Beginning with the foundations of community development, An Introduction to Community Development offers a comprehensive and practical approach to planning for communities. Road-tested in the authors' own teaching, and through the training they provide for practicing planners, it enables students to begin making connections between academic study and practical know-how from both private and public sector contexts. An Introduction to Community Development shows how planners can utilize local e...

"What does the landscape architect actually do as a design?" The authors investigate this seemingly simple question. What resources are available for designing open spaces? What part is played by conditions deriving from nature? How are locations and spaces created in the open air, how are paths routed and boundaries set, how are hard and soft materials used? Drawing on practical and theoretical experience, this introduction, often used as a textbook, reveals the central components of design ...

Offers an introduction to technical and constructional open space planning, with all the relevant topics, from the most common materials and surfaces to the construction of open space elements and the use of plants.

In today's world - despite the dramatic anthropogenic environmental changes - a proper understanding of the relationship between humanity and nature requires a certain detachment. The pressing problems in their whole extent will only be fully understood and solved with comprehensive and patient analysis. Accordingly, this book develops new perspectives on fundamental questions of biology, ecology, and the economy, integrated within a framework of a terminology specially devised by the authors.

By illuminating the epistemological backgrounds of ecological-economic research, the authors lay foundations for interdisciplinary environmental research and offer guidelines for practical action. In close contact to the findings of present-day biology and economics, they demonstrate the fruitfulness as well as the shortcomings of modern science for the understanding of the proper place of humankind in nature.. Frequently, current problems in the fields of economics, ecology, politics, philosophy and biology are discussed in a kind of "dialogue" with thinkers and poets like Bacon, Quesnay, Kant, Goethe and Novalis...