Landscape Architecture Planning & Design

• These are study notes about planning and design in landscape architecture.

Key Resources

• Landscape Architectural Graphic Standards is the primary source being summarized.

Planning and Design Exam 2025

• Focus is on understanding key concepts and processes.

Landscape Planning

• It is about carefully using scientific and cultural information to make informed choices
• Landscape: all natural and cultural features that distinguish one area from another.
• Results in a written and graphic landscape plan, documenting goals, strategies, and spatial consequences.
• Involves 11 steps.
• Feedback loops exist where each step informs/modifies the previous and subsequent steps.

Steps in Landscape Planning

• Identification of planning problems/opportunities is the starting point
• Issues can be problematic or opportunities for the people or environment.
• Goal establishment, to address problems should provide a planning process basis.
• Goals articulate an idealized future.
• Commitments are made once goals are established.
• Landscape analysis, regional level inventories and analyses of biophysical and sociocultural processes are conducted at a broader level.
• Geographic information systems (GIS) are helpful.
• Landscape analysis, local level involves studying specific planning areas.
• The aim is to understand natural processes, and human actions and plans.
• Existing information gets collected and analyzed.
• Interdisciplinary teams are helpful.
• Detailed studies link inventory/analysis to problem/goals, understand human values, opportunities, constraints, and issues using suitability analyses.
• Scales may vary to explore linkages.
• McHarg popularized the overlay technique (now mainly done with GIS).
• Plan concept, options, and choices develop possible futures, give conceptual models for solving problems, and should relate to plan goals.
• Landscape plan preferred options are integrated (strategy for local scale); includes flexible guidelines.
• The landscape plan is a strategy for local-scale development using flexible guidelines.
• Policymakers and managers can use it to conserve, rehabilitate, or develop the area.
• Continued citizen involvement and community education interacts with the whole process.
• Public involvement is critical during plan development.

Environmental and Legal Considerations

• Environmental review manages impact as part of ecological movement.
• The NEPA process requires considering environmental concerns and community input for federal actions like highway, park, and airport projects.
• Private developments may require NEPA review too.
• Some states have "Little NEPA" laws (CEQA is more strict).
• NEPA has primarily two types of documents, EA and EIS.
• The EA is stream-lined, and the EIS covers things extensively.

Important Elements of the NEPA process

• Description of project / justification.
• Project alternatives for review.
• Current conditions evaluation.
• Potential impacts and mitigation.

Key decisions after NEPA

• Determine the Analysis levels
• The first chapter in an EA or EIS is a description of the proposed action, including the purpose and need for the project with supporting data.
• Development of Project Alternatives: Key component of an EA or EIS and provides critical comparison to the preferred alternative.
• Documentation of the Affected Environment:
• The first technical component of the document.
• Describes the baseline conditions for the project site and surrounding context for each of the resource disciplines.
• Evaluation of Environmental Consequences: The potential consequences of the project on the site and surrounding area are then identified, including short- and long-term impacts.
• Development of Mitigation Measures: The environmental review process also includes recommendations to reduce or offset the adverse impacts of the project.
• Circulation of Documents for Review: The various chapters of narrative and graphic information are compiled into a report.
• Completion of the Environmental Review Process: Following the public review period, all the comments are compiled and addressed, at which point the project can either be approved, change direction, or be dropped altogether. At the end of the EA process, if a project does not have significant environmental impacts, a Finding of No Significant Impact (FONSI) is prepared and signed by the appropriate federal agency, becoming the final environmental documentation for approval.
• Related statues include; NHPA. ESA, CWA, COE, EPA
• Potential Legal Challenges can actually derail a project so ensure accuracy

Legal: Permits and Regulations

• Professional licensure means a state has legislation under the "police power" permissible to protect citizen's health, safety, and welfare.
  • Landscape architecture is a relatively recent to professional licensure, in comparison to its sister professions of architecture and civil engineering
  • "Title" statute only regulates title usage
  • "Practice" statute regulates professional activities
  • "Practice act" statutes are supported by the ASLA.
• Certification by professional societies or industry groups available, not illegal without.
• regulation related to the landscape achitecture includes, Land use, preservation, or development. -threatened resources and plant and animal species,impact on environmental change,economic stimulation.
• Regulations should Zoning and Entitlements should be known
• Land Development and Growth Management Regulations can take the form of land development and growth management regulations.
• Regulations relating to the enviornment
• Historic Prservation

Project Administration:

• Essential to the success of any project.
• Project manager: responsible to client, principals, and project team.

Skills required of a project manager:

• organizational ability, communication, responsibility, technical skills

Duties of a project manager:

• proposal writing, project initiation, schedule & budgeting, work planning, monitoring, finance, team & consultant management, & client management.
• Additional services and quality control/ project closeout and writing all of this down in a secure location.