Critical Landscape Planning during the Belt and Road Initiative

Abstract

The 414-kilometer China-Laos Railway, one of the first infrastructure projects implemented under China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), is rapidly nearly completion at the end of 2021. Coupled with hydroelectric dams, industrialization of new mineral belts, and super-highways, landscapes along this and similar development corridors in BRI countries are undergoing rapid and unprecedented transformation. This book is written for development agencies and environmental NGOs, who are engaged in the development and conservation of these landscapes, from the perspective of the built environment disciplines. While often the agents and accomplices of neoliberal development, the planning and design professions lack both critical scholarly reflection on their socio-environmental impact and adequate methodologies of professional practice for mitigating that impact. The most well-informed expertise in critical development studies rarely enters these professions or their projects, and there is a lack of publications in the planning and design fields that engage the implementation of large-scale infrastructure development. Addressing this scholarly lacuna, this book uses landscape architecture’s interdisciplinary focus on planning and landscape ecology to synthesize critical development studies with the built environment disciplines’ capacity, if not naive predilection, to intervene on the ground. Exploring cultural and scientific knowledge exchanges between China and Laos, nature tourism, resource networks, and new town development, this book provides chapters on the historical and interdisciplinary framing, teaching pedagogy, and site-specific examples of a wider “landscape approach” to development, notably a selection of 15 planning strategies developed by students, who followed this pedagogy since the groundbreaking of the China-Laos Railway in 2016.