Landscape Architecture Frontiers 048: Human Desires, Social Demands, and Landscape Future

(Paperback)

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Design is a means to satisfy social demands, and such demands come from human desires. Only when individuals desires fuse and grow into a collective consensus, can they be manifested and conveyed in various landscape forms as new public goods. As a public goods serving human desires and social demands, landscape design faces both challenges and opportunities preceding undergoing public crises. In this issue, LA Frontiers explores the implications of human desires on public behaviors through cross-disciplinary lenses of philosophy, social psychology, cognitive science, cultural studies, anthropology, sociology, history, etc. It would offer inspiring insights for landscape professionals to identity their role in responding to contemporary demands and those of future societies.

At present, in view of the spatial isolation caused by the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent prevalence of contactless services, the current conventional space-time narrative may be dramatically changed. The fact that both observing and being observed now become consumer goods within landscape enables landscape architects to recognize and examine peoples suppressed desires and unmet needs, introspect the rationality and necessity of marginal desires, and thus, redefine the sophisticated interactions between landscape design and human desires, as well social demands.

Author Bio

Kongjian Yu is a doctor of design at the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University, he is an honorary foreign fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and a professor at the College of Architecture and Landscape Architecture, Peking University.

Leiqing Xu is a professor at the College of Architecture, and Urban Planning and Expert of the Top Think-Tank at Tongji University.

Susan Nigra Snyder is co-director for the Critical Conservation and has a MDes from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.

George E. Thomas has a PhD in History of Art, is co-director at Critical Conservation, has a MDes from the Graduate School of Design, Harvard University.

Zhao Chen is a PhD candidate at the Department of Cultural Anthropology,at the University of Tokyo.

Galen Newman is an associate professor at the School of Architecture, Department of Landscape Architecture and Urban Planning, at Texas A&M University.

Estello Raganit is a senior designer at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates, Inc.

Monique Hiu Yan Wong is a landscape designer of Snhetta.

Xiaoxuan Lu is an assistant professor of Landscape Architecture at the University of Hong Kong.