Our societies need to solve difficult issues to attain sustainability. The main challenges include, among others, global warming, demographic change, an energy crisis, and loss of biodiversity. In tackling these issues, a holistic understanding of our living space is important. The field of landscape planning and design is at the core the holistic concept and it makes several contributions to achieving sustainability. First, landscape planning and design connects different spatial scales: from site to region to the planet. Second, it focuses on close interrelationships between human...

The purpose of this book is to present a new proposal for landscape management labor accounts. Many matured countries are now confronting an aging society and a shrinking population. Land degradation in those countries is basically caused by a lack of local labor forces. It is very important, therefore, to consider and develop methods to provide appropriate labor forces for the sustainable management of landscapes or to reduce or shrink landscape management areas sustainably with available labor forces. Landscape management labor accounts provide a foundation for such development.This book...

This book is based on presentations made by German and Japanese scholars at the international symposium "New Trends of Landscape Design: Seamless Connection of Landscape Planning and Design from Regional to Site Scales-The Cultural Context" held November 2012.

This book analyses the similar challenges faced by Japan and Germany in regard to environmentally sustainable and resilient urban development under conditions of social and natural change;