus is placed on Canada and other environmentally complex and sensitive northern regions. One key theme is the integration of Indigenous knowledge, experience, and storytelling throughout several of the chapters. The book draws lessons that are grounded in inclusive, contextual, and multi-scalar readings which suggest landscape-informed practices that are both socially and environmentally resilient, just, and sustainable.

Hannes Zander is working as PhD Fellow at The Oslo School of Architecture and Design. He holds a master in landscape architecture degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and is co-founder of the International Landscape Collaborative ILC.

Dr. Shelagh McCartney is an associate professor at the School of Urban and Regional Planning at Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada. She received a master of design studies and a doctorate of design from the Harvard Graduate School of Design and is the founding director of the Together Design Lab.

Together Design Lab. Samantha Solano is an assistant professor at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She holds a master in landscape architecture degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and is a co-founder of The VELA Project and principal of the research practice JUXTOPOS.

Sonja Vangjeli is a landscape architect and design project manager at Waterfront Toronto and has international experience as landscape designer and researcher. She holds a master of landscape architecture degree from the Harvard University Graduate School of Design and a master of architecture degree from the University of Waterloo.