چكيده لاتين :
Site Analysis, presents an approach to landscape planning and development that combines public health, safety and welfare and site’s inherent characteristics. As such, the approach is firmly grounded by Ian McHarg’s ecological planning method. The basics of McHargian ecological planning involves conducting inventories, analysing ecological and social information, and then synthesizing this information to establish constraints and opportunities guiding the development of the landscape. In this book, the process of planning starts with programming and goal setting and then inventories are divided to physical, cultural and biological attributes of site, which then through site analysis, result in site constraints and opportunities.
Lagro’s process of site planning and design consists of programming, site selection, site inventory, site analysis, conceptual design, design development, construction documentation and project implementation.
He categorizes these eight steps into four general phases: pre-project or predesign, site assessment, design and implementation (p. 14-20). He is also highlighting the context and contextual analysis and builds on this foundation by adding steps involving programming and implementation to create a more comprehensive method, which is context sensitive. The major strength of the book is that it offers a significant contribution for site and landscape design procedures, an area often overlooked by authors.
The book’s eleven chapters follow Lagro’s eightstep method plus two chapters to clarify the relation of the “sustainable built environment” and “visualization of the spatial information” with the process of planning. Although these two chapters are introducing and discussing smart growth, sustainable design,
LEED rating systems for buildings, effective graphic communication, GIS etc., they are not integrated and dissolved in the proposed process and their places is not clearly mentioned. Moreover, content has been enriched compared with the first edition, towards adopting new concepts, methods and technologies that are introduced since then and tackling the argument about the necessity and importance of site analysis as one of the methods in landscape planning and development. Lagro argues that site analysis is a diagnostic process that identifies the opportunities and constraints for a specific land use program. The output of the site analysis process is site suitability for that specific land use and therefore he supports his claim by focusing on suitability analysis. He emphasizes that site and contextual analysis presents the uniqueness of the site’s physical, biological and cultural conditions and portrays site’s opportunities and constraints related to the intended development. In this edition, Lagro provides the most important attributes of the site and its surrounding, categorizing them and expressing their significance in land use terms.
He reported the idea that site inventory should prepare critical information on maps so that site analysis could synthetize them into knowledge about site suitability for the intended development. The charts, pictures and tables introduced in the text are concise, and well chosen. Case studies effectively demonstrate, for example, the importance of understanding regional and site characteristics such as soil, climate, watersheds, hydrology, wildlife, vegetation, geology, topography, legislation, utilities, circulation, history and land use, and other steps in the process. The new case studies are a wonderful addition to the second edition and depict how geographic information systems (GIS) are used throughout the landscape planning process.
This book is to detail each crucial step in the site analysis and planning processes, from site selection through design development. It shows how these activities are integrated to arrive at a site plan that successfully balances the needs of the client and other stakeholders with the site’s suitability for the intended land uses. This book will fill a void in the academic market by offering a comprehensive introduction to all stages of the site planning and design processes.
James A. Lagro Jr. is professor and chair of the department of Urban and Regional Planning at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He is a planner and a landscape architect with more than twenty-five years of experience who has published in leading publications.
