Urban Landscape serves "Humans", Ecological Landscape serves "life"

An urban landscape refers to the spatial form and visual atmosphere collectively constituted by diverse elements such as streets, plazas, buildings, and landscaping within cities, which are the primary habitats of human populations. It is only the material manifestation of urban functions and structures but also the aesthetic experience and cultural imagery perceived by people in urban life.

Photo taken in Huizhou, China

From an aesthetic and cultural perspective, the urban landscape is an aesthetic object created through long-term human practical activities, based on specific regional natural conditions and patterns of social development. It possesses not only stable material forms— such as building facades, street patterns, and public spaces—but also rich spiritual connotations, carrying historical memory, place identity, and collective emotions. As a cultural phenomenon, the urban landscape is not merely a visual spatial composition but also an "aesthetic field" capable of evoking people's aesthetic feelings and stimulating a sense of place identity.

Photo credit: unsplash

Within this field, the material and the spiritual, utility and beauty, and the artificial and the natural intertwine, collectively shaping the unique character and temperament of the city.

In contrast, an ecological landscape is an ecological network with a multi-dimensional structure and dynamic function within the complex ecosystem of society, economy, and nature. It includes not only visible patterns of natural geography, hydrological processes, climatic conditions, and biological vitality but also economic landscape elements such as energy flows, transportation networks, and land use, as well as humanistic landscape content including population structure, cultural traditions, ethical beliefs, and customs. These elements interact and couple with each other across the dimensions of time, space, quantity, structure, and order, collectively forming a complex ecological network of human-nature interaction.

Photo taken in Shenzhen, China

The ecological landscape emphasizes a systematic ecological connection, reflected not only in the physical aspects of mountains, rivers, forests, farmlands, lakes, and grasslands but also extended to deep relationships between the individual and the whole, the internal and the external, the past and the future, and the subjective and the objective. It pursues the harmonious coexistence of the internal and external environments of the human ecosystem, the efficient coupling of systemic structure and function, and the integrated unity of heaven, earth, and humanity.

Photo taken in Hangzhou, China

In terms of manifestation forms and value orientations, the urban landscape and the ecological landscape exhibit clear differences. The urban landscape centers on human use and aesthetic experience, emphasizing the visual order of space, functional organization, and a sense of high-maintenance refinement. It is often composed of hard pavements, geometrically patterned flower beds, and neatly pruned plants, presenting highly artificial spatial characteristics.

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The ecological landscape, however, takes the health of the natural ecosystem as fundamental, pursuing the self-sustaining nature of ecological processes, species diversity, and ecological resilience. It relies on the natural succession of native vegetation and low-intervention ecological processes, exhibiting a natural, wild, and flowing vitality.

Nevertheless, in modern environmental design and urban planning, these two are gradually moving towards integration. Through design approaches such as rain gardens, ecological riverbanks, green roofs, and naturalistic planting, efforts have begun to skillfully introduce natural ecological functions into urban environments, simultaneously satisfying the usage demands of urban spaces while restoring or simulating natural processes to achieve a win-win situation for humans and nature.

Photo taken n Shenzhen, China

For example, when we see neatly trimmed parterre flower beds and polished marble plazas, that is often a typical urban landscape. Conversely, when we step into a natural place characterized by lush wild grasses, abundant aquatic vegetation, and filled with the sounds of insects and birds, that is generally the manifestation of an ecological landscape.