A synthesis of Approaches to Ecological Planning

Abstract

jor concerns? How do they propose that the concerns be addressed? What are the anticipated out-comes? Based on a review of their relative strengths and weaknesses, I argue that none by itself can adequately address the whole spectrum of ecological-planning issues. I then speculate on when landscape architects and planners may lean toward one approach rather than another for guidance. Undertaking a comparative synthesis of these approaches is perhaps a risky venture given the diverse methods and techniques of each approach; therefore, I risk the criticism of overgeneraliza-tion. I therefore explore the central tendency or bias, as statisticians would call it, of each ap-proach's responses to the questions. In a strict sense, studies of landscape values and perception should not be included as an ecological-planning approach, but they are relevant to ecological planning because knowledge about the values held by people is "essential to the development of socially responsive and supportive landscapes." 1 Moreover , repetition is inevitable in a comparative overview such as this, especially since each approach has been covered extensively in the previous chapters. In the discussion that follows, I argue that there are two types of theories in ecological planning: substantive and procedural. 2 Substantive theories of ecological planning permit an in-depth understanding of the landscape as the interface between human and natural processes. These theories, which are descriptive and predictive, originate from the social and natural sciences, as well as the humanities, including such fields as anthropology, biology, ecology, fine arts, geography, geology, and history. When we seek to understand the landscape as a reflection of culture, we turn to the works of J. B. Jackson, John Stilgoe, David Schuy-ler, Denis Wood, Neil Evernden, Cotton Mather, and the like. 3 When we want to understand soils, we turn to a pedologist. The intellectual traditions depicted in Figure . indicate the disciplinary origins of the substantive theories that inform each approach. Procedural theories focus on the ideology, purposes , and principles of ecological planning. They explicate the functional relationships that permit the application of the knowledge of human and natural processes in resolving human conflicts in the landscape. The five approaches examined in this book are procedural theories of ecological planning. Each offers a working theory and procedural recommendations for putting the theory into practice. Thus, in ecological planning we draw upon substantive theories for content knowledge but use procedural theories as a framework for organizing the pertinent knowledge to address ecological-planning problems.