Landscape Planning and Development Theory is the core course in HKU's Master of Landscape Architecture (MLA) and Bachelor of Landscape Studies BA(LS) curricula that provides the historical and theoretical basis for environmental planning as it is undertaken across the milieu of fields engaged in the sustainable development of landscapes, for instance, landscape architecture, urban planning, geography, and environmental management. Lecture, tutorials and reading sets are topical and cover: the history and legacy of ecological planning (from landscape architecture) and GIS since the 1960s; modern landscape ecology and spatial ecology (since 1980s); international development from the 1950s through post-development theory; environmental activism (since 1970s); the environmental state (since 1990s); the rise and global proliferation of environmental impact assessment; participatory planning, publics and counterpublics; and current trends in landscape planning and valuation, covering ecological connectivity, ecosystem services, and landscape securitization and “smart Earth”.
Across this wide range of topics, we directly confront and embrace the epistemological and practical dissonance between landscape arts and landscape sciences, especially between ecological planning (as construed by landscape architecture) and biological conservation. This course is also designed to facilitate critical reflection on the selection and appropriation of secondary scientific research for environmental planning practice and policy. The course’s reading list is a mix of: a) foundational texts in landscape architecture, landscape planning, and landscape ecology; b) novel papers in spatial ecology; and c) case-based literature from science and technology studies (STS), land change science, and political ecology. We focus both on theory—bridging between the design disciplines and the axioms, problem framing, and project types of the above conservation-related fields—and technical knowledge for working within complex and contested natures. Students' term projects for the course introduce them to how landscape ecologists and landscape scientists are engaging regional landscapes in Hong Kong and Southeast Asia. Through lecture, seminar discussion, and their term projects, students:
- Engage histories of neoliberal development, environmental governance, design and planning of landscapes via the milieu of regulatory and technological tools and products facilitating land and resource management in Greater China and Southeast Asia;
- Relate the histories, research methodologies and practices of non-design disciplines’ approaches to environmental planning to a history of ecological planning in landscape architecture;
- Gain new cross-disciplinary vocabularies in planning, development and sustainability that help you understand and articulate human and non-human stakeholders’ conceptions, ethics, and narratives of development, nature and biodiversity;
- Reconcile the methods and products of abstract environmental science and planning with real (i.e., situated) site conditions, constructing detailed representations, even where information or data is limited or scarce; and
- Appropriate and put such methods and products to critical use in service of a landscape design-research agenda.