Peking University, Beijing. Nov 6th, 2009: The Seventh Chinese Landscape Architecture Education Conference & Landscape Architects Congress opened in Peking University last Saturday, October 31st. The conference was initiated by the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture in order to foster Landscape Architecture education in China and set up a platform for international academic communication and discussion.
The theme of this year’s conference was “Landscape Urbanism”, a new perspective and methodology to handle the human-environment relationship. In the past, buildings defined urban forms and cities were designed as amplified buildings. This Architecture Urbanism had dominated the design practice and education for many years and had led cities into ecologically vulnerable situations. And the theory of Landscape Urbanism was put forward to respond to the issue. The core of this concept is that landscape, rather than architecture better defines urban forms and urban experiences. Landscape is not a park, not a garden and not even a street art; rather it is an urban infrastructure and more accurately it is urban ecological infrastructure, an ecological process rather than a fixed form.
Keynote speakers in the conference include top scholars and practitioners of the Landscape Urbanism theory. Over 600 Landscape Architecture students, teachers, Chinese landscape architects and government officers also joined the conference.
At the opening ceremony, Yu Kongjian, president of the Graduate School of Landscape Architecture and president of the Turenscape Design Institution addressed the conference and presided over it. He warmly welcomed all the participants first and then looked back on the development of Landscape Urbanism, evaluating its strengths and illuminating its prospects. He recognized Landscape Urbanism as “a rediscovery of landscape and landscape architecture” which had provided an opportunity to integrate architecture and landscape architecture, and bridge the gap between various disciplines. He also pointed out that the unprecedented urbanization and urban construction in China would create the greatest opportunity to test and enrich the Landscape Urbanism theory.
The two-day’s Landscape Urbanism tour was arranged in 6 sections, which together made up a comprehensive picture. Kelly Shannon, professor of Architecture and Urban Planning in Catholic University of Louvain, first casted the question “Can landscape save Asian urbanism?” She provided a global perspective on urbanism: its challenges and solutions, which set the stage for the landscape approach to urbanism. Charles Waldheim, professor of Landscape Architecture, Director of Harvard Graduate School of Design and also the founder of the term Landscape Urbanism, gave a thorough interpretation of the term: its meaning, history and development. Frederick Steiner, professor of architecture in University Texas at Austin and Bart Johnson, associate professor of Landscape Architecture in University of Oregon made systematic explorations on ecological planning and design in the context of global warming and environment crisis.
They aimed to seek the landscape urbanism and ecological urbanism approach to bridge the gap between the big global issues and the local urban design solution. Besides academic exploration, design practice of the Landscape Urbanism theory was also presented and shared in the conference. Beyond research and design practice, Landscape Urbanism in terms of management was also discussed. Shen Lei, from Tianjin Urban Planning office and Dr. Wang Lin, from Shanghai Planning and Land Management, gave a comprehensive management analysis from the nation scale to the city scale.
In the conference, two forums were held apart from the keynote speeches. One was the Design Practice Forum which discussed how higher education and the Landscape Architecture industry could cooperate appropriately and were mutually promotional. And the other was Higher Education Forum, which mainly talked about the relationship between landscape architecture higher education and the labor required in the rapid urbanization process. The National Landscape Architecture Graduation Design Exhibition was held along with the conference and 450 student graduation projects from 128 Chinese universities were on display in PKU library.
The two-day conference achieved great success, promoting the development of Landscape Urbanism in China and fostering international communications on landscape education.
Edited By: Seren
