Landscape Urbanism: Eco-approaches as "Seeds" in China's Urban Transformation

China is witnessing a process of urbanization with a previously-unseen scale, speed and scope, which has caused a dramatic shift in landscape. These have also provided great challenges and opportunities for landscape architect as a profession to address the following two major issues in the coming decades: 1) finding solutions to the energy and environmental crises; 2) regaining cultural identity. In other words, landscape architects need to search for design strategies and ecological approaches to enhance the city's adaptive and flexible resilience to environmental crises. Landscape Urbanism, rising from North America over the past decade, has inevitably come to China, even though the theory is far from being mature and its argument needs more practical evaluation. More importantly, another updated Ecological Urbanism is emerging at Harvard. It not only contains whole views of Landscape Urbanism, but brings more ecological approaches as seeds in urban transformation. Through a serious of analyses, this paper is focusing on the evolution of ecological planning, landscape urbanism and ecological urbanism theories. It also aims to find potential inspirations that Chinese cities could learn from the Western experience.