6th Fábos Conference on Landscape and Greenway Planning

Abstract

This editorial is an overview of a Special Issue of Land entitled “Selected Papers from the 6th Fábos Conference on Landscape and Greenway Planning: Adapting and Expanding Contracting Cities.” This Special Issue of land contains six papers—most of which were presented at the 6th Fábos Conference on Landscape and Greenway Planning (Fábos et al. 2019) held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst 28–30 March 2019.The Fábos conference theme was to explore the social and economic potential of linear green spaces in urban areas that are declining or expanding.

1. Introduction

Being a former graduate student (MLA 1973) mentored by Emeritus Professor Julius Gy Fábos, I am very pleased to guest edit this Special Issue of land entitled “Selected Papers from the 6th Fábos Conference on Landscape and Greenway Planning: Adapting and Expanding Contracting Cities.” This Special Issue of land contains six papers—most of which were presented at the 6th Fábos Conference on Landscape and Greenway Planning [1] held at the University of Massachusetts Amherst 28–30 March 2019.

The Fábos Conference on Landscape and Greenway Planning is held every three years to bring together scholars who are influencing landscape planning, policy making and greenway development from local to international levels. The aim is to explore how landscape architects and planners from different countries have approached greenway planning and to understand how greenways can be tailored to each country or region’s geographic, cultural and political contexts. The 2019 Fábos conference theme was to explore the social and economic potential of linear green spaces in urban areas that are declining or expanding.

2. Results and Discussion

There are five research papers and one review paper that address this theme. Olivia Horte and Theodore Eisenman’ s review paper [2] is a systematic literature review and typology of urban greenway scholarly papers. They reviewed some 52 referred articles to identify gaps in greenway scholarship as well as develop a typology for urban greenway research. The remaining papers address physical, cultural and historical greenway research occurring in Zhengzhou City China, Lisbon Portugal, Amman Jordan, Hungary and Guangzhou China.

Huawei Li et al. [3] map and analyze the role of parks effect on the urban heat island in Zhengzhou City China, which is an expanding urban area. The authors use remote sensing imagery to analyze 123 parks looking at the cooling effect on the dense expanding urban area of Zhengzhou City. In another paper in the Special Issue, Wenxiu Chi and Guangsi Lin conducted a case study [4] on a highly dense area in Guangzhou China to see if the greenway areas match the needs of resident’s physical and social activities.

There are two papers in the Special Issue that analyze aspects of urban morphology, which is important for urban neighborhood development and structure. Rui Justo and Maria Matis Silva [5] analyze the role of vegetation in decoding urban morphology within three neighborhoods in Lisbon Portugal. Anne Gharaibeh et al. [6] also look at urban morphology of Amman Jordan with specific reference to the role of urban streams. They utilized historic areal photos and maps as well as interviews to better understand the perception of urban morphology change over time.

Finally Albert Fekete and Lazio Kollányi [7] utilize research based design techniques applied to historic castle gardens in the Caspian Basin Hungary. Such knowledge will be useful for historic interpretation as well as garden restoration.

3. Conclusions

These six Special Issue papers explore the physical, historic and cultural aspects of urban greenspace from multidisciplinary perspectives. More conference papers can be found in the online conference proceedings [1].