PhD thesis: A Landscape Approach. Reading a Geographic Context Through Multiple Dimensions: The Case of the Hexi Corridor Region in China’s Northwestern Gansu Province

Long-term processes of socio-environmental transformation have severely degraded entire world regions, leading to pressing social, economic, and environmental challenges. In this planetary context, the thesis develops a Landscape Approach as a theoretical framework to systematically read and better understand large-scale geographies. It promotes landscape as a culture of thinking and a mode of working across spatial, temporal, and disciplinary dimensions.

As a case study serves the remote and arid Hexi Corridor in Northwestern China. The region is portrayed through a narrative that spans from its first integration as a strategic territory into imperial China (121 BC) to recent trends concerned with environmental challenges, as well as ambitions of economic growth

and development. Ultimately, the Landscape Approach aims to inform new interdisciplinary practices that can find integrated solutions to intervene in specific locations and restore degraded ecosystems at watershed scales, creating conditions that are socially and environmentally more just and sustainable