data jungle adventures

The term “landscape”, as defined by the European Landscape Convention (Florence, 2000), covers the part of the land, as perceived by humans, which evolves through time as a result of being acted upon by nature and humans. Landscape architecture involves planning, designing, managing, and nurturing the built and natural environments, as the American Society of Landscape Architects defines this field. 

A Geographic Information System (GIS) can be regarded as a field and a tool. It is a technological field that incorporates geographical features with tabular data. It is a tool since it gives access to overlay data, maps it, and analyses and assesses real-world problems. Its role is to examine spatial relationships, patterns, and trends in a specific geographic context. 

About the link between Landscape Architecture and the Geographic Information System, we can say first that landscape architects contributed to the foundation of GIS. From Warren H. Manning, founder of the American Society of Landscape Architects, Ian McHarg father of the overlay techniques documented in his book Design with Nature (1969), to Jack Dangermond, founder of ESRI, one of the leading GIS firms.

But what about today? 

How can GIS support landscape architecture and its professionals in producing functional and sustainable plans for livable spaces in an ever-growing world of environmental dilemmas?

Throughout the different stages of a landscape architecture project (plan, design, manage), we can trace a GIS’s role. It is found in a particular stage of a LA design project, fact-finding for site analysis. How?

Understanding is the basis of intervention

And this is the aim of fact-finding: to understand the context of the project area to create a design that fits it best. The fact-finding questions, the end goals they serve, and that can be answered using GIS are related to:

• Topography: a landscape design plan may require the creation of varying elevations from a flat site, use of a particular slope, or even reduce certain sections with a slope of the terrain. To understand elevation variations and how to deal with them, GIS tools offer accessibility to produce different elevation maps and create a digital elevation model. A Geographic Information System can also do slope analysis to extract different values of steepness and the slope’s direction, which takes us to the following. The direction of physical slopes is known as the aspect. In GIS, the aspect map produced shows a classification of values ranging from flat (-1) and north (0) to North (360), depending on the terrain being analysed.
• Shadow impact analysis: usually used to check and calculate the shadow impact of existing and proposed buildings on other features such as parks, parking, neighbouring facilities, etc., for different days of the year. What exactly is calculated? The duration, the percentage, and the area of shadow for the zone of interest. 
• Line of sight and visibility: the first is an analysis where we determine what section of the terrain an observer’s point of view can see. The start and the endpoint of the visibility analysis are determined by the order in which the vertices are drawn.
• Hydrological analysis: some of the questions asked during the fact-finding phase are related to where does the water come from? Where does it go to, and how? These questions can be answered through site collected data, hydrological analysis that includes surface drainage analysis, analysis of groundwater, surface water analysis, and categorisation of water resource utilisation types: drinking, agriculture, industrial, recreation, etc.
• Climate analysis: a design project’s manager and his team will have to understand a minimum of climate data through the set of meteorological conditions and characteristics of the given area of interest. Based on the central question here, we seek to collect data on rainfall, temperature, and humidity, mainly regarding extremes and long-term means and map these out using GIS.
• Dust: An exciting element for landscape architects working in desert contexts is dust and its events’ assessment. GIS can support by differentiating zones that are more exposed to dust systems because of their location or climatic conditions.
• Soil: the use of GIS here can be split into two prominent use cases. The first includes mapping the characteristics of soils, classifying them, and plotting their different types. The second is related to correlating and predicting if the plantation of certain trees can adapt to this or that type of soil. 
• Geomorphology: the examination of a relief, geomorphologically, can give insights into the height above sea level, the average slope inclination, and land texture local formation.
• Geology: geological input contributes to understanding the terrain, and the type of layers can guide landscape architects to a better understanding of where sandstone and limestone layers are spread across the project’s site for example. In addition to that, it can indicate the presence of specific special geological features, e.g., a field of fossils from the palaeozoic era (541-252 million years ago).
• Hydrogeology: where possible, having the hydrogeological data as an input in the analysis adds value to the landscape architect’s project. For example, if there is a probability that some aspects of his projects will be affected by an overflow of an underground water source, he would like to know beforehand. And that’s what GIS can present to him: a hydrogeological map showing, among others, different geological layers, water sources, faults, and underground water flow directions. 

Generative Design

Overall, GIS is not just a layering tool. It exceeds that in that we can use its analysis tools and workflow to intersect or study different combinations of layers. E.g., zones of highest rainfall quantity with dense vegetation cover.

Parametric design, this relatively new but promising approach that redefines the relationship between designer and design software, is capable of managing extensive data loads while keeping them organized through numerical and logical expressions. These features, apart from enabling the rapid creation of a plethora of forms, can be utilized to express both the design objectives and the complex relations and conditions that pre-exist in the urban landscape system.

Other usages of GIS that support landscape architectures’ work are related to more straightforward actions, like data conversions from AutoCAD to shapefiles, for example, and visualizing geotagged photos on GIS and its different layers of analysis, etc.

Conclusion

Crystal Cheng evoked “the case for GIS proficiency in landscape architecture”. She mentions that GIS is still perceived as a planning tool. This is similar to a comment that GIS cannot contribute to creativity. Others still talk about the under-usage of landscape architects’ potential geographic information systems. 

Maybe a different approach to using GIS in fact-finding is a good start towards incorporating more of these tools. Jack Dangermond calls GIS “a sort of intelligent nervous system for our planet when humanity desperately needs one to address the environmental and humanitarian crises at hand”.