1 Introduction

Landscape architecture participates in development. Whether that participation is self-reflective or uncritical, complicit or compromised, this discipline has had significant impacts on development practice and academia that are often unacknowledged outside what is otherwise a relatively narrow professional field. In the ways landscapes are planned and studied, for instance, both geographic information systems and modern landscape ecology, which are today established parts of diverse social and natural sciences, owe their origins distinctly to landscape architecture.

In 1967, landscape architect Ian McHarg, often referred to as the father of Geographic Information Systems (GIS), wrote that “[w]here the landscape architect commands ecology he is the only bridge between the natural sciences and the planning and design professions, the proprietor of the most perceptive view of the natural world which science or art has provided” (p. 105). With global urbanization increasing, both as physical land use change and as expanding discourse and rhetoric, not at any time since the beginning of the twentieth century’s environmental movement in the early 1970s has this burden of “bridging” been more imperative. New allegiances between development agencies and planning institutions, such as in China’s recent ecological “red line” policies (Bai et al., 2018), are extending these institutions’ (and their planners and landscape architects’) remit into sensitive non-urban landscapes and socio-ecological systems. While often the agents and accomplices of neoliberal development in countries such as Lao PDR, the planning and design disciplines generate scarce critical scholarly reflection on development and offer few models of practice for critically engaging or mitigating large projects.

A significant portion of this book presents planning proposals for rural development situated in northern Laos. “Development” here includes such projects, practices, and processes as land conversion, linear infrastructure building, ecological resilience, impact mitigation, and resource access and redistribution. These planning proposals are intended to be presented and debated with regional and national governments, multilateral banks, international environmental and human rights NGOs, civil society, and environmental movements. These actors are not the urban real estate developers, town planning boards, and city governments most landscape architects, architects, and planners are trained or accustomed to interact with. The most well-informed expertise in critical development studies rarely enters these professions or their projects, and there is a lack of publications in the planning and design fields that engage the implementation of large-scale infrastructure development. This book addresses this scholarly lacuna and uses landscape architecture’s interdisciplinary focus on planning and landscape ecology to synthesize or “bridge” critical development studies with the planning and design disciplines’ capacity, if not naive predilection, to intervene on the ground.

This bridging is admittedly uncomfortable, and intellectuals and professionals will disagree with this book. Green academics and geographers may, at least in the first half of this book, read little new here but a rediscovery of decades of their literature. Conservation biologists may see and rebuke a deconstruction of nature and scientific authority. Development practitioners, from both the international development community and built-environment camps, will argue that they are already practicing in interdisciplinary ways. Landscape academics will admonish us for shedding decades of landscape architecture discourse. When teaching our students as well as writing this book, we bear this potential crossfire in mind and deploy them as productive motivators in our search for alternative models of landscape architecture education and practice that more effectively bridge development, geography and natural sciences.

2 Critical Interventions

While this book details a pedagogy of planning, its primary reflections are on how planning for environmentally sensitive, rapidly developing contexts such as northern Laos should be approached by planners. There are at times unresolved tensions in our presentation of “critical” landscape planning as a pedagogy versus as a practice. This tension results from whether such a practice is relegated to the academy, the profession, consultancy, advocacy or a combination of these. There are strong institutional fields that make such a practice near impossible regardless of the host or medium. We must admit that this pedagogy is situated in two ways: Firstly, it is reactionary to ongoing rapid development in Lao PDR, primarily spurred by China’s Belt and Road Initiative launched in 2013 and the assemblage of agro-industrial and infrastructural projects that predate or accompany it; and secondly, this pedagogy is taught as a required design studio course in landscape architecture at the University of Hong Kong, which enables or enhances varying degrees of access to Southeast Asia and relieves some burdens of the institutional fields present when operating from North American and European contexts.

Doyle and Doyle (2000) assert that environmental studies’ “strategic problem-solving, … eclectic methodology of interdisciplinary approaches, [and] … critical and at times radical thought and propositions” are useful “to bridge the gap between theory and practice” (p. xxx). However, doing planning, as opposed to studying it or the sciences that may (or may not) underpin it, is arguably different than being a critic of planning. It is important to consider how critical development specialists (e.g., a critical geographer or critical anthropologist) are trained and their frequent hesitation to generate tractable proposals from what are otherwise very robust, critical, and generative disciplinary spaces. For anthropologist Tania Murray Li in The Will to Improve, a book based on her fieldwork and consultancy in Indonesia’s Sulawesi highlands, this hesitation is reflected in her inability to suggest effective development programs:

I find an ethnographic appreciation of the complexities of rural relations to be antithetical to the position of expert. This might seem counterintuitive. Surely a person like me, after more than a decade of research, has ideas about how to translate that knowledge into effective programs to help people? Indeed, I am sometimes asked by anthropologically trained development administrators in Indonesia to provide suggestions about what they should do. More specifically, they ask me to provide them with a bridge between my research describing the dynamics of rural life, which some of them have read, and the world of projects, which they inhabit. Such a bridge eludes me. Why is it, I ask myself, that so many experts can examine Indonesia and devise programs to improve it, whereas I cannot? (Li, 2007, p. 3)

Li further describes how development projects result from acts she calls the “rendering technical” from a field of preexisting, predetermined capacities or solutions, the construction of “an arena amenable to management and calculation” (p. 28). This act is similar to what political ecologists Forsyth and Walker (2008) articulate as “problem closure” in their work in northern Thailand (p. 12). Li articulates her critical position here primarily as “diagnostic” (p. 3); for her, the role of critic and expert (e.g., the planner) are distinct because of the expert’s necessity to define problems in terms of the solutions that can be offered. Geography’s various interdisciplinary constructions for studying nature-society relationships, such as political ecology and land change science (Turner & Robbins, 2008) or, more recently, a call for a critical physical geography (Lave et al., 2014), hold, to various degrees, cultural-technological positions that challenge Li’s distinction between critic and expert. A large portion of Chapter Two: A Pedagogy of critical landscape planning is dedicated to developing a cultural-technological position for landscape architects doing development planning, i.e., landscape planning, and exploring Li’s circumscription of what constitutes a “project.”

3 Landscape Planning as Sustainable Development

Although this book is written from the perspective of the design disciplines and is intended to effect change in and for various silos of landscape architecture education, in programs both design-oriented and science-oriented, we offer considerable bridging into development, geography, and natural sciences. Indeed, in the book as in teaching, we hold an outward valence and deploy mostly foreign discursive sounding boards to make and justify both pedagogical choices and suggestions for how to do planning.

This book also offers a significant break with the ecological planning and landscape ecology literature from landscape architecture. Landscape ecology is defined as “the science and art of studying and improving the relationship between spatial pattern and ecological processes on a multitude of scales and organizational levels” (Wu, 2008, p. 2103). Richard T. T. Forman, professor emeritus in Harvard’s Department of Landscape Architecture, is considered the father of modern landscape ecology, as well as the subfield of road ecology. Since its inception in the mid-1980s, modern landscape ecology has become a vibrant field over the last three decades in various biological, geographical, and social sciences (Cushman et al., 2010). Furthermore, early geographic information systems (GIS) research and development addressed questions of “development suitability” among human landscape use (such as agricultural or industrial), environmental limits (such as slope, soils, and water supply), and their consequences or services (such as erosion and pollution control) (Chrisman, 2006). Indeed, throughout the 1990s, land-use planning in Laos was rationalized through “scientific” expertise stemming from such land suitability analysis and geospatial software environments (Lestrelin et al., 2012, p. 583). Although, in the course of their learning, our students have engaged with landscape ecologists, none of those landscape ecologists had trained in landscape architecture, and, indeed, they recognize little if any disciplinary lineage with landscape architecture. The same is true for natural and social scientists deploying GIS.

Significant ideological barriers are also present. With few exceptions, most landscape architects and planners are disciplinarily short-handed to engage sustainable development outside of what is termed urban sustainability. This inadequacy requires a shift (not merely expansion) in design discourse and related built-environment fields from urban sustainability to conservation and sustainable development. Sustainability is most commonly defined as “…a dynamic balance among three mutually interdependent elements: Protection and enhancement of natural ecosystems and resources; economic productivity; and provision of social infrastructure such as jobs, housing, education, medical care and cultural opportunities” (Dominski et al., 1992, as quoted in Bell & Morse, 1999). Alternatively, the International Union for the Conservation of Nature (IUCN) has, since the 1980s, defined “sustainable development” as “…development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their needs” (WCED, 1987). Key to this latter definition is the framing of sustainable outcomes in terms of “ability,” which foretells the focus of post-development theory on, rather than material outcomes, the means of development, the process of development, and ensuring that people have the capacity to improve their own lives (Sen, 1999). Arguably, most of the planning and design disciplines (i.e., landscape architecture, architecture, urban planning) take the former definition, which presumes a necessity to quantify resources, to be economically productive, and that social infrastructure, including health and well-being, is something to be provided. For landscape architecture to effectively engage in landscape planning and development, landscape architects must wield a discourse of sustainable development and shift away (not merely expand) from design’s dominant forms of economic or urban sustainability. This shift is explored through situated, Laos-specific discourse from geography in Chapter Four: Locating discourses and narratives for intervention.

4 A Definition of Critical Landscape Planning

Landscape architects are not traditionally trained to be critical; they are also not trained as natural scientists, and landscape architects’ expertise in development should be treated with suspicion. Landscape architects are mostly designers (e.g., artists) who tend toward ecologically conceptualizing their practices with varying degrees of social and (natural) scientific sophistication. Although landscape architecture claims distinct lineages in human geography and town planning, it is often the more mainstream town planning traditions that drive the field both academically and professionally. However, Gerald Young, in his 1974 survey of applied human ecology fields, remarked that:

[S]everal of the soundest and most successful ecologically based environmental consultant firms are essentially converted landscape architecture firms, e.g. Wallace, McHarg, Roberts and Todd in Pennsylvania or Steinitz and Rogers in Massachusetts. This latter trend presents a difficulty in trying to distinguish an ecological method specifically for landscape architecture; most of its more prominent practitioners, at least those in print, tend not to separate it from the field of planning and generally make little attempt to distinguish method (Young, 1974, p. 53).

Although we by no means have naive faith in the capacity of “design” (as a holistic approach from the design disciplines) to offer ways to improve improvement, we do argue that landscape architecture’s role in the institution of planning remains, in its capacity (and responsibility) as McHarg had argued in 1974, to “bridge” planning with natural science. We further this argument in this book to suggest landscape architecture’s contemporary role to bridge planning with critical development, as well as conceptions of nature that hold it, in its own right, distinct from humanistic social deconstruction (e.g., conservation biology; see Soulé, 1995).

There are numerous, almost assuredly insurmountable, barriers to what could be considered “critical” planning. Planning is largely mainstream, dominant and an active participant in the neoliberalization of science. Planning suffers from a lack of effective interdisciplinary knowledge and praxis with both critical social science and applied ecology. We do not address these issues, nor do we provide a comprehensive survey of critical social theory or critical approaches as they pertain to development. Instead, we demonstrate the use of critical reflection as conceptual generators in the making (and drawing and designing) of plans. We bridge tenets from design, such as process-based and iterative approaches, to similar process-based axioms and methods in post-development theory.

Our working definition of critical landscape planning is as follows:

A practice of critical landscape planning, routed in landscape architecture, uses multiple forms of sustainability to plan for landscapes engaging in (or encountering) development. The critical landscape planner holds a cultural-technological position and simultaneously applies science to specific site conditions, is critical of that science, and in the process and practice of applying it, refines and deepens the relevant scope of work.

Whether done by a consultancy firm or a large international NGO (with no designers or planners), planning is almost always a compromised effort. We are attempting to push planning towards a more momentary and political practice of sustainability (not economic or urban sustainability) that is supported by post-development theory and emancipatory aspirations. The conceptual approaches in students’ projects presented in Part Two of this book are driven by a critical development focus, which can be distilled even from the project titles, such as: Negotiating with ethno-ecology: Landscape management strategies for northern Laos’s ecotourism boom; Empowering a labor transition during enclosure and securitization of Luang Prabang’s natural heritage; or Water risk and responsibility: A political-chemical land genealogy for the Muang Sing Valley, Laos.

5 Organization of This Book

This book is divided into two distinct parts. The three chapters in Part One have a wide remit, covering issues from pedagogy to practice, reframing the development history of northern Laos as an assemblage of projects, and surveying the discourses necessary, hopefully, to make development planning better—or as anthropologist Li (2007) would say—“for how improvement can be improved” (p. 2). Part Two surveys nine strategic planning proposals developed from that pedagogy and discourse.

In Chapter Two: A Pedagogy of critical landscape planning, we suggest a form of critical research and practice in landscape architecture that actively engages the global development community. We frame critical landscape planning as produced through three primary struggles: holding cultural-technological positions; ensuring transdisciplinary approaches through culturing and immersion; and maintaining momentum via process-oriented approaches to development. We cover critical landscape planning’s definition as an applied critical research practice, address its primary challenges institutionally, academically, and practically, and describe the aspects of the landscape architecture design discipline that enable it. This is conveyed through reflection on our approaches to project case study selection and design exercises, stakeholder relationships, approaches to fieldwork, capacity for intervention, and association with parallel research efforts. Much of the contents, although supported academically, are structured as suggestions that are equally important as methods for design research and professional practice. These suggestions include replacing “site analysis” with a process of site-specific interdisciplinary socialization and replacing design and planning “concepts” with generative (even if often incommensurable) cultural-technological positions.

Chapter Three: From land-locked to land-linked? constructs a history of infrastructure-building in Laos understood through economic connectivity. This chapter challenges the dominant narrative of a dehistoricized, often linear progression from land-locked to land-linked or from isolation to integration by contextualizing the contemporary imaginations and developments of Laos within the broader social, economic and political transitions across the Mekong region. We ground the distinct histories of three loosely defined historical periods between the mid-nineteenth century and present day in discourses specific to their times and places, each with their own geographic conception of the Mekong region and particular combination of socio-economic and geopolitical imperatives driving investment in large-scale infrastructure projects. This chapter presents development projects in Laos as relational and cumulative and supports an understanding of development as a process instead of product.

Chapter Four: Locating discourses and narratives for intervention explains why particular literature (i.e., secondary sources) were included as supporting knowledge for our approach to landscape planning. This chapter argues that planners and designers engaging in a “critical” landscape planning need a proactive, rigorous and reflective approach to assembling the discourses, both global and local, in their projects. Discourse is assembled from post-development theory, cultural anthropology, sociology, political science, political geography, and political ecology. Drawing from a selection of articles on the recent (i.e., since establishment the Lao People’s Democratic Republic in 1975) political economy and ecology of Laos by Lestrelin et al. (2012), Goldman (2001), Barney (2009) and Dwyer (2020), we foreground four critical concepts that function as conceptual drivers of the strategic planning proposals featured in Part Two of the book. These critical concepts are: the politics of land-use planning; sustainable development paradigm; frontier resourcification; and the promise of infrastructure.

The strategic planning proposals in Part Two are loosely grouped into four thematic areas: (1) Infrastructural connectivity and difference; (2) Western alternative development and Chinese development; (3) Chinese mass nature tourism and ecotourism; and (4) Northern scientific knowledge and indigenous knowledge. These planning proposals engage the development of large-scale agro-industry, infrastructure and extractive projects, and the milieu of green developmentalist projects that contest and enable them, such as protected areas, community forestry programs, and corporate social responsibility projects. Political economist Simpson (2014) following Hirsch (1998) argues that most environmental movements in the Global South have “crystallised most clearly around large-scale resource projects” and that they are “movements that ‘oppose something’” (p. 50). Although not overtly activist in nature, most of the included planning proposals in Part Two do have, as evidenced in their thematic groupings by chapter, normative or emancipatory objectives aligned with the deconstruction of development and nature.

Indeed, for every special economic zone, development enclave, satellite city, or resettlement site in rural Laos, there might just be an unassuming planner, architect or landscape architect doing a landscape impact assessment, drafting a new plan or making a rendering to motivate investment. The planning and design disciplines are often complicit in development violence through mainstream professional practice. Deeper awareness of the development process, starting from an immersion and culturing of landscape designers in the critical and technical disciplines that actually debate and practice sustainability in Laos and related contexts, however flawed, is necessary to improve development outcomes.