I owe this definition to Tom Turner who lectures at the University of Greenwich. There was a long period when most of these places were rural - landscape architects designed forests and country parks, reclaimed coal tips and quarries and helped to ameliorate the impact of new roads or power lines. These activities still go on, of course, but what is striking is the extent to which landscape architecture, at least in the UK, has, over the course of two decades, become a profession largely concerned with urban environments. This perception grew out of my own experiences working for planning departments in Glasgow and on Tyneside, but it has been confirmed, at least to my own satisfaction, by a series of twenty-seven interviews conducted with landscape practitioners over the summer of 1997. If you ask landscape architects to say what they mean by good design, they will often give you an explanation that involves spaces, scale and attention to detail.
People can get all the components right and get the scale wrong.
To my mind it's not what the design of urban space is about. It should be how it functions. It should be simply paved and very carefully detailed. If you hadn't been told that these were landscape architects, you might have presumed that they were urban designers. The two professions have very much in common.