In an age of glossy architectural visualizations and slick photography, today’s media is saturated with images of projects mummified in their ideal, untouched, and unused state. Every design and technical publication on landscape architecture tries to teach us how to do things based on best practices. Rarely do we see a landscape project that has been in use for five or even ten years. To counterbalance this status quo, it is time to review and scrutinize the Sh*tscapes: typical mistakes in the design of our public realm.

This publication is a compendium of a hundred failures made in the design, construction, or maintenance processes of urban landscapes. Looking at these unsuccessful examples, the authors propose simple and practical solutions aimed at preventing common mistakes, predicting future scenarios, and averting or accepting failures.


Both Vladimir Guculak and Paul Bourel are landscape architects based in London. Together, they founded studio gb, a landscape architecture and design practice specializing in urban landscape and the public realm. Vladimir Guculak is the author of Landscape Observer London (2017).

In an age of glossy architectural visualizations and slick photography, today’s media is saturated with images of projects mummified in their ideal, untouched, and unused state. Every design and technical publication on landscape architecture tries to teach us how to do things based on best practices. Rarely do we see a landscape project that has been in use for five or even ten years. To counterbalance this status quo, it is time to review and scrutinize the Sh*tscapes: typical mistakes in the design of our public realm.

This publication is a compendium of a hundred failures made in the design, construction, or maintenance processes of urban landscapes. Looking at these unsuccessful examples, the authors propose simple and practical solutions aimed at preventing common mistakes, predicting future scenarios, and averting or accepting failures.


Both Vladimir Guculak and Paul Bourel are landscape architects based in London. Together, they founded studio gb, a landscape architecture and design practice specializing in urban landscape and the public realm. Vladimir Guculak is the author of Landscape Observer London (2017).