Research
Landscape architecture research in Canada is as diverse as the country’s topography. The landscape is a complex cultural and environmental entity that is in a constant state of flux. Resource extraction and site contamination have impacted our varied regional and urban contexts. These problems occur, at different scales, across the country and there is a wealth of knowledge held in separate institutions. Furthermore, our historical use of the land, and population and climate fluctuations including urban growth influence how we evaluate the health/well-being of the land and its users and design for the future. Our hope is that this design research network will unite researchers with a common interest in the landscape to appraise and generate methodologies and projects related to shared research questions. The Land|Terre Design Research Network (LT Design Research Network) is a forum for Canadian landscape research.
Our hope is that this landscape design research network will unite researchers with a common interest in the Canadian landscape to collaborate, sharing methods processes and projects related to shared research questions.
The country’s landscape architecture schools are housed in different disciplinary faculties, offering an immediate opportunity to expand the network into interdisciplinary research. Researchers address complex cultural and environmental issues that bridge social, cultural, scientific, political and economic knowledge. Collaboration is crucial. Academics and practitioners arrive at the discipline with backgrounds ranging from arts and philosophy to pure and technical science. The approaches to such a multi-faceted discipline vary widely as well. Methodologies in landscape architecture research include analyzing great public spaces (Tate and Eaton, 2015) and associating health benefits of risk for children at play (Brussoni, Ishikawa, Brunelle, and Herrington, 2017). They include how landscapes change over time using morphological analysis (Sandalack and Uribe 2016, Landman 2015, North 2012), and sustainable futures (Landman 2015). Research methods also contribute to contemporary theory (North 2018), the evaluation of modern landscape heritage (Valois 2012, Valois 2015) and making sense of place by analyzing photographs (Braiden, 2016).