What is Landscape Architecture?

Landscape architecture is about creating external physical environments that can fulfill the broad range of human landscape requirements in harmony with natural processes. The focus of landscape architecture can be very broad in scope and scale. It can range from the highly conceptual to the rationally practical. From artistic external environments that can challenge the way we think about and engage with outdoor space, to mitigation schemes that reduce the damaging impacts of functional and exploitative human interventions.

In the modern post-industrialised world and particularly cities, many of our external environments are dreary unordered compositions, left over bits, produced by uninspired, single-goal processes. Various constructed interventions do their own thing and which are further limited by their poor arrangement in awkward spaces. Successful landscape architecture can at this fundamental level, integrate the many contrasting aspects of external built design. It can create far more enjoyable external spaces, improving social, economic and environmental value at different scales, from regional landscape planning, down to the design of streets, parks and community gardens.