Editors’ Introduction

CHANGES IN LANDSCAPE JOURNAL STAFF AND EDITORIAL PROCESSES

In the fall 2013 issue, we announced major changes afoot at Landscape Journal. Coeditor Lance Neckar left the University of Minnesota to accept a position as Professor of Environmental Analysis at Pitzer College, Claremont, California and Director of the Robert Redford Conservancy for Southern California Sustainability, and he resigned as coeditor of LJ effective December 31, 2013. Managing editor, Vincent deBritto has also stepped aside from LJ in order to pursue other professional opportunities. In response to these changes, the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) Board of Directors appointed Daniel Nadenicek, Dean of the University of Georgia’s College of Environment and Design (CED), to join David Pitt as coeditor. Likewise, CED Associate Professor Ashley Steffens is the new managing editor. In light of these appointments and UGA’s capacity to fulfill LJ’s copyediting needs, the CELA Board also approved a relocation of the Landscape Journal editorial office to the University of Georgia until the current contract runs out in 2016, at which time CELA will seek proposals for new editors. The new address for the LJ Editorial Office is:

• Landscape Journal
  College of Environment and Design
  The University of Georgia
  285 S. Jackson Street
  Athens, Georgia 30602
  ljournal@uga.edu
  Tel 706-542-8113 Fax 706-542-4485

We have also updated the manuscript submission process and guidelines to an online submission procedure through E-Journal Press. For more information, see the Manuscript Guidelines in the back of this issue or visit our new site at lj.msubmit.net.

SCHOLARSHIP FOR A CHANGING WORLD

These internal changes have inspired us to wonder about how more profound and comprehensive changes taking place in the world will impact LJ as well as our academic and professional practitioner readers. With the many unprecedented social, economic, political, and environmental disruptions the nation and world have endured over the last several years, it is important to ask—where do we go from here? The future, it seems, promises only more uncertainty as leaders at all levels seek to regain stability and attempt to define the “new normal.”

In recent decades, the quest to locate the appropriate path forward has engendered speculation by pundits, futurists, and writers. In hypothesizing about distinct cycles within the larger pattern of history, William Straus and Neil Howe (1997) suggest that the nation was unraveling in the 1990s and that there would be a period of crisis about a decade later. That prophecy certainly proved accurate. Writing in a similar vein, post-crash authors such as Richard Florida, (2010) and Paul Gilding (2011), suggest that new ways of thinking, working, designing, and building inevitably emerge after periods of crisis and collapse. More recently, Rebecca Ryan (2013) interprets the seasonality of economics and suggests that a new future always emerges during the “dark days of the winter season.” While scholars may challenge a very structured interpretation of cyclical history, few will argue with these writers’ vantage and prescience on the inevitability of massive social and environmental changes occurring in the first decades of the 21^st century.

Many of these changes will directly affect those who design, plan, or manage the landscape and those who study landscape intervention through various disciplinary lenses. While we intend to discuss more of these changes in future Landscape Journal issues, this introduction focuses on the unrelenting transformation of technology, environmental challenges, and demographic changes and shifting populations.

Transformation of Technology

Information technology is a subject of significant debate among landscape architects. The dichotomous points of view found within the profession, discipline, and allied disciplines are similar to and influenced by perspectives found in recently published books and articles. Technology is sometimes seen as the enemy (or at least one of the enemies). For example, Richard Louv (2005) suggests that the allure of technology contributes to “nature deficit disorder” among our children and Maggie Jackson (2008) warns that technology and the overconsumption of information is causing a significant drop in the ability of our youth and many adults to focus attention.

While many landscape designers and planners agree with these points of view...