Defining Landscape Democracy – A Path to Spatial Justice

The cover painting on the dust jacket of Egoz et al.’s edited book titled Defining Landscape Democracy depicts a vast display of people acting in different places, ranging from city squares, to construction places and landscape parks and includes urban agriculture, thus signifying the wide range of contributions to the book. Defining Landscape Democracy contains 20 chapters divided into two sections. The first section ‘Framing the discourse’ provides theoretical approaches to the theme of landscape democracy and spatial justice. It contains six theoretical essays, which provide comprehensive knowledge and background information that help the reader to gain an insight into debates and reflections on the necessity of public participation in landscape-related projects. The second part, ‘Contextualising landscape democracy’, contains 14 case studies and the contributing authors’ personal reflections, covering the topic of landscape democracy to an impressive extent. On some places it is difficult to learn the lessons promised by the chapters in the second part of the book because the authors concentrate toomuch on theoretical questions (e.g. inChapters 7, 8, 10, and 20) instead of progressing to their introduced examples. The reader becomes ‘lost’ due to the authors shifting back and forth between different reflections. Nevertheless, there are many relevant points relating to the topic of landscape democracy and spatial justice, and the actors’ various motivations, constraints, and approaches, due partly to the fact that the authors and case studies originate from several continents. Due to the aforementioned diversity, each reader should find some information relevant to their field of interest. Other contributions within the second part of the book provide various details about the stories about plants in private gardens (Chapter 9), an unsuccessful attempt to prevent a public park frombeing privatized, describedwith the use of many bottom-up concepts in Istanbul (Chapter 19), and the successful participatory city planning – Proyectos Urbanos Integrales (PUI) (Integrated Urban Plan) –for one of the most disadvantaged locations in Colombia, namely the city ofMedellín (Chapter 18). Other case studies explainwhether citizens’ participation in planning projects and planning processes either can work or does not work (Chapters 10, 11, and 17). In Chapter 12, the reader is informed about planning visions in the 1960s, based on storytelling as a catalyst for democratic change. The author of the chapter explains how the ‘modernist utopia’ is further developed towards today’s participatory planning (Chapter 12). Landscape is not limited to the ‘rural’ environment and democracy is removed from its purely political and/or administrative context. The reader gains an insight into small-scale private ‘gardenscapes’ and cityscapes (Berlin, Thessaloniki, Athens, Istanbul,Medellín, andOslo), in the capture of public green spaces –most of which are combined with new layouts andplanningof cityscapes, community gardens and collective landscapes. In the latter context, case studies from Denmark (Chapter 14), Norway (Chapter 15) and Spain (Chapter 16) describe how people with completely different means and needs took over governance and created their own future. The Andalusian case (Chapter 16) may serve as an example for many rural areas, in which, for different reasons, people struggle to earn their living. The guiding principles of the Andalusian actors were fair distribution of resources, social and cultural democracy, and political justice. This may be the most practical oriented example in the book – showing what people can achieve if they are unified in their aims and motivation, but only with the support of municipalities through, for example, the acquisition and dedicated use of land. The case study presents a vast contrast to the process related to the movement ‘Occupy Gezi Park’ (Chapter 19), which started in Istanbul in 2013 as a public protest against the privatization of the park, yet the people did not achieve their aims, despite their numbers and different actions. Last, but not least, Chapter 20 focuses on public art, which could have been an interesting way tomark the end of the extensive reflections but, unfortunately, the chapter becomes lost in theory instead of providing or clarifying introduced examples. Defining Landscape Democracy is a comprehensive, dense work, with small font on thin paper, although the latter should not be seen as a disadvantage. However, it is unfortunate that the illustrations are in only black and white. Colour printing would have provided additional benefits, especially in the case of photos. To summarize, the book delivers many interesting and different ideas as well as approaches to the topic of landscape democracy and spatial justice. It triggers both thinking about and working with approaches. I have rarely found so many theoretical and methodological reflections unified in one volume. From this point of view, the book has the