LA+ Identity

In this issue:

• Ursula Heise discusses how we have become alien to our environment and why the notion of ‘sense of place’ must now give way to ‘sense of planet’;
• Nicole Porter examines the commercial phenomenon of landscape branding, with starkly different examples from Singapore and Norway;
• Mark Raggatt explains how a critical postcolonial discourse of Australian identity has been invoked by a development featuring a building-sized portrait of an Indigenous man;
• Jim Igoe reflects on the way that protected areas in Tanzania negatively impact cultural identity in order to secure ecological identity;
• Andrew Graan and Aleksandar Takovski contemplate what Skopje’s recent city-wide installation of figurative monuments says about contemporary Macedonian national identity;
• Ed Casey examines the complex identity of built place through a philosophical lens;
• Charles Waldheim discusses the changing identity of design schools in the United States;
• Rui Yang and Xiaodi Zheng write about the professional identity of landscape architecture in China;
• Mark Kingwell addresses how place and space shape self-identity, invoking Franz Kafka’s literary genius in his exploration of where identity is located.
• Julian Raxworthy relates the provenance of plants to cultural identity by documenting the story of a humble garden in an informal settlement in Cape Town;
• Clive Hamilton argues that the Anthropocene requires new identities as a western sense of self isolated from the surrounding world becomes increasingly untenable;
• Kerri Culhane and Molly Garfinkel find strong community identity in a New York housing development of the type lambasted by Jane Jacobs and the new urbanists;
• Miriam García García and Victor Ténez Ybern look at how an instance of ‘undoing’ design has resurrected the identity of Spain’s Catalan coast;
• Dirk Sijmonds reflects on how for centuries the Dutch have collectively shaped their nation’s landscapes as a continuing work in progress;
• Nicole Lambrou and Eric Lum question the reality of The Sea Ranch’s famed eco-identity; and
• Paul Preissner visits Munich, North Dakota, where he finds a powerful sense of place precisely because of its absence.

Binding: Softbound
ISBN: 978-1-939621-71-9
Pages: 120pp
Size: 10.5” x 8.75” Portrait
World Rights: Available