Offers advice on planning public spaces in urban areas, discussing the positive effects that parks and gardens can have on cities and their residents; and covering design, maintenance, volunteers, public funding, and private donations; with a list of plants and other resources.

For many years planning was something done in the name of progress by distant committees. In the past decade, however, heavy-handed ideology has given way to a new generation of planners from diverse backgrounds - architecture, landscape, even art and performance - who seek fresh, creative ways of working with communities to build modern and sustainable societies that reflect the needs and dreams of their inhabitants. This book presents and explains, for the first time, the rise and success of this new global sensibility. With important lessons and invaluable ideas for architects, planners and landscape designers around the world, this book - set to be the volume that establishes the agenda for going forward - is just as essential for anyone interested in the future of our countryside and cities.

Until the 19th century, landscape was seen merely as a backdrop to a main subject, but with the rise of industrialization, natural settings became increasingly rare in urban life and, therefore, more valued and frequently represented. This book looks at the evolution of the landscape as photographic subject.

George Alexander Grant is an unknown elder in the field of American landscape photography. Just as they did the work of his contemporaries Ansel Adams, Edward Weston, Eliot Porter, and others, millions of people viewed Grant’s photographs; unlike those contemporaries, few even knew Grant’s name. Landscapes for the People shares his story through his remarkable images and a compelling biography profiling patience, perseverance, dedication, and an unsurpassed love of the natural and historic places that Americans chose to preserve. A Pennsylvania native, Grant was introduced to the parks during the summer of 1922 and resolved to make parks work and photography his life. Seven years later, he received his dream job and spent the next quarter century visiting the four corners of the country to produce images in more than one hundred national parks, monuments, historic sites, battlefields, and other locations. He was there to visually document the dramatic expansion of the National Park Service during the New Deal, including the work of the Civilian Conservation Corps. Grant’s images are the work of a master craftsman. His practiced eye for composition and exposure and his patience to capture subjects in their finest light are comparable to those of his more widely known contemporaries. Nearly fifty years after his death, and in concert with the 2016 centennial of the National Park Service, it is fitting that George Grant’s photography be introduced to a new generation of Americans.

Landscapes for People is an attempt to elucidate unique solutions to these pressing issues around the globe. We believe landscape must go beyond simple problem solving and push the boundaries of what is possible given the realities of budget, politics, environment or cultural influences. We seek to understand the needs and aspirations of people in the landscapes we design at the variable scales of a plaza, a street or an entire city. Our passion is design that synthesizes aesthetics and sustainability, but always within the context of both human and natural systems. SWA WORKS is structured around four categoriesurban regeneration, creative campus, lifestyle and adaptive strategies. Our hope is that one will find a sense of clarity and purpose in how our projects are organized under these four leading descriptions and the unique associations between how the landscapes and people interact. We hope youll find beauty in the work, and be inspired to participate in the everyday spaces that make up the landscapes where we live, work or play.

"Of beach plums, ramps, and Ramada Inns: a quietly sensitive eminently sensible consideration of the landscapes of our lives . . . A gift." —Kirkus Reviews Following her bestselling The Architect of Desire, Suzannah Lessard returns with a remarkable book, a work of relentless curiosity and a graceful mixture of observation and philosophy. This intriguing hybrid will remind some of W. G. Sebald’s work and others of Rebecca Solnit’s, but it is Lessard’s singular talent to combine this profound book–length mosaic— a blend of historical travelogue, reportorial probing, philosophical meditation, and prose poem—into a work of unique genius, as she describes and reimagines our landscapes. In this exploration of our surroundings, The Absent Hand contends that to reimagine landscape is a form of cultural reinvention. This engrossing work of literary nonfiction is a deep dive into our surroundings—cities, countryside, and sprawl—exploring change in the meaning of place and reimagining the world in a time of transition. Whether it be climate change altering the meaning of nature, or digital communications altering the nature of work, the effects of global enclosure on the meaning of place are panoramic, infiltrative, inescapable. No one will finish this book, this journey, without having their ideas of living and settling in their surroundings profoundly enriched.

This is the first textbook to fully synthesize all key disciplines of environmental studies. Humans in the Landscape draws on the biophysical sciences, social sciences, and humanities to explore the interactions between cultures and environments over time, and discusses classic environmental problems in the context of the overarching conflicts and frameworks that motivate them.