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2025
- Research article
by
1Department of Landscape Architecture, Stuart Weitzman School of Design, University of Pennsylvania, 119 Meyerson Hall, 210 South 34th Street, Philadelphia, PA19104-6311, USA
2Associate Professor, Department of Real Estate Management, HungKuo Delin University of Technology, No. 1, Lane 380, Qingyun Road, Tucheng District, New Taipei City
- Volume 115 Issue 4
- Pages: 150
- - 169
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20251154-09
Heat adaptation of compact temperate neighborhoods usually relies on green spaces since additional land to accommodate larger parks is scarce. The heat mitigation capacity of such spaces cannot be estimated just in terms of their surface areas. One-hectare intervention may perform like a shade destination, cooling interface with streets, or both depending on patch division, compactness, grouping, width of streets, and direction of streets. Street-Coupled Thermal Allocation (SCTA) methodology is utilized in order to find out which one-hectare layout suits best each of four neighborhood morphologies when pedestrians’ heat stress is considered the goal of urban planning. Numerical parameter sets incorporate four types of streets and eight types of one-hectare layouts. Four street types, designated as T1 to T4, vary in street area share, height-to-width ratio, and orientation composition. Eight layouts of one hectare, referred to as S1 to S8, differ in patch area, total patch number, shape index, grouping property, and association with wide and narrow streets. Calculation is performed separately in respect of Local Green Refuge Score and Street Cooling Transfer Score with further aggregation of these two scores with coefficients 0.55 and 0.45, respectively. It turned out that grouped and compact layouts (S7, S8) ensure maximum performance with regard to local refuge, and grouped wide streets provide maximum cooling transfer capacity (S1, S3). Combining the two scores yields maximum values in favor of S1 layout within T1, T2, and T4, equaling to 0.719, 0.689, and 0.740, respectively. Layout S8 wins in terms of SCTA score for T3 with score equaling to 0.721 and also proves to be very effective for T4 neighborhood morphotype with SCTA value of 0.730. Layout S3 maintains its good performance throughout and reaches 0.728 in case of T4 type of morphology. The results suggest that one-hectare green space layout optimization is a morphology-related task, whereby grouping and wide streets are more appropriate for the street cooling transfer goal, while compact cross-street placement is better for diagonal morphology.
- Research article
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1Department of Urban Design and Landscape Planning Greenfield State University United States
- Volume 115 Issue 4
- Pages: 125
- - 149
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20251154-08
Planning of nature-based solution interventions in cities typically starts with typology lists, as opposed to calibration of performance models based on local conditions. Such practice generates practical selection problems in Global South cities where floods, heat stress, water pollution, droughts, biodiversity depletion, erosion, air pollution, and lack of equal access to urban nature are often co-occurring challenges even before the availability of performance evidence on costs, land-use, and performance. Typologies of interventions are selected according to scale-weighted functional leverage, functional range, spatial continuity, and medium coupling criteria for keeping only those intervention families that will be assessed further. Scale-Weighted Functional Leverage (SWFL) is calculated for four types of implementation media: water, land, built structures, and hybrid water–land media. Fourteen resilience functions are kept: biodiversity, heat regulation, water-pollution regulation, pluvial flood regulation, coastal flood regulation, river flood regulation, drought regulation, air-pollution regulation, erosion regulation, river navigation improvement, riverbank erosion regulation, social resilience, coastal flood and erosion regulation, and general flood regulation. The most common medium among 32 interventions is water, accounting for 16 interventions, followed by land, responsible for 12 interventions, built structure for three interventions, and one hybrid water and land intervention. Biodiversity is the most common function represented by 19 interventions, compared to single representation of social resilience, river navigation improvement, and riverbank erosion regulation. Neutral SWFL values result in selection of mangrove restoration, green–blue infrastructure, and urban forest systems as leading solutions, and river management and restoration interventions are also important because they help to preserve rare functions of rivers. Ranking of typologies based on priority weighting puts green–blue infrastructure as number one under heat and air categories, raises rainwater harvesting systems under drought and pluvial challenges, and includes urban gardens as a necessity under social and biodiversity categories. Selection of minimum coverage set demonstrates the need for portfolio of interventions as means of achieving broad resilience coverage.
- Research article
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1School of English Language and culture, Xi’an Fanyi University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710105, China
- Volume 115 Issue 4
- Pages: 105
- - 124
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20251153-07
Large metropolitan green spaces can be described using the total share of land cover types or an ecosystem-services index, but these metrics do not indicate whether vegetation producing the desired services overlaps with people affected by sealing, emissions, heating, surface water runoff, and poor local green space. This paper considers Moscow based on population-oriented ordinally sufficient analysis of the largest urbanized territory. The available data consists of 118 administrative districts, residential quarters, regular grid cells, more than 12 million residents, 841 landscaped objects of green infrastructure, 202.1 km2 of landscaped green infrastructure, 86 nature reserves covering 149.8 km2, and six physical services. Calculation is performed with thresholds and score distributions of sanitary-zone vegetation, stormwater regulation, cooling capacity, cultural green access, residential green provision, and roadside green space. Each block is assessed for adequate land share and adequate resident share such that ecological sufficiency and resident coverage will not be confused. It is concluded that there is little correlation between metropolitan green abundance and resident sufficiency. Regulating services appear to be the largest deficit, with adequate land share rising from 12.0% of district area to 19.2% of grid area, whereas adequate resident share goes up merely from 11.3% to 11.7%. Cultural access and residential provision are better accounted for by quarter level with 48.4% of adequate area and 38.3% of adequate population. Roadside green space shows greatest sensitivity to the grid-level analysis with 37.2% of adequate area and 34.2% of adequate population. Moscow therefore has plenty of green space infrastructure but lacks resident sufficiency due to insufficient overlap of ecological services and human exposure to urban environment.
- Research article
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1Landscape Architecture Department, Imam Abdulrahman Bin Faisal University (IAU)
- Volume 115 Issue 3
- Pages: 86
- - 104
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20251153-06
While urban greening can enhance thermal comfort, public space quality and ecological continuity, the impact of daylight ozone formation hinges on the composition of tree species, local transport system and chemical reactions involving nitrogen oxide. For this analysis, Bologna’s tree population-specific canopy renewal target has been calculated with ten broadleaf species as Pi = fiEi, pollutant-response coefficient and receptor attenuation threshold using their isoprene emission potentials, statistics, ozone and nitrogen oxide response rates and daylight ozone increment for Irnerio, Montagnola, University Gardens and Berti Pichat receptors. Isoprene production is highly concentrated in Bologna’s assemblage with Platanus × acerifolia, contributing 57.90% of normalized isoprene potential, and Sophora japonica making up for additional 21.08%. The two species contribute together 78.98% of normalized isoprene emission potential with first five species providing 99.25%. Ozone has a stronger response rate compared to that of nitrogen oxides (KO3=0.783 versus KNOx=0.257). As such, daylight ozone increment may be adopted as the managed endpoint in canopy management. University Gardens receptor is controlled by the daylight ozone increment of 6.7% while those of Irnerio, Montagnola and Berti Pichat are 2.3%, 1.9% and 0.8%, respectively. Within the constraint of 2% daylight ozone increment, University Gardens needs to have the reduction of 70.1% isoprene production potential while Irnerio only 13.0%. Replacing completely Platanus × acerifolia and Sophora japonica results in the University Gardens’ residual daylight ozone increment of about 1.41%.
- Research article
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1The University of Sheffield
- Volume 115 Issue 3
- Pages: 71
- - 85
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20251153-05
In photovoltaic green roofs, the electricity generation takes place over the vegetated surface via solar-electric process, whereas the thermal behavior is governed by evapotranspiration, substrate heat storage, and vegetation exposure under the effect of solar radiation. In the following section, a measured data set of sedum green roof in Ljubljana with elevated photovoltaics will be analyzed based on the comparison of three shade conditions of the vegetation surface: unshaded, partially shaded, and fully shaded. The Hydrothermal Constraint Number depends on evapotranspiration similarity, the vegetation-temperature correlation adjusted according to shading, photovoltaics’ correction to the evapotranspiration in the longwave range, and daytime heat-flux fraction to the heat flux reference. The measured evapotranspiration rate for 9 July 2024 is 3.98 mm day−1, and the modeled value is 4.15 mm day−1; for 25 July 2024, they are 4.08 mm day−1 and 3.95 mm day−1; and for 3 August 2024, they are 2.60 mm day−1 and 2.73 mm day−1. Thus, the corresponding RMSE is 0.145 mm day−1, the mean absolute error is 4.15 %, and the fidelity coefficient is 0.959. The vegetation-temperature correlation, θv = 0.935θa + 0.011Rg(1 − S), implies that every reduction of the short-wave shade-sensitive irradiation by 100 W m−2 results in the decrease of the solar thermal component of approximately 1.1 °C. Photovoltaics correction to the evapotranspiration by the long-wave exchange leads to the change in evapotranspiration.
- Research article
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1College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Peking University, Beijing 100871, China
- Volume 115 Issue 2
- Pages: 51
- - 70
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20251152-04
Public space analytics has become capable of capturing visual data, text data, behaviour data, environmental data, and administrative data. However, increased opportunities in evidence collection do not necessarily mean balanced evidence on users, since observable actions and simple perception tend to attract significantly more computational power than, for instance, safety, accessibility, climate comfort, universality, and management experience. The objective of this paper is to apply the proposed Evidence-Deficit Allocation approach to a ten-dimensional public space evidence register, featuring 427 dimension assignments and 58 dimension-level machine learning assignments. These ten dimensions include feeling towards place, satisfaction, sensory experience, use and activity, sense of safety, health, climate comfortability, perceived accessibility, universality, and feeling towards management. Evidence-Deficit Allocation involves several components including evidence share, machine learning share, local uptake, positive evidence-to-method deficit, and constraint load, which are then used to calculate a size-sensitive priority score and an under-adoption urgency score. Analysis finds that use and activity and feeling towards place represent 64.17% and 86.21%, respectively, of the total dimension evidence assignments, and machine learning assignments. It can thus be confirmed that there is a pronounced dominance of machine learning in behavioural and affective dimensions. Meanwhile, climate comfortability, universality, and feeling towards management represent 14.29% of dimension evidence assignment, but none of these three has any machine learning assignments. Use and activity achieves a maximum size-sensitive priority score of 100.00, while sense of safety scores 100.00 in urgency. Perceived accessibility, climate comfortability, management perception, and universality are four under-instrumented fields in public space evidence. In a 10,000-run perturbation analysis, the results are found robust against alternative constraint weighting.
- Research article
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1The school of Automation and Electrical Engineering, University of Science and Technology Beijing, Beijing, China
- Volume 115 Issue 2
- Pages: 33
- - 50
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20251152-03
Flood adaptation in land use in Nigeria calls for an intervention order that aligns with the level of flood burden, exposure of livelihood activities, and deterioration in land cover. In this paper, four flood-exposed communities; Odekpe, Umunakwo, Oko, and Okwe have been analyzed using the 198-respondent dataset on livelihood activity, size of farmland, flood shock index, nature-based integration value, and land cover type. About 61.1% of all respondents experienced severe to very severe flood shock, 72.7% of respondents earn their livelihood through farming and fishing, and 63.6% of respondent are exposed to small to medium-size farms. Odekpe had the largest flood shock value of 0.703, followed by Umunakwo (0.665), Oko (0.648), and Okwe (0.574). During 1990-2020, built-up and bare lands increased from 14.93 to 96.59 km2 whereas floodplains area increased from 183.07 to 332.73 km2. Vegetation and water bodies have declined during this period. The highest priority scores were allocated for ecosystem restoration and protection (27.51), green infrastructure development (25.01), and sustainable agriculture (24.80).
- Research article
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1School of English Language and culture, Xi’an Fanyi University, Xi’an, Shaanxi, 710105, China
- Volume 115 Issue 1
- Pages: 16
- - 32
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20251151-02
Singapore’s urban green spaces should promote biodiversity and yet be safe, legible, and cheap to maintain. Rapid vegetation growth and regular pruning are likely to reduce insect and bird faunas through reduced flowering, litter, understory, and nesting structures within humid tropical urban green spaces. This paper assesses 13 Singapore urban green spaces comprising 7 parks and 6 streetscapes and determines whether sites having high faunal capacity also generate high biodiversity return when subject to light maintenance activities. Assessment was based on data regarding vegetation density, maintenance class, planted vs. spontaneous vegetation, species richness, Shannon diversity, probable species numbers, and cross-taxon performance for aculeate hymenoptera, butterflies, and birds. Four calculated metrics were considered: composite faunal capacity, low-input biodiversity return, unfulfilled species numbers, and cross-taxon performance. While parks recorded high average composite faunal capacity values (0.765), streetscapes recorded high values of spontaneous vegetation (0.602). Sites maintained under low maintenance conditions produced the greatest biodiversity return, at 0.577, against medium maintenance levels (0.274) and high maintenance conditions (0.152). Current return was greatest for Tampines Eco-Green (0.429), Chuan Lane Park (0.368), NUS Ventus (0.291), and Admiralty Road West (0.241), while those showing low current return included West Coast Park, Jurong Central Park, and Sembawang Hot Spring Park, all of which exhibited greater maintenance release priority. Results indicate that biodiversity amounts and biodiversity returns give contrasting planning signals for tropical urban green spaces.
- Research article
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1Faculty of Architecture and Urban Studies Capital Design University Canada
2Department of Environmental Planning Pacific Research University Canada
3Department of Environmental Design Coastal Research University United States
- Volume 115 Issue 1
- Pages: 1
- - 15
- https://doi.org/10.70517/la20251151-01
Siting civic facilities in semi-arid settings should take into account both the need to locate facilities within a certain range from the people in terms of access to their services and the fact that some buildings are more sensitive to temperature than others. This analysis of a 29.5 ha plot located in the Green City of BenGuerir in Morocco is based on the data such as program areas, G+ floor configurations, the distance up to which people are willing to travel for certain types of facilities, population density, lighting loads, equipment loads, ventilation and air changes per hour, cooling and heating setpoint temperatures, wall and roof surface heat transfer coefficients, window solar heat gain coefficient, and annual cooling and heating intensities. As the result of calculations, mixed-use facilities demonstrate the highest internal gain intensity (65.28 W m−2), followed by the gymnasium (55.05 W m−2), the police center (49.10 W m−2), the secondary school (45.52 W m−2), and the primary school (43.73 W m−2). At the same time, residential buildings and the polyvalent room show the lowest figures (18.98 W m−2 and 19.15 W m−2). With regard to access requirements, primary schools and mixed-use facilities have the most important priority due to their preferred service distance being 750 m, while masjids and polyvalent rooms are second in order (1200 m). The annual cooling intensity is 51.13 kWh m−2 year−1, while the annual heating intensity is 25.18 kWh m−2 year−1. Thus, the coefficient equals 2.03. The obtained results suggest that high internal gain activities are to be avoided along.
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.