Yi Luo

Greenways offer sustainable benefits at ecological, cultural and economic levels, enhancing human well-being. Landscape performance assessment is a crucial task for evaluating these benefits and guiding the sustainable development of greenways. To clarify the characteristics and roles of landscape performance in the development of the US greenway system, text analysis was conducted using KH Coder, and a meta-analysis was performed on three databases to select research cases on greenway performance evaluation in the US. The results show that the evaluation of social performance is higher than that of ecological and economic performances, and the data related to economic performance is more difficult to obtain. The efficacy of greenway projects varies with the construction stage and is influenced by social background and target benefits. The sustainability characteristics of high co-occurrence relationships are key to guiding greenway performance assessment, which helps in selecting indicators for evaluating greenways and providing references for improving planning directions. In the future, innovative technical means tailored to the goals of greenway landscapes should be used for performance evaluation.

Due to the changes in land use types and industrial agglomeration brought by the long-term rapid urbanization, the ecology of China’s rural areas has been greatly impacted. The health of residents and other living beings living in rural areas has been affected. In recent years, the ecology of the rural environment has been paid attention to. This study performed a bibliometric analysis of 167 papers on the Web of Science from 2013 to 2022. It shows that policy management and environmental science were two main research fields in solving the ecological and environmental crisis in China’s rural areas. Additionally, it was found that the study areas often spanned administrative districts, and the research was mainly based on the integrity of the overall ecosystem. The cases studied were mainly distributed in the following three types of areas: continuous river basins and lake basins; economically developed regions; and less developed areas with relatively fragile ecosystems. Ecological elements such as water, soil, air, and vegetation were all included in the study aims. Finally, from the perspective of institutional reform, comprehensive approaches to solving China’s rural ecological environmental problems in the current research were identified, including the revision of laws and regulations, economic means, technological innovation, and public participation.

The Landscape Architecture Foundation (LAF) advocates evaluating built landscape projects’ performance and collecting evidence to guide future practice. However, in the first few years of landscape performance research, various case studies, while quantifying a number of desirable outcomes, failed to evaluate projects’ performance against their original goals. Therefore, they did not sufficiently establish relationships between goals, design solutions, and performance. This paper aims to demonstrate the need for goal-driven performance evaluation through an urban park study in Florida, USA. We evaluate Depot Park’s level of accomplishment regarding four design goals and discuss experiences and lessons learned during the process. The results show that although it is feasible to conclude whether a project is making progress towards its goals, determining whether the goals are achieved or the level of accomplishment can be difficult. Precisely defined goals, performance benchmarks, and comparative studies are needed for future performance studies.