Drawing from diverse disciplines including philosophy, history, cultural criticism, visceral geography, urban studies, gender studies, and racial aesthetics, the 18th Issue of LA+ explores the elusive and enigmatic theme BEAUTY in relation to landscape architecture and the constructed environment. Rather than arrive at any one singular definition of beauty, within its pages, contributors challenge readers with alternative views through deep and critical reflection. What is a “beautiful� landscape today? Is there such a thing as “natural beauty�? Why do humans across the cultural spectrum concern themselves so much with the beautification of themselves, their objects, and their surroundings? Is beautification benevolent or nefarious? Is there value — economic or otherwise — in beauty, and whose interests do ideals of beauty serve? In the end, why does beauty matter at all? LA+ BEAUTY is guest-edited by Colin Curley, a New York-based landscape architect and architect whose work navigates the complex environmental and socio-political dimensions of disturbed, contaminated industrial landscapes, and seeks to expand the range of their aesthetic and experiential potential.

How can design be used to challenge the status quo, to interrupt the jargon, to disrupt and redirect ecological and socio-economic flows? LA+ Journal’s fourth international design ideas competition invited designers to take an established place and design something to productively interrupt both its cultural and spatial context. What does this mean? It means injecting something different into a given context to effect new meanings and new functions. It means questioning what design does, who it’s designed for, what it looks like, and what it means. Issue #17 brings you the results of the LA+ Interruption design competition. As well as showcasing the award-winning designs and a comprehensive Salon des Refusés, LA+ Interruption features interviews with jurors Fiona Raby, Martin Rein-Cano, Mark Raggatt, Rania Ghosn, and Jason Zhisen Ho, and an essay by Katya Crawford, coauthor of the The Design Competition in Landscape Architecture (forthcoming).  

Almost everything that landscape architects design is ultimately for a community. Community can be the boon or bane of a project, and oftentimes both. LA+ COMMUNITY aims to explore how, over time, each of us moves in and out of multiple communities, shaping them as they shape us, and in turn shaping our landscapes and cities. We ask how different disciplines construct different ideas of community and how those communities are anchored in space and time, whose interests they serve, and what traces they leave. And we examine how - in this pluralistic, fragmented, and fluid world - designers can meaningfully engage with communities. Contributions from: Anne Whiston Spirn reflects upon her personal and professional journey through her long-term engagement with the Mill Creek community in the West Philadelphia Landscape Project. Architect and cofounder of the DisOrdinary Architecture Project Jocelyn Boys discusses how designers and policy-makers make assumptions about the "ordinary user" of public space and explores ways of understanding and improving how people with disabilities engage with such spaces. Historical geographer Garrett Dash Nelson contemplates the conceptual and practical slippages between understanding community in both its geographical and sociological forms, and what this means for designers seeking to give spatial form to the concept of community. A multi-perspective Q+A with BIPOC designers, educators, and artists Kofi Boone, Julian Agyeman, Hanna Kim, Alma du Solier, Jeffrey Hou, Melissa Guerrero, and Kat Engleman confronts the enduring practices of spatial injustice and the need for new processes, engagement, and outcomes for a racially and culturally inclusive future. Philosopher and author Mark Kingwell considers the literal ins and outs of the question "What is community?" in the midst of a global pandemic. Landscape architect Kate Orff speaks about the ways in which she uses community activism and different practices of engagement to drive better design outcomes. Criminologists James Petty + Alison Young open our eyes to the rise of hostile architecture and criminalisation of homelessness in public space. Designer Chrili Car reflects on lessons learned from working with a self-organised community in a remote village in northern Ghana to masterplan long-term local sustainability and greenbelt projects. Ecologist Jodi Hilty, President and Chief Scientist of the Yellowstone to Yukon Initiative, speaks about the realisation of this visionary wildlife-corridor project spanning 3,200 km, two countries, and hundreds of different communities and interests. Historic preservationist and planner Francesca Russello Ammon teases out the contradictions in the canonical urban renewal success story of Philadelphia's Society Hill. Landscape architect Jessica Henson gives us the inside story on the intractably complex socio-political and ecological task of master planning a 51-mile swath of the Los Angeles River with a diverse range of user communities. Michael Schwarze-Rodrian recounts the extraordinary achievements of the Emscher Landscape Park in Germany's Ruhrgebiet, where over the last 30 years a working-class community facing the trauma of transition to a post-industrial economy has been sustained by the medium of landscape, without the forms of displacement or gentrification typically associated with high-end greening. Urban planner and author of Just Sustainabilities Julian Agyeman elucidates what the culturally inclusive design of public space entails. Architect Mario Matamoros delivers a stinging critique of the way in which developers and designers in the Honduran city of Tegucigalpa dupe the public with cynical community consultation so as to anesthetise the possibility of dissent, and Sara Padgett Kjaersgaard interviews the CEO of the Federation of Traditional Owner Corporations, Paul Paton and landscape architect Anne-Marie Pisani about working with Indigenous communities in Australia to help facilitate self-determination and connection to their lands.

Issue 14 of LA+ Journal brings you the results of the LA+ CREATURE international design ideas competition, which explored how we can use design to achieve a more symbiotic existence with other creatures. The competition brief asked entrants to choose a nonhuman client and design something - a place, a structure, a product, a process, a system - to improve its life and increase human-nonhuman empathy. As well as showcasing the award-winning designs and a comprehensive Salon des Refuses, LA+ CREATURE features an essay by Lori Gruen (author of Critical Terms for Animal Studies) and interviews with jurors Timothy Morton, Kate Orff, Jennifer Wolch, Andrew Grant, Chris Reed, and Farre Nixon.

Time is ticking. That's what it does. Or at least that's how we represent what we don't understand. For physics, time is a byproduct of so called space-time, elastic goo created at the very moment that something came from nothing; the moment eternity stopped and the universe began. For geology, time is 4.5 billion years of compression and catastrophe. For biology time is 3.5 billion years of diversification and now the urgency of the sixth extinction. For anthropology time is 150 thousand years since mitochondrial Eve walked out of the rift valley in Ethiopia. For historians, time begins with Herodotus (484 BC) and ends, or rather doesn't, with Fukuyama's The End of History. For architecture time is ruination. For landscape architecture time is ephemerality, entropy, and growth. For all of us time is running out.

In the middle of the electromagnetic spectrum between the binary extremes of black and white it’s not gray, as you might expect, but green. And within green’s bandwidth there are more tonal variations than any other colour can make. Maybe this is why - envy, naivete, and money aside - green is generally synonymous with good. Green is paradise for Islam, luck for the Irish, and a healthy planet for environmentalists. Whereas the industrial past was grey, the future is green. LA+ Green explores the green spectrum from plants to politics and from art to science, with contributions from: Noam Chomsky; Robert D. Bullard; Kassia St. Clair; Neil M. Maher; Rob Levinthal; Sonja Dümpelmann; Peder Anker; Robert Mcdonald; Parker Sutton; Tamara Toles O’Laughlin; Nicholas Pevzner; Michael Marder; Shannon Mattern; Michael Geffel; Brian Osborn; Julian Bolleter; Cristina Ramalho; Robert Freestone; Richard Weller; Michael Geffel; Brian Osborn; Julian Raxworthy.

In this moment of seemingly compounding global crises and existential concerns about the future of the planet, LA+ pauses to consider the values and implications of speculation. How are speculative acts understood differently within specific disciplinary structures versus broader cultural perceptions? Whether employed as a means of influence, a method of production, a form of practice, a manner of inquiry, a way of seeing, or a motivating ideology, LA+ Speculation engages speculation and the speculative as world-shaping concepts worthy of deep and critical reflection. Guest edited by Christopher Marcinkoski with Javier Arpa Fernandez, and other contributors include: Merve Bedir, Casey Lance Brown, Stuart Candy, Paul Dobraszyk, Aroussiak Gabrielian, Daisy Ginsberg, Adrian Hawker, Souhei Imamu, Karen Lewis, Min Kyung Lee, Mpho Matsipa, Alexandra Sankova, Jonah Susskind, Ytasha Womak.

The Landscape Project is a collection of essays by the landscape architecture faculty at the Weitzman School of Design at the University of Pennsylvania, long considered a leading institution in the field of landscape architecture. This collection covers topics such as food, biodiversity, water, plants, energy, public space, politics, mapping, practice, and representation and serves as essential reading for students and professionals wishing to engage with the full scope of today's landscape. These essays radically expand the purview of landscape architecture.

Issue 10 of LA+ Journal brings you the results of the LA+ Iconoclast open design ideas competition, in which we asked designers to reimagine New York's Central Park, fictionally devastated by eco-terrorists protesting the loss of the world's forests. See what designers did when faced with the opportunity to challenge this icon of landscape architecture. LA+ Iconoclast also features interviews with jurors Geoff Manaugh (BLDGBLOG), Jenny Osuldsen (Snohetta), Charles Waldheim (Harvard GSD), Beatrice Galilee (The Met), Lola Shepard (Lateral Office), and Richard Weller (PennDesign), as well as a critique of competition entries by Julia Czerniak.

Risk is many things. It can invoke fun, temptation, or danger; it can be laced with uncertainty, fear, or hope. But most importantly for the design professions, risk is the engine of art and innovation. Complicating the risks inherent in every act of environmental design are two now dominant threats to humanity: climate change and social inequality, both of which are expected to make Earth a more volatile, dystopian planet. Risk reduction - under the rubric of resilience - is the new paradigm for landscape architecture and urbanism.

Ever since the 18th century when Alexander Pope advised his peers to consult the "genius of place", the idea that designers could interpret and then express the essential identity of a place has been venerated in landscape architecture. This issue of LA+ is devoted to critically exploring the nexus between place and identity with contributions from disciplines as varied as landscape architecture, residential architecture, philosophy, literature, ethics, marketing, anthropology, history, politics, and visual arts. Combining broad scope with intense focus, LA+ Identity shows spatial identity for what it truly is: a conglomeration of multiple factors that effects all of our lives.