<p> During the 21st century, more people will reside in cities than in rural areas for the first time in human history. As cities expand to accommodate their growing population, pressure is mounting on local biodiversity and the ecosystems they support. This promoted the U.N. Convention on Biological Diversity in collaboration with the City of Singapore to develop a biodiversity index specifically for cities. In 2014, the final draft of the City Biodiversity Index was released. Twenty-three indicators comprise three categories that assess: native biodiversity, ecosystem services, and municipal support for local biodiversity. A case-study was designed for Starkville, MS to better understand the merits of the index and its application to small rural town planning. The research illuminated the breadth and flexibility of the index across multiple scales and the availability of local resources to deliver a meaningful biodiversity analysis.</p><p>

This dissertation traces the recovery of the landscape idea during the middle decades of the 20th century by a group of public intellectuals, scholars and designers responding to the everyday realities of the modern American built environment. That recovery served as a corrective to modernism’s construction of landscape as either abstract utopian space or retrogressive historical tableau. The primary catalyst for this renewed interest in landscape as a representation of human cultures and their complex relationship with the natural world was the essayist and critic John Brinckerhoff Jackson and his magazine Landscape. During the years of Jackson’s editorship (1951–1968), the magazine became a locus for intellectual exchange, a gathering place for a community of scholars from different disciplines who were drawn to Jackson’s unique voice. Jackson’s essays in the magazine used the term landscape in a way that was not common outside of the field of human geography. Here landscape did not describe a picturesque or painterly scene, nor did it describe a process of beautification. Jackson wrote of landscapes that seemed somewhat prosaic: the everyday, ordinary environments of city streets, rural farms, individual dwellings, highways and the commercial strip. He insisted that understanding how to read these places for their social, cultural and ecological content was a necessary—though too rarely employed—prelude to imagining new prototypes for the design and management of human environments. The mid-century intellectual milieu fostered by J.B. Jackson ultimately nurtured a contemporary (and still evolving) understanding of landscape as a conceptual medium composed of a diversity of cultures, layers of visible history and hidden narratives and an interdependent human ecology that continues to shape landscape theory and practice today. Keywords: landscape, Landscape magazine, landscape idea, modernism, modernity, 20th century, mid-century, J.B. Jackson, nature, everyday, America, human geography, built environment, architecture, landscape architecture.

<p> I analyze Lviv outskirt settlement Sokilnyky in Ukraine in order to find out which social structures, emerged or reconstituted after the collapse of the Soviet Union, are expressed in cultural landscape and how. After the collapse of the Soviet Union and redirection of Ukrainian economy to the neoliberal way of economy and the emergence of the distinctive post-socialist form of capitalism (Hirt 2012), largest cities&rsquo; environs became places of drastic change in demography, housing, infrastructure, land-use and landscape. Former predominantly agricultural areas became desirable places to live for the new rich Ukrainians. In addition suburbs were commercialized with the emergence of segregated commercial units including big box shopping malls. Currently post-socialist suburbs are mixed income with different social classes coexisting in one area face to face, however the segregation of affluent people is evident in new residential areas where fortress houses have emerged. At the same time Lviv suburbs still retain their rural face with supplemental family farming practiced mainly by long-term residents. After the strict planning regulations during the Soviet period, nowadays the lack of planning and architectural regulations together with drastic privatization of former agrarian land created eclectic landscapes being also the landscapes of privilege and inequality. </p><p>