Ecological Planning

The author's goals are on target, for no other book sets the ideas of landscape planning into a set of developing concepts within a historical context. There are few books on landscape planning in general and none to my knowledge that attempt both a complete overview and a comparative analysis. Ndubisi's approach is sound in every way. This book is long overdue. -- Sally Schauman, Duke University

For this reason he offers guidance as to when it may be appropriate for landscape architects and planners to emphasize one approach rather than another.Ecological planning is the process of understanding, evaluating, and providing options for the use of landscape to ensure a better fit with human habitation. In this ambitious analysis, Forster Ndubisi provides a succinct historical and comparative account of the various approaches to this process. He then reveals how each of these approaches offers different and uniquely useful perspectives for understanding the dialogue between human and environmental processes. Ndubisi begins by examining the philosophies behind and major contributors to ecological thinking during the past 150 years, as well as the paradigm shift in planning that occurred in recent decades as a result of a growing global ecological awareness. He then turns to landscape suitability analysis and discusses alternative approaches to ecological planning, such as applied human ecology, applied landscape ecology, and others. Finally, he offers a comparative synthesis of the approaches in order to reveal the theoretical and methodological assumptions inherent when planners choose one approach over the other. Ndubisi concludes that no one approach can by itself adequately address the whole spectrum of ecological planning issues. For this reason he offers guidance as to when it may be appropriate for landscape architects and planners to emphasize one approach rather than another.