This book shows how a cultural landscape perspective on suburban situations can improve quality of life for residents and provide positive impacts on long-term resiliency and sustainability. One of today's primary challenges for environmental planning and landscape architecture is accommodating competing land usage while providing the experience of a cultural landscape, i.e., a positive place connectiveness for people. This book develops new links between cultural landscape studies and the suburban planning discussion, showing how evolving cultural identities may have an impact on the sense of place. The book uses exemplary case studies from Europe and the US to present and compare underlying cultural narratives, focusing on the impact of these narratives of land use planning and design approaches on cultural landscapes within the suburban context. It will be of interest to students, researchers, and practitioners in Cultural Studies, Landscape Studies, Urbanism, Environmental, Urban and Regional Planning, and Landscape Architecture.

Wolfram Höfer is a Professor at the Rutgers of Department of Landscape Architecture. He received is doctoral degree from the TU München and serves as Director of the Rutgers Center for Urban Environmental Sustainability (CUES), his community outreach projects have a focus on suburban cultural landscapes.