BULACAN STATE

UNIVERSITY

COLLEGE OF ARCHITECTURE
AND FINE ARTS

“CRITIQUE PAPER: ANALYSIS OF

FREDERICK STEINER’S

ECOLOGICAL PLANNING MODEL

SUBMITTED BY:

BULAONG, JOHN MARVIN V.

BSAR 3-B

SUBMITTED TO:

L. ARCH. RUEN BALMORES

The ecological planning model of Frederick Steiner is all about on how to simple identify and
make a synthesis on how to properly make a site analysis in order to identify or come up with
the possible problems of the site, this problem will surely make your site analysis even better
by coming up with some ideas and techniques to be accumulated within the site. The Living
Landscape is your ecological planning action manual--one that working professionals will rely
on time and again, and one that fits perfectly with the practical focus of today's urban and
landscape curricula. An American Society of Landscaping Architecture Merit Award Winner,
this exemplary, much-praised resource offers: a systematic, highly useful approach to
landscape planning that maximizes ecological objectives, community service, and citizen
participation; more than 20 challenging case studies that demonstrate how problems were met
and overcome from rural America to large cities; scores of checklists and step-by-step methods;
hands-on help with practical zoning, land use, and regulatory issues; coverage of major
advances in GIS technology and global sustainability standards; more than 150 illustrations.
Landscape goes deeper than appearances, and for many years famed planner Frederick Steiner's
The Living Landscape has steered landscape architects and environmental planners toward
meaningful, lasting values and aesthetics in design. Now this revised and updated edition of
The Living Landscape offers Dr. Steiner's design-oriented ecological approach in a thoroughly
practical framework for today's professionals, in today's world. In addition, The Living
Landscape continues its award-winning role as a premier teaching tool for planners and
architects in training. Now we all know a little bit about the book itself let’s talk about the
author who is Frederick Steiner, Frederick R. "Fritz" Steiner is an American ecologist who
currently serves as the Dean and Paley Professor for the University of Pennsylvania School of
Design, having succeeded Marilyn Jordan Taylor in 2016. He is a fellow of the American
Society of Landscape Architects and the American Academy in Rome. He teaches courses in
the areas of landscape analysis, landscape architecture theory, and environmental impact
assessment. His specialization is in ecological planning, historic preservation, environmental
design, green building, and regional planning. Steiner earned his Bachelor of Science degree
in graphic design from the University of Cincinnati in 1972, followed by a Master of
Community Planning degree, also from Cincinnati, in 1975. In 1977, he earned his Master of
Regional Planning from the University of Pennsylvania, and in 1986 he earned both his Master
of Arts and Ph.D. in City and Regional Planning from Penn. Formerly, he was Director of the
School of Planning and Landscape Architecture, College of Architecture and Environmental
Design at Arizona State University and previously taught at Washington State University, the
University of Colorado-Denver, and the University of Pennsylvania. He was also awarded an
honorary M.Phil. in Human Ecology from the College of the Atlantic. He has also served as a
city planning commissioner and has worked with community groups, as well as national
environmental and conservation organizations. He has been a visiting professor at Tsinghua
University in Beijing, China, and was a Fulbright-Hays research scholar at Wageningen
University in The Netherlands. He is the former dean of the School of Architecture at the
University of Texas at Austin, having stepped down from the position of Dean in 2016 to lead
the University of Pennsylvania School of Design. Following the announcement of his new
position in February 2016, Steiner stated his decision to leave UT Austin had been influenced
by Texas Government Code Section 411.2031, which entitles licensed individuals to carry
concealed handguns onto the campus of an institution of higher education--dubbed "Campus
Carry." The Texas law went into effect on August 1, 2016. Frederick Steiner has lot of
published book which are The Politics of New Town Planning (1981), Ecological Planning for
Farmlands Preservation (1981), Human Ecology: Following Nature's Lead, Planning and
Urban Design Standards (with Kent Butler 2006), Design for a Vulnerable Planet (2011),
Urban Ecological Design (with Danilo Palazzo 2012), all this book is written by Frederick
Steiner. The book ecological planning manner is based on a United States standard that is why
some of its arguments is in high modernized. Upon reading the book it says about the people
leaving because of what we call urban sprawl, it is the urbanization of some city in United
States because of people leaving the planning of the city is not arranged into functional sources
so Steiner proposes an ecological planning model that attempts to use “biophysical and
sociocultural information to suggest opportunities and constraints for decision making about
the use of the landscape” (Steiner 9-10). This model involves eleven interconnected steps,
including:

1. Identification of issue or issues.

2. Establishment of a goal to address the issue(s).

3-4. Inventories and analyses of biophysical and sociocultural

systems from the larger down to the specific level.

5. Detailed studies to link inventory and analysis to problem(s) and goal(s).

6. Development of concepts and options.

7. Preparation of a landscape plan.

8. Presentation to and response from affected public.

9. Development of detailed designs for individual sites.

10. Implementation of detailed designs.

11. Administration of plan.

These eleven stages provide all the steps to be accomplished and these eleven stages will help
in planning much more effective than before. Upon doing these process the ecological site will
eventually be useful in a way of a functional facilities and landscape.
The strategy use by Frederick Steiner is more on I think about the people choices, on how the
people will picture a someone’s place and what will be the activities to be obtain in a particular
are. The book ecological planning model is somehow to be able to get into our lives as an
architects or as a planner for the better future. This last section will illustrate some applications
of the concepts and principles discussed above to site planning and design. In other words,
what are some of the specific sorts of physical planning techniques that may be employed to
achieve ecological health and sustainability?

1). Planning Level – On the regional level there are some approaches that can be implemented
to provide for economic development while protecting the landscape character and minimizing
the negative environmental impacts of growth. The University of Massachusetts Center for
Rural Massachusetts identified the Connecticut River corridor as a critical area vulnerable to
mounting development pressures. The planners identified a number of significant issues
ranging from soil erosion and stream sedimentation, to loss of natural resources, threats to
agricultural lands, and incompatible historic and cultural impacts. After analyzing these issues,
the University of Massachusetts group devised an approach for sensitive growth and
development utilizing a series of legal controls and planning and design recommendations.
One of these, Open Space Development Design (OSDD), utilizes optional or mandatory
regulations to establish overlay zones. For example, a “Rural Preservation District” might be
established that prohibits subdivision development from consuming more than 50% of any
parcel. If the base density is 1 unit /10 acres, then the maximum lot size is five acres, with the
remaining five acres permanently restricted from development. Using a sliding scale approach,
as the area actually allocated for development decreases, the number of lots can increase (e.g.,
60% open space would allow twelve 3.3 acre lots instead of ten; 70% open space twenty 1.5
acre lots instead of ten, etc.) (Arendt 226-230).

a. Clustering residential development along the edge of the existing woodland to minimize the
visual impact of growth on the open rural pastureland.

b. Restricting lot sizes, development densities, architectural character, to respect the historic
and cultural character of existing communities.

c. Designating visually and environmentally sensitive areas as agricultural districts to restrict

new growth from encroaching upon them.
d. Restricting development adjacent to environmentally sensitive areas (river’s edge, wetlands,
ridgelines, etc.) by zoning and or building restrictions to protect the resource and retain its
scenic amenity. (Arendt 100-102)

The benefit of such techniques is to protect the rural landscape from uncontrolled or poorly
controlled patterns of development over open fields or wooded hillsides. The growing
acceptance of such approaches is due to the fact that they encourage sensitive development
without restricting the overall growth potential of an area or penalizing the landowner from
realizing a profit.

2). Site Design Level – There are many specific design recommendations that can be made at
the scale of individual site design. These may relate to specific environmental issues such as
energy and/or natural resource conservation or to cultural and aesthetic concerns. In essence,
they are specific design guidelines that may be used to achieve the general goals established
by the comprehensive planning and facilitated by the land use controls discussed earlier. They
may include such general responses as:

a. Considering solar orientation when siting facilities to maximize the potential benefits of
active and/or passive solar energy. One example of this would be to lay out a housing
development with streets running generally east-west to facilitate a north-south orientation of
the houses.

b. Selecting and placing vegetation:

1) Utilizing deciduous trees adjacent to facilities to provide for cooling shade in the summer,
while allowing for the benefit of solar warming in the winter.

2) Buffering prevailing winter winds with evergreen plant massing.

3) Channeling cool summer breezes into suitable exterior spaces of a development with masses
of vegetation.

c. Considering facility placement to minimize energy costs of grading and to minimize erosion
potential from disturbed slopes.

d. Minimizing use of impervious surfacing to reduce surface runoff thereby recharging the
water table on site and minimizing potential soil erosion.
(c and d relate equally to the cultural and aesthetic as well. By concentrating development and
nestling it into the edges of the woodland, we can minimize the visual intrusion into the rural
character of an area subject to expanding development pressures.)

e. Preserving as much of the existing vegetation as possible as a site development is designed.

Using native or naturalized plant materials will provide suitable habitats for native wild life
and facilitate the preservation of migration patterns.

f. Utilizing native building materials, e.g., field stone, native timber, etc. as well as local styles
will also help to preserve the visual character of a place.

These application is what I love about the book because it is all about the fact what the site was
really are. But, there are some factors that I want to be more accurate into it by adding some
feature not in United State based but here in the Philippine standards because we as a designer
wants the best for our country so I propose an investigation or a process all about the lives of
a people living around a radius of the site to know about what is really going on in that
particular site to come up with good suggestion and feedback about them.