Title: Experiences of physical activity in a flat country Regular physical activity provides many chronic diseases and is an important contributor to health promotion. According to Swedish goals for public health, community planning ought to provide opportunities for exercise in all groups of the population and exercise in daily life should be uncomplicated, even in rural areas. The purpose of this study was to explore how individuals living in a flat country experienced their opportunities for exercise on a regular basis. Four semi-structured interviews were carried out with a phenomenological approach and for the analysis a phenomenological-hermeneutic method was used, resulting in two main themes and nine sub themes. The first main theme ?The reciprocal relation between physical activity and the landscape? showed that the informants experienced that they had good opportunities in the landscape for physical activity, it was easy to exercise on a regular basis, provided there was motivation.

By using the cyborg as a structural tool to analyze certain aspects of human interaction with what can be perceived as landscape or landscape architectural elements, this thesis seeks to explore the concept of the cyborg landscape in order to place human practice in the context of postmodern ideas of the end of true nature. Ever since human kind has externalized evo-lution by using tools and extending the body with technological inventions, we have also taken our surroundings out of their natural trajectory. Everything we do that is conditioned by the use of technology is altering that which we perceive as nature and natural. Since we have been doing this for millennia we have of course also altered our surroundings by the influence of technology.This thesis uses three examples of landscape or landscape architectural elements that are conditioned by the integration of technology to explore this practice through a postmodern model of analysis based on the concept and basic premises of the cyborg, or the cybernetic organism. A cybernetic organism is in short an organism that has functioning technological parts integrated into its system.

This paper analyses the existence and nature of the sacred landscape Olands härad during the Bronze Age and Iron Age. Olands härad is located in Northern Uppland, onthe way to Östhammar, about 30 km northeast of Uppsala. The interpretations are done with help of place names studies as well as archaeological finds. The results indicate that different types of cult locations can be found in the area..

This paper researches how the palimpsest concept is used in relation to landscape, and how it can function as a tool within landscape architecture. Palimpsest originally refers to old parchment handwritings, where new text has been applied on top of effaced, but still discernable, earlier writing. Superimposition of information is the core of the palimpsest concept, used within a range of scientific as well as cultural fields. The purpose of this paper is to find how a landscape palimpsest can be distinguished among the many different layers of landscape, such as historical or cultural, and to examine the potential use of the concept in theory and practice of the landscape architecture field. The study is conducted as a literature survey, examining the use of the palimpsest concept within academic works related to landscape.

Drawing on earlier research, and using observations as the method, this study presents a design of a nature playscape for children. Applying outdoor pedagogy to the fundamental structure of a specific location, the study proposes a design of a playscape, over a more obvious design, for instance one based around a quiz walk.The theoretical framework is Gibson?s theory of affordance, and the goal has been to create a "play flow". The study concludes that spatial rhetorics can be an important tool when teaching children about nature..

Nature and culture are often described as opposites, but at the same time nature is often de-scribed as culture and past. This essay examines how nature and the past are culture. I study how 51 people make shifting distinctions between nature and the past in relation to culture, the present and the future. By using the concept of Orientation of Sarah Ahmed I analyze how the informants direct themselves against nature, past and culture through a questionnaire, ob-servations and walk-alongs. I discuss how their ideas about nature and the past differ with their different starting points and are shaped through their physical meetings with them.

Several thousand years of human impact on the landscape in the form of cultivation is the reason to many nature- and culture values in the agricultural landscape today. Intensification and rationalization has led to vast monocultures and has forced many farms to close down. These trends have increased in the last years and constitute great threats to the values of the cultivation landscape. The purpose with the environmental objective A varied agricultural landscape is to protect these values. The environmental action plan of the municipality of Lund (LundaEko) 2006-2012 is built on the 16 national environmental objectives. The purpose with this paper is to put together material that the municipality of Lund can use in their work with modifying the local intermediate goals for the environmental objective A varied cultural landscape. The overall issue for this paper is ?What has happened with the state of the cultivation landscape in the municipality of Lund since LundaEko was approved in 2006?? The paper seeks to portrait the current conditions of the following fields: meadows and pastures, organic farming, exploitation threats to agricultural land, landscape elements with cultural values and species that are threatened.

The aim of this project is to investigate the meeting between the city and the sea and tolook into how that could be developed and made use of. I want to find out how you can increase the availability of a specific place and make it more welcoming, I also want to bring life to an already existing space and create a central meeting place in the city. The purpose is to give form to an esplanade along a dock in the central parts of Kalmar. Starting with an analysis of this public place, I want to create a concept that is close to the existing context and communicates the contrasts or associations between for example: city and nature, artificial and natural and indoor and outdoor. The primary object of the project is to add a welcoming, public place to the city where you on an accessible way canfamiliarize yourself with the meeting between the city and the sea.

The hotel is located on Skatholmen in the archipelago of Stockholm, Värmdö county. The hotel building has an open structure characterized by hospitality and the nature outside. The rooms have stunning views of the island landscape and lush forest. With biodiversity and valuable nature in mind, the building has been designed with a structure that should not be too intrusive in the surrounding landscape. The building is meant to blend into the dark silhouette of the island and to give a light footprint on the topography of the landscape.The use of well-chosen materials and similar design, both in plan and facade, creates a consistent building despite the building's somewhat playful expression.

This master thesis is made in co-operation with the Department of Forest Management and Products at the Swedish University of Agriculture in Uppsala and the Forestry Association in Stockholm. The purpose of the Master thesis was to describe how pre-schools in Sweden use forests and green areas, and to understand how different factors can affect the use of the nature. The purpose of the interviews was to create a picture of attitudes and routines of the pre-schools, in the matter of visiting the nature. The thesis is built on interviews where fifteen pre-schools in five large cities around Sweden participated. Among these pre-schools, five of them worked with special focus on nature, while the other ten did not have any particular focus connected to their activity.

Nature and culture are often described as opposites, but at the same time nature is often de-scribed as culture and past. This essay examines how nature and the past are culture. I study how 51 people make shifting distinctions between nature and the past in relation to culture, the present and the future. By using the concept of Orientation of Sarah Ahmed I analyze how the informants direct themselves against nature, past and culture through a questionnaire, ob-servations and walk-alongs. I discuss how their ideas about nature and the past differ with their different starting points and are shaped through their physical meetings with them.

In this essay, I explore the history of the ideas that have shaped the profession of landscape architecture, in a Swedish context. To this purpose, I have sampled the professional debate on landscape architecture at four points in time. These are the years around 1890, 1930, 1970 and 2010. Drawing on G N Brandt (1920), I make the distinction between two arguably crucial approaches, i . e., naturalism and formalism. By identifying these perspectives, and by dividing the arguments of each time period according to this classification, I am able to compare the course of the debate over time. I take on the task through hermeneutics.

?Think of the best for the child? that?s a sentence we been hearing before, but the question is, do we really? Does the child get the opportunities to develop to healthy, safe, creative, mobile,concentrated, invention, curious, harmony child? Preschool outdoors is about time. On a preschool outdoors, gets the child opportunities to shape materials and the place they are on, the environment on preschool outdoors is formable and the children fantasy is big. Nothing is decided on a preschool outdoors ahead and nothing is static, here is the place where the child creates together with the nature and landscape. The landscape has a central part in the child?s play and in the child development and there are often no limits.

Semi-natural grasslands are threatened biotopes in the landscape and without conservation measures high values of nature will be lost. Meanwhile, the biological values associated with cultural values of the traditional agricultural landscape in Sweden. Studies of land use history may help to understand how today biological diversity has evolved and how it can be preserved. Färsna farm in Norrtälje has left some of the old heritage of biological diversity in the form of nature - forest and grassland, which hosts an unusual herb-rich flora. Through the study of historic maps and från1673/1767/1801/1901 1952 and orthophoto of the area has a picture of how land use has changed over time emerged.

Fresh Kills park and the The High line park in New York, Downsview park outside Toronto the birch landscape at Shiphol Airport have something more in common than being big new park landscapes.They all include thoughts and images about ecology. These images are neither typically nature picturesque nor typically garden stylish. In Sweden we have the biotopes of Ankarparken, the new design of Kristinebergsparken. At Chelsea Flower Show in England Swedish nature put in a garden format is winning awards. There are some new ecological influence in the air.