Landscape and Urban Planning is an international journal aimed at advancing conceptual, scientific, and applied understandings of landscape in order to promote sustainable solutions for landscape change. Landscapes are visible and integrative social-ecological systems with variable spatial and temporal dimensions. They have expressive aesthetic, natural, and cultural qualities that are perceived and valued by people in multiple ways and invite actions resulting in landscape change. Landscapes are increasingly urban in nature and ecologically and culturally sensitive to changes at local through global scales. Multiple disciplines and perspectives are required to understand landscapes and align social and ecological values to ensure the sustainability of landscapes. The journal is based on the premise that landscape science linked to planning and design can provide mutually supportive outcomes for people and nature.

Landscape science brings landscape ecology and urban ecology together with other disciplines and cross-disciplinary fields to identify patterns and understand social-ecological processes influencing landscape change. Landscape planning brings landscape architecture, urban and regional planning, landscape and ecological engineering, and other practice-oriented fields to bear in processes for identifying problems and analyzing, synthesizing, and evaluating desirable alternatives for landscape change. Landscape design brings plans, designs, management prescriptions, policies and other activities and form-giving products to bear in effecting landscape change. The implementation of landscape planning and design also generates new patterns of evidence and hypotheses for further research, providing an integral link with landscape science and encouraging transdisciplinary collaborations to build robust knowledge and problem solving capacity.