The Big Asian Book of Landscape Architecture

Many Asian societies share a deep understanding of the centuries-old balance between human and natural systems. For the last decades, the effects of globalisation have threatened this local knowledge, leading to the disappearance of cohesive environmental ethics. Recent political developments such as RIO+20 and the Nagoya Convention (2012) suggest that revisiting traditional ecological philosophies can provide new possibilities to approach current environmental crises.

The endeavour to defend local ecological philosophies and competencies is not a new phenomenon in the Asian context. First attempts can be traced back to the end of the industrial revolution, which overturned centuries of nature-and-culture adjustments, giving rise to the idea of political ecology. Theories discussing concepts such as ‘citizen disobedience’ (Thoreau, 1849), ‘mutual aid’ (Kropotkin, 1901), and ‘universal geography’ (Reclus, 1891) emerged alongside the ideas of ecological conservation and civil society resistance in the Asia Pacific region. For instance, a politician and social activist Shozo Tanaka, considered to be the first Japanese environmentalist, engaged in the advocacy for rural resistance following the Ashio mines pollution in 1890. Recent years have seen a resurgence of local political philosophies and a renewed focus on Asian ontologies lost since the nineteenth century.

To decipher current dynamics of Asian landscape, it is essential to understand and appreciate what is happening at a local level through analysing contemporary projects. Impacted by the environmental crises, Japan and Singapore have each demonstrated their capacity for resilience through the ecological philosophies deeply rooted in their ontologies. This represents a legitimate resistance to the current intellectual orthodoxy infused by various international congresses, which try to reassess each culture on generic models. Notably, two cases are examined here : the ecological philosophy approach of a landscape architecture firm in Japan dealing with social injustice, and the political ecology approach of urban farmers in Singapore addressing regional spatial injustice.