Nature, Self, and Being in the World: Revealing a Flourishing Ethics in Landscape Architecture through Poignant Landscape Experiences
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Poignant landscapes are gateways to our existential belongingness because they allow us to be moved by the world. Landscape architects have the potential to shape the worlds landscapes, as settings for poignant life experiences, and yet, an issue lies in the praxis of the profession. Contemporary landscape architecture and environmental ethics, as part of contemporary society, are enmeshed in binary narratives. Because interpretations of landscapes are inseparable from notions of nature, which hermeneutically carry existential stories of human-world relationships, when an enigmatic natural world was abandoned for the objectivity of biology and space, the worldview of landscapes also split into binary narratives of human versus nature, sacred versus profane, and poetic versus practical. Moreover, with the expansion of secularism and nondualist cosmologies such as Daoism and Indigenous teachings into the Western world, polarised moral judgements, which are loosely based on past Christian narratives, become paradoxical and unsupportive towards resolving contemporary social and ecological disputes. Therefore, this project argues for an approach to ethics based on the idea of flourishing, which sees morality as relational and that ethical individuals make autonomous choices to flourish within a world of social and ecological systems. \n \nTo return to the roots of being, this research asks landscape architects what a flourishing life and a flourishing environment really means to them. Poignant experiences with landscapes are used to provoke memory and awareness of being in the world and the sense of connectivity with other existences in the human, ecological, or spiritual worlds. Through the analysis of professional codes and mandates, a survey of landscape architects, and interviews with flourishing landscape architects, the research explores how the landscape architect, as a professional identity and as an archetype in the collective consciousness, is interpreted, performed, and communicated in landscape architecture. A hermeneutic approach was used to unravel concepts of nature, landscape, experience, poignancy, and ethical choice-making. The analysis reveals that a reflexive process that is simultaneously personal and collective can increase experiential awareness, expand horizons for meanings, and create opportunities for shifting paradigms essential to achieving a sense of human belongingness in the world.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.010 | 0.036 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.008 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.010 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.003 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".