Master Plans for City Landscaping

Advantages

• City landscaping provides a win-win approach when creating citywide projects. First, it ensures that designs and projects are functional and that citizens will benefit from them. Second, by considering aspects of landscaping, the designs often enhance the natural aspect of the location, as well as ensure that projects are pleasing to the eye. Each project also follows a certain set of rules and regulations to maintain order and functionality. For example, when creating a road or a highway, developers ensure that the size, shape and quality of each road meet the city standards.

Components

• Landscaping a city, because of its immenseness, is not as easy as landscaping a particular garden or park; however, the components and concepts are essentially the same. When creating a master plan for a city landscape, developers consider several components: evolution planning, ecological and natural sustainability, and historical and cultural aspects of locations.
  Evolution planning considers the natural and ecological aspects of locations. Developers often assign ecology and biology experts to study the flora and fauna of a location to make sure that their survivability is considered in the landscaping plan. Historical and cultural locations also get the same treatment. Developers also work based on the natural features of the landscape, instead of removing or destroying them. For example, natural hills and lowlands are left as is as much as possible.

Preplanning Stage

• Preplanning requires that administrators and designers perform a thorough site analysis to assess a city’s current situation and to review the types of future developments they may introduce. This includes soil boring and examinations, testing for possible elements within the soil, and looking for presence of environmental elements that could affect future developments. These are then included in the site analysis report for point-to-point comparison when the master plan is executed.

Goals

• Landscape master plans for cities should be environmentally sustainable in developing an ecologically grounded landscape. The master plan should also easily adapt to human activities and experiences, meaning that nearby locations and facilities should complement each other for easier travel. Because cities often expand after a few years, each new project or section should also be planned in such a way that nearby locations will complement the project and that expansions are possible.