New Issue Published: Landscape Architecture, Volume 2026, Issue 1
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Volume 113 Issue 1
- Research article
by
1Department of Garden History and Landscape Heritage Royal Urban Studies Institute United Kingdom
- Volume 113 Issue 1
- Pages: 38
- - 55
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231131-03
Coastal adaptation requires a direct contrast between the level of local climate pressure and the utility provided by the functions associated with the blue-green action. In this case, we focus on Chennai and Kochi, Indian coastal cities facing climate pressure from exposure to sea-level rise, heavy rain, warming, drainage challenges, and land use. These two cities experience all five pressures without generating similar climate adaptation needs. Hydro-Institutional Adaptation Partitioning (HIAP) is used to translate the values of 2080 climate projections and planning actions into four pairs of dimensions that include: thermal pressure, sea-level pressure, rainfall-regime pressure, and extreme-event pressure. The planning cover was operationalized based on national policy and planning program support, climate planning, wetland/biodiversity projects, and participation in canal governance. It is observed that the two cities had a consistent number of action classes of four, yet different adaptation needs. Chennai has the larger sea-level coefficient than that of Kochi and maintains small uncovered pressure in both thermal and sea-level dimensions. On the other hand, Kochi has the highest overall climate pressure due to high levels of warming and decline in mean rainfall. The latter also maintains the larger uncovered pressure related to thermal moderation and rainfall retention capacity. Sensitivity tests revealed that the uncovered climate pressure in Kochi increased with respect to heat-dryness weighting, whereas Chennai stayed responsive to sea-level drainages and heat sensitive open spaces.
- Research article
by
1College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
2Turenscape Urban Planning and Design Co., Ltd., Beijing 100080, China
- Volume 113 Issue 1
- Pages: 20
- - 37
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231131-02
High-resolution overhead imagery captures building arrangement, street structure, vegetation cover, industrial land use, water surfaces, and outdoor activity space in a resolution appropriate for neighborhood analysis. However, semantic classification of such imagery is reduced to an ordinal score by counting favorable criteria, despite the difference in recognition reliability between visual cues and the possibility of moving from one class to another by changing one indicator alone. An Evidence-Calibrated Urban Scene Quality Index (ECUSQI) was devised to convert five semantically identifiable visual indicators into a reliability-based five-point scale. We analyzed a test set of 3038 labeled samples of urban imagery patches extracted from central Changsha (China) among 3874 RGB patches of 250 × 250 pixels with 0.5 m ground sampling distance (GSD). Recognition reliability of 615 test scenes with respect to open building layout, grid-like street structure, vegetation coverage, lack of industrial areas, and presence of activity space was estimated in the training procedure. Jeffreys smoothing of recognition reliability normalizes each indicator increase, the posterior uncertainty component identifies scores based on less reliable semantic information, and the threshold margin term points out classes determined by a less confident inference. The test dataset includes 527 scenes with five correct decisions, 77 with four, 9 with three, and 2 with two, implying an average of 4.836 correct and 0.164 incorrect indicator interpretations per scene. The accuracies of indicators range from 93.17% for buildings to 98.86% for industrial areas. Co-attention reduces the expectation of indicator mistakes by 58.0% and decreases the multi-mistake probability by 8.48% to 1.79%. In the spatial interpretation, ECUSQI is lower in more densely populated districts of older construction and higher in green residential areas with open structure and activity space. Our index serves a concrete measuring purpose, since reliable overhead semantic information can inform fine-grained environmental evaluation, along with its threshold sensitivity.
- Research article
by
1Department of Landscape Planning, Prairie State University, United States
2Department of Environmental Design, Coastal Research University, United States
- Volume 113 Issue 1
- Pages: 1
- - 19
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20231131-01
Now that the greening of climate infrastructure is firmly established as part of urban adaptation, however, civic effectiveness is more complicated than hydrology, cooling capacity, plant cover or space design alone. Socially fragile adaptation occurs where greening brings local benefits to people who face displacement pressure, selective redevelopment, access restrictions and weakened local identity. In this study, Resident Retention Gate Analysis (RRGA) is introduced as an ordinal civic calculation of the likelihood that socio-environmental benefits are usable by marginalized residents. Applying the calculation involves mapping a civic record of each of four neighborhoods in Boston, Philadelphia, Amsterdam and Barcelona: their histories, their climate/environmental problems, their greening interventions, their redevelopment pressures, their distribution of civic interviews and the order magnitude of their benefits in terms of recognition, displacement experience, displacement threat, development, dissatisfaction, green gentrification fears, unequal access and social cohesion disruption. RRGA turns those order-magnitudes into civic gates based on three civic criteria: tenure stability, public development orientation and continuity of access/belonging. It calculates the retained benefit score by multiplying recognized benefit with the average of the two constraints and the dominant one. The retention deficits are worst in East Boston due to high tenure pressure and greening associated with the marketization of waterfront amenities, where only a small civic gate makes room for benefits that are already recognized to be moderate. The retained benefit score is highest in Hunting Park, whose high greening need has been coupled with low marketization pressure, despite green gentrification fears being very real there. The Amsterdam Noord case features a bottleneck situation caused by investment-led greening and creative redevelopment, as well as waterfront amenities. The most exclusionary and protection-focused tension between benefits and constraints emerges in Poblenou, where high need for greening is compounded by strong displacement and redevelopment pressures. Conclusion: Climate-adaptive greening should be evaluated in terms of resident retention – the crucial question here being whether the affected community will remain nearby, able to govern, access and take ownership of their environmental improvement.
Call for Papers
Landscape Architecture invites submissions for Volume 2026, Issue 3, scheduled for publication in September 2026. The journal welcomes high-quality scholarly contributions that advance research, theory, criticism, and applied knowledge in landscape architecture and related fields.