Previously published in French by Éditions Quae, this volume presents findings of a major research programme into landscape and sustainable development. While led by French scholars, the research team and geographical scope of the project was international, collaborative and comparative. Using case studies from across Europe, the interdisciplinary team of contributors discuss the relationship between landscape as defined by the European Landscape Convention and the concept of sustainable development. This English edition has a new introduction written by Yves Luginbühl and Peter Howard. The book is then divided into three sections: Biophysical Realities and Landscape Practice; Landscape Resources-Inheritance and Renewal; Governance and Participation. Some of the topics covered, such as wind-farm landscapes, will be familiar to English language readers, but others, such as footpath economics, non-woodland trees, inter-generational equity, and the insistence on the necessary developments in governance less so.

Constructing Gardens, Cultivating the City is the first cultural history of major new parks developed in Paris in the late twentieth century, as part of the city's program of adaptive reuse of industrial spaces. Thanks to laws that gave the city more political autonomy, Paris's local government launched a campaign of park creation in the late 1970s that continued to the turn of the millennium. The parks in this book represent this campaign and illustrate different facets of their cultural and historical context. Archival research, interviews, and analyses of the parks reveal how postmodern debates about urban planning, the historic city, public space, and nature's presence in an urban setting influenced their designs. In sum, the city adopted the garden as a model for public parks, investing in complex, richly symbolic and representational spaces. These parks were intended to represent contemporary twists on traditional designs and serve local residents as much as they would contribute to Paris's role as a world city. The parks' development process often included points of conflict, pointing to differing views on what Parisian space should represent and fundamental contradictions between the characteristics of public space and the garden as it is traditionally defined. These parks demonstrate the ongoing cultivation of the city over time, in which transformed sites not only fulfil new functions but also engage with history and their surroundings to create new meaning. They stand for landscape as a form of signifying cultural production that directly engages with other art forms and ways of knowing. Just as the Luxembourg Gardens, the Tuileries, and the Buttes-Chaumont parks exemplify their eras' cultural dynamics, such parks as the Jardin Atlantique, Parc André-Citroën, and the Jardin des Halles express contemporary French culture within the archetypal space of their era, the city. Finally, they point the way to current trends in landscape architecture, such as citizen gardening and ecological initiatives.

This book provides a multi-disciplinary coverage of the broad fields of species, community and landscape conservation. The panel of contributors consider a range of topics in vegetation and biodiversity assessment, planning and management of conservation zones and protected areas, together with historical and social/legal issues of the environment and nature conservation. The book celebrates the life’s work of Professor Franco Pedrotti.