Landscape Architecture Criticism

Performance Evaluation: Identifying Barriers and Enablers for Landscape Architecture Practice

“…The results of this study agree with the observations of Hadjri and Crozier [43] that there is always no clear single beneficiary in most performance evaluations. Instead, the beneficiaries of performance evaluation are the industry as a whole and the public-the end-users of the most evaluated and future landscape developments, and as the literature shows, conducting more performance evaluations can (1) help the profession's body of knowledge to grow [25,30]; (2) help the profession to better communicate the value of their work [12,32]; (3) inform future design practices and public policies and better contribute to sustainability [15,27,28,30,31,33]; and (4) help the evaluated project to achieve better performance [14,27,34]. The territorial authorities and the government, as an important funding source identified, are representative of the public, the ultimate beneficiary of evaluation practices.…”

“…Learning from the actual performance of implemented designs by using "a kind of planful science-based approach" is a fundamental way of helping the profession's body of knowledge to grow [25] (p. 46). Secondly, evaluating complete projects can help design professionals to better understand how their designs perform and function for users [27][28][29], and therefore, inform future design practices and public policies and contribute to sustainability through making future designs more user-friendly [15,[30][31][32][33]. Performance evaluations are the essential link in the process of identifying what users like and dislike and feeding these lessons back into future designs [15,33].…”

“…The designers, in collaboration with facility managers and owners, can also fine-tune the development to mitigate the underperforming aspects or enhance the expected performance [14,34]. In extreme cases, such evaluation can even "indicate a complete redesign of a site" [27] (p. 128). Finally, evaluating complete projects in a rigorous way can also help the profession to better communicate the value of their work, making the profession more accessible to mainstream science, the public, and decision-makers [12,32,35].…”

“…Despite the high importance perceived and recognized by numerous scholars and practitioners, performance evaluations remain rare in practice [27,33,[36][37][38][39][40]. Two barriers are frequently documented in the literature as preventing the implementation of performance evaluations of built environment projects.…”

Entre recherche et conception : l’évolution de Journal of Landscape Architecture (JoLA).

“…More recently, Jackie Bowring's Landscape Architecture Criticism (2020) 32 elaborates on the contribution JoLA makes in articulating the relationship between practice and research in 'Under the Sky'. The unpacking of built projects as a mode of scholarly research forces a consideration of the interdependencies between practice and theory, offering a common ground to professionals and academics.…”