A recent article at Live Science looks at the work of Robert Cheetham, “one of two landscape architects… hired to start a Crime Analysis and Mapping Unit for the Philadelphia Police Department” fourteen years ago, and today the founder of a consulting company that provides “geospatial analysis services to enhance decision-making”, including developing a software system for his previous employers that does “geographic crime analysis, early warning and risk forecasting”.
Having (I think, I’m not bothering to track down the location at the moment) before posited that landscape architecture, like architecture, possesses some strong disciplinary aptitude for something(s) like “spatial intelligence” (we landscape architects might call our version “geospatial intelligence”) which make the discipline at least as valuable when it is understood as a way of thinking as when it is understood as a professional body of techniques, and also believing that the capacity to interpret and represent spatial patterns within landscape is a particularly important manifestation of spatial intelligence within the discipline, I find examples like this extremely encouraging, because they indicate that there is some validity to that argument.
[Link via Damian Holmes (@landreader).]
