A Transdisciplinary Approach for the Validation of Neighborhood Landscape Design Guidelines

Abstract

Although numerous planning and design guidelines have been developed to guide landscape implementation in urban areas, there is scant information on how they are validated before their application. Validation, defined in this study as the process of assessing the applicability and readiness for adoption of guidelines, is seldom reported but is essential if landscapes are to meet the diverse needs of stakeholders. This study focused on the validation of design guidelines for neighborhood landscapes by using a transdisciplinary process to integrate the opinions of the researchers who develop the guidelines, the policy makers who adopt the guidelines as landscape policies, the design practitioners who use the guidelines in design, and the residents who use the neighborhood landscapes once they are implemented. Three design schemes were developed based on the guidelines, and six surveys were conducted to understand the opinions of the four stakeholder groups. The transdisciplinarity of the validation process was assessed using three criteria: credibility, legitimacy, and saliency. The study found that (1) these three criteria can be used to assess the outcomes of the validation process, although each criterion was met to different degrees; (2) the overall assessment of the design schemes produced by following the design guidelines was favorable, but residents and policy makers placed different emphases on the assessment areas; (3) the perceived importance of particular ecosystem services in design schemes, such as heat and flood hazard mitigation, was relatively high, but maintenance of soil quality was less visible and less emphasized; and (4) all groups perceived particular ecosystem services, such as recreation and mosquito control, as highly applicable to neighborhood landscapes, while the importance of noise reduction, soil improvement, and stormwater treatment functions was more variable across the groups. The study yields insights that could be used to validate other guidelines.