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Landscape Logic is an essay on the need for a landscape-based approach to designing sustainable urban environments.

Urbanization is one of the biggest challenges of this century. Urban development comes at the expense of fragile ecosystems that protect and provide us with food and water, not to mention the associated increasing vulnerability to flooding, drought, and social inequality. We therefore need a landscape-based approach to urbanism that considers the biosphere as the context for social and economic development and takes the landscape as its basis.

Landscape-based urbanism utilizes the understanding of the landscape system and its ecological and social-cultural processes and relationships – landscape logic – as the foundation for designing sustainable urban environments across scales. Design with nature, people, and history are at the approach’s core. Using landscape logic, we can build nature-inclusively and climate-adaptively and ensure a healthy and safe living environment for everyone.

Steffen Nijhuis is a full professor of landscape-based urbanism and head of the landscape architecture section at the Faculty of Architecture and The Built Environment, Delft University of Technology, the Netherlands.