About Landscape Architecture Frontiers

Landscape Architecture Frontiers

Landscape Architecture Frontiers (Chinese title: 景观设计学) is a bimonthly bilingual academic journal published in Beijing by Higher Education Press since 2013, in partnership with the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture at Peking University. It is China's first international landscape architecture journal, publishing themed issues on landscape design, planning and ecological research in both English and Chinese. Its print ISSN is 2096-336X, its online ISSN is 2095-5413, and its Chinese publication number is CN 10-1105/TU. Professor Kongjian Yu of Peking University — the landscape architect known internationally for the "sponge city" concept — is its chief editor, with Tina Tian as executive editor. The journal was selected as an Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) journal and received an honour award in the communications category of the 2015 ASLA Professional Awards; it reached volume 12 in 2024 and volume 14 in 2026.

Founding and identity

Landscape Architecture Frontiers, usually shortened to LA Frontiers, was first published in 2013. It is published bimonthly in both English and Chinese by the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture at Peking University and Higher Education Press, the Beijing publisher affiliated with China's Ministry of Education. That bilingual, bicultural format is the journal's founding idea: to carry Chinese landscape research and practice to an international readership, and international work to Chinese readers, in the same themed issues. Its official site, hosted by Higher Education Press, lists the journal's identifiers — ISSN 2096-336X in print, ISSN 2095-5413 online, CN 10-1105/TU, postal subscription code 80-985 — and its DOIs use the prefix 10.15302/J-LAF. The directory record agrees: publication start year 2013, bimonthly frequency, publisher Higher Education Press. Few design-discipline journals anywhere are structured this way, as a dialogue between a national profession and the world rather than as a one-way export.

Editors

The journal's chief editor is Professor Kongjian Yu. Yu holds a doctorate in design from the Graduate School of Design at Harvard University, is an honorary foreign fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and is a professor at the College of Architecture and Landscape at Peking University; he also founded the design practice Turenscape, whose works are internationally recognised for their ecological concepts and resilient, sustainable visions. Tina Tian serves as executive editor. Yu's editorial voice is a defining feature of the journal: his editorials often challenge existing urban construction and landscape aesthetics in China and propose ecological solutions for creating resilient, sustainable and attractive urban and rural landscapes and ecosystems, advancing theories that include "big feet aesthetics", "negative planning approaches" and "designed ecology". An interview with Yu and Tian in Landscape Architecture Australia remains one of the fullest published accounts of the journal's editorial philosophy.

Aims and scope

The journal's aims and scope statement, published on the Higher Education Press journal platform, describes LA Frontiers as an international academic journal focusing on the role and influence of landscape architecture research and practice on global sustainability. Publishing bimonthly, it introduces new ideas, emerging theories and cutting-edge methods that respond to hotspot topics and pressing challenges with design solutions. Anchoring land and outdoor spatial practice, it presents works that bridge academic studies and material implementation, respond to human–land relationships through design approaches, synergise ecological governance and societal visions, and integrate scientific thinking with aesthetic representation. It emphasises interdisciplinary studies and application — research for design, research on design, and research through design — and highlights efforts that integrate and translate multidisciplinary knowledge and research findings into application. The journal is strictly peer-reviewed and welcomes original research papers, review papers, syntheses, perspectives, and case studies and comparative studies.

Topics and themed issues

Calls for submissions organise the journal's interests under three headings: first, exploration of theories, technologies, methodologies and tools in landscape planning and design and allied fields; second, landscape planning and design, nature-based solutions, urban and regional planning, urban design and urban renewal addressing climate change, biodiversity, ecological restoration, rural development, design justice, and human health and well-being; and third, instructional experience and design critiques on those topics. In practice the journal publishes themed issues, each gathering research and practice around one problem. One of its most successful was "Sponge City" (issue 14, 2015): after China's Ministry of Housing and Urban-Rural Development published a technical guide in 2014 encouraging sponge city construction throughout China, the issue focused on internationally leading theories and pioneering practice, exploring models and strategies for building better sponge cities in China. Later documented themes include urban governance and spatial quality improvement under inventory planning (issue 047), regional planning based on water and land resources at basin scale — covering the Yangtze River Delta, the Yangtze Economic Belt, the Yellow River Basin and the Guangdong–Hong Kong–Macao Greater Bay Area (issue 051) — and climate change and resilience of human settlements, addressing carbon peaking and neutrality, big data and AI in climate risk evaluation, and low-carbon planning and design (issue 054). A recent collection on urban flood risk identification and resilience enhancement, edited by Mengyun Xie, approached landscape architecture alongside hydrology, water resources, public policy and emergency management.

Readership and recognition

The journal's audience, as Yu and Tian described it, includes professional landscape architects, planners, governors and students majoring in landscape architecture, urban design, planning and the arts — a deliberately mixed readership of practitioners, policymakers and academics that matches its research-into-practice mission. Its recognition came early. LA Frontiers received an honour award in the communications category of the 2015 ASLA Professional Awards, from the American Society of Landscape Architects — an unusual distinction for a journal, reflecting the quality of its bilingual presentation of projects and ideas — and it has been selected as an Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI) journal, placing it within the Web of Science family of indexes. Issue by issue, its contents mix editorials, papers, and views and criticisms: a 2022 issue, for example, carried an editorial on cultural ecosystem services by Wen Chen, Xu Haiyun and Tobias Plieninger alongside research papers and critical essays.

Contents in recent volumes

The journal has maintained its bimonthly rhythm for well over a decade: volume 11 appeared in 2023, volume 12 in 2024, volume 13 in 2025 — its October 2025 issue, volume 13, issue 5, carried editorials and papers including work by Kongjian Yu — and volume 14 in 2026, with volume 14, issue 4 dated August 2026 on the journal's current site. Recent article topics show the breadth the aims statement promises: comprehensive noise-reduction effectiveness of plant communities; transboundary ecological collaborative management; systematic thinking on landscape justice; the inclusive potential of pet parks for spatial justice; nature-based solutions for bird habitat restoration in high-density urban areas; termite-related and topography studies in earlier volumes, including research on the artificial mountain in traditional Chinese gardens and on the Mekong and Sài Gòn–Đồng Nai deltas by Bruno De Meulder and Kelly Shannon; and a scoping review, following PRISMA-ScR guidelines, of 79 empirical studies drawn from 8,748 screened records. The journal also engages professional education directly, examining the paradigm transformation of knowledge production for landscape architecture professional doctoral students after China's 2022 adjustment of the professional degree catalogue extended the degree to doctoral level.

The Peking University base

The journal's co-publisher, the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture at Peking University, anchors it in China's leading landscape research community, and its pages have drawn contributions from scholars at Peking University and Tsinghua University, among many Chinese and international institutions. That base matters because Chinese landscape architecture developed its modern academic form largely at Peking University under Yu's leadership, and the journal functions as the discipline's bilingual showcase: the place where Chinese ecological planning theory — sponge cities, negative planning, designed ecology — is set out in English with built projects as evidence, and where international scholars publish for a Chinese professional audience in translation. Yu's stated diagnosis of his home context gives the journal its critical edge: in China, he has argued, landscape design is often misunderstood as environmental beautifying and ornamental creation, and public awareness of environmental issues still needs ecological public education — a gap the journal exists in part to close.

Place in landscape publishing

International landscape architecture has few bilingual journals, and none with this journal's particular combination: a national ministry-affiliated academic publisher, a top university's graduate school, themed issues tied to live Chinese policy programmes such as sponge cities and basin-scale planning, ESCI selection, and an ASLA communications award. Landscape Architecture Frontiers describes its own future role as acting as a bridge connecting research and social needs, and science and art, leading the development of the discipline. From its founding in 2013 through volume 14 in 2026, that bridge has carried in both directions — Turenscape's ecological practice and Peking University theory outward to the world, and scholars such as Tobias Plieninger, Bruno De Meulder and Kelly Shannon inward to Chinese readers — making the journal one of the most distinctive design-discipline publications to emerge from China.