About This Issue

This Spring 2024 issue of Landscape Journal has six articles and four book reviews. The first two articles focus on urban parks in cities with unique cultural histories and socioecological contexts. The research article by Binita Mahato examines the historical effects of park segregation and unequal investment on current park design in Montgomery, AL. Her article raises social justice questions with serious public policy implications. The second article, by Vicente Zárate‐Flores and Lane Fargher‐Navarro, examines the modifications made during the Covid‐19 pandemic to parks in Merida, a city in Yucatan, Mexico. The piece examines and critiques the decision‐making process that led to these changes and analyzes their impacts. Lessons learned from this global health crisis continue to be discovered and published in Landscape Journal.

The next two articles focus on green infrastructure design and communication. Joowon Im and Jiyoon Yoon explore how schoolteachers can be enlisted to promote awareness about green infrastructure and its social and environmental benefits. Jessica Rossi‐Mastracci focuses on cladograms as an information organization and visualization tool. Her article suggests potential applications that could advance design research, enable community engagement and design decision‐making, and improve student learning.

The final two articles focus on academic policies and practices that influence curriculum design, program accreditation, and faculty hiring and promotion. David Barbarash writes on efforts at Purdue University to annually assess their BLA curriculum and revise it, when necessary, to achieve evolving learning objectives. He observes that teaching critical thinking skills can have lifelong benefits for students, whereas vocational education leads to more immediate benefits (i.e., getting that first job after graduation). Finally, Ashley Steffens, Ebru Özer, Charlene LeBleu, and Hala Nassar present the baseline data they have gathered on women’s success in landscape architecture programs across North America. Future longitudinal research, one hopes, will show increasing gender equality in career opportunities and achievement.

Rounding out this spring issue are four reviews of recent books on landscape scholarship. This issue’s expert reviewers are Richard C. Smardon, Beichen Yu, and Jeremy Foster. Professor Smardon’s review of Riley’s colorful life story led me to reflect on my own interest in Riley’s writing early in my career. Robert Riley’s 1990 article in Landscape Journal, “Some thoughts on scholarship and publication,” still resonates today.