Design for Conservation

HKU Landscape undergrads capped their senior year with the Final Review for our Thai-Myanmar Border Studio. This year, students focused on a set of controversial and long-delayed development projects along the Thailand-Myanmar border, including dams on the Salween and Yuam rivers, a coal mine concession in Chiang Mai province, industrial zones in Mae Sot, and the planned large-scale water diversion tunnel from the Salween to Chao Phraya basins. Taught by professor Ashley Scott Kelly and teaching assistant Sandra Saw Yu Nwe, this studio teaches students not merely how planners or architects or landscape architects might be involved in large-scale planning projects but also how cultural anthropologists or political scientists might approach, evaluate, and address development throughout Southeast Asia.

Students learn how development happens from both desktop research and field visits, covering topics including: environmental histories of northern Thailand and southern Myanmar; participatory and customary mapping; transnational environmental and human rights advocacy; land governance and tenure; and migration, labor and border industries. For 10 days in mid-March students traveled overland roughly 600 kilometers in Thailand from Chiang Mai to Mae Sot in Thailand, meeting with several environmental and human rights advocacy groups, including International Rivers, The Border Consortium (TBC), Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN), EarthRights International (ERI), and indigenous community groups.

After returning to Hong Kong, students individually spent 8 weeks to propose landscape planning strategies that together: react to strategic and long-running resistance through community mapping, villager research or citizen science; address power and knowledge in reforestation programs; enable or nurture multiple migration pathways in the agricultural sector; and confront investment and contested value systems in dual-governed regions.

At their final review, students defended their proposals to a large panel of experts, including: Prof. Emily Yeh (Dept. of Geography, University of Colorado; past president, American Association of Geographers); David Gallacher (Executive Director, Environment, AECOM); Prof. Jeff Hou (Dept. of Landscape Architecture, University of Washington); Winnie Law (HKU Centre for Civil Society and Governance); Alice Hughes (HKU School of Biological Sciences); Jiraporn Laocharoenwong (Dept. of Anthropology and Sociology, Chulalongkorn University); Jayde Roberts (School of Built Environment, Univ. of New South Wales); Sidh Sintusingha (Melbourne School of Design); Zali Fung (Social Equity Institute, Univ. of Melbourne); Merve Bedir (Center for Spatial Justice, Istanbul; Critical Media Lab, Basel); Peter Cobb (HKU Humanities and Digital Technologies, Faculty of Arts); and several planners and designers from HKU Planning, Architecture, and Landscape Architecture.

The students, Ashley, and Sandra express their gratitude to our jury members and HKU's continued support for engaging in essential discussions about landscape development across sectors and geographies in the region. Congratulations to the students!

Click here to view course synopsis and student work

University of Hong Kong (HKU) students studying landscape planning travelled in March for roughly 600 kilometers along the Thailand-Myanmar border between Chiang Mai and Mae Sot in Thailand. Students met with several environmental and human rights advocacy groups, academics, and communities regarding a series of controversial and long-delayed development projects along the border, including dams on the Salween and Yuam rivers, a coal mine concession in Chiang Mai province, industrial zones in Mae Sot, and the planned large-scale water diversion tunnel from the Salween to Chao Phraya basins.

The students, their instructor Ashley Scott Kelly, and teaching assistant Sandra Saw Yu Nwe thank International Rivers, The Border Consortium (TBC), Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN), EarthRights International (ERI), indigenous community groups, and academics from Chiang Mai University and Chulalongkorn University for helping make our visit a productive learning experience.

For Myanmar civil society engaged in conservation and sustainable development, it is often difficult to make connections between government-published information and current remote-sensing data on landscape change, if such data can easily be accessed at all. This post contains a new series of 125 maps for Tanintharyi Region at 1:50,000 scale matching the extent of the commonly used map series published in 2007 by the Myanmar Survey Department, Ministry of Agriculture & Irrigation (First edition 2007). This new series is freely downloadable.

Primary layers are from public sources, including forest loss year (2000-2021), land cover, villages, roads and streams. Additional features include protected areas (gazetted and planned), industrial zones, and linear infrastructure. Layers in these new maps were chosen and styled to emphasize landscape change over the past 20 years. For that reason, if forest loss occurred at any time since the year 2000, that loss is shown instead of current land or tree cover, regardless of any tree cover gain since the initial loss.

Format: All sheets are A1-size (594x841mm) at 150 DPI resolution, RGB color. Each sheet has a location diagram in the lower-right corner with the sheet numbers for all maps in the series. Each file is named with the MoA sheet number. For instance, for sheet 1198_16 the filename is: Dcam22v1_Sheet_1198-16.tif

Download map sheets:

• One zip file (1,327 MB) containing all high-quality (TIF format) sheets for printing: Dcam22v1_Sheets_HighQuality_Tif_150dpi_Rgb.zip
• One zip file (243 MB) containing all low-quality (JPG format) sheets if you need smaller file sizes: Dcam22v1_Sheets_LowQuality_Jpg_150dpi_Rgb.zip

Individual map tiles (low-quality JPG) can be downloaded by clicking a tile on this key map:

HKU Bachelor of Arts in Landscape Studies BA(LS) students capped their senior year with the Final Review for Studio Laos: Strategic Landscape Planning for the Greater Mekong. The studio focused on northern Laos's rapidly transforming landscapes along its border with southwest China. Co-taught by professors Ashley Scott Kelly and Xiaoxuan Lu, this studio teaches students not merely how planners or architects or landscape architects might be involved in large-scale planning projects but also how a cultural anthropologist or political scientist describes and assesses development across Southeast Asia.

Following the recently published pedagogy in Critical Landscape Planning during the Belt and Road Initiative (Kelly and Lu, 2021), students read from diverse literature critical of how development happens, covering histories and issues such as alternative value systems, context-specific responses to reductive policies and plans, and overlapping or patchworked development. Using that knowledge and their landscape studies education, students then individually analyzed the frictions between two development projects prior iterations of the studio had visited before the pandemic. Projects included botanic gardens, forest study plots, wildlife sanctuaries, community forests, hydropower and irrigation dams, water user groups, villages undergoing resettlement, highway upgrading, special economic zones or other enclaves, protected forests, permaculture farms, and rubber and other cash-crop plantations. Frictions between these projects include ideological frictions (such as between Western alternative and Chinese-backed approaches, or between northern science and ethnobotany), as well as practical frictions in these projects' capacities for sustainable development.

For the second half of the term, students individually developed landscape planning strategies, especially considering the persistent obstacles to sustainable development and ongoing shocks to socioeconomic and socioecological systems, such as transitions from small-scale ecotourism to mass nature tourism, large-scale infrastructure and enclosure, and rural-urban migration. At their final review, students defended their proposals to members from a range of Laos civil society, including: an NGO operating several wildlife sanctuaries across Southeast Asia; an NGO trialing coffee in northern Laos; a 30-year-old network of field biologists studying the eastern Himalayas; and Laos's oldest domestic development NGO. Other members of the students' jury included: landscape architects and geographers from the National University of Singapore and University of Technology Sydney; a landscape ecologist, an archeologist, and an impact assessment expert from HKU's Schools of Biology and Humanities and Centre for Civil Society and Governance; as well as architects and landscape architects from HKU's Faculty of Architecture.

The students, Ashley, and Xiaoxuan give their greatest appreciation to our jury members and our school's continued support for the important conversations had year-on-year concerning the development of landscapes across sectors and across geographies in the region. Congratulations students!

Click here to view course synopsis and student work

A new book, Critical Landscape Planning during the Belt and Road Initiative by Ashley Scott Kelly and Xiaoxuan Lu, will be published by Springer Nature in November 2021.

Backcover text:

Kelly, A. S., & Lu, X. (2021). Critical Landscape Planning during the Belt and Road Initiative. Singapore: Springer. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-16-4067-4

Final-year HKU Bachelor of Arts in Landscape Studies BA(LS) students presented their strategic planning proposals for northern Laos to an international panel of ecologists, sociologists, geographers, activists, and philanthropists, in addition to designers and planners.

For their proposals, students each asked difficult questions of development and sustainability practices, including: Challenging impact assessment scope; qualifying the remediation potential of Chinese contract farming; bridging scientific study and community forestry; mitigating the industrialization and over-harvesting of species for traditional medicine; and exploring overlaps between mass ecotourism, protected areas and the illegal wildlife trade.

Having not visited Laos this term due to the pandemic, we took the opportunity to reinforce our critical approaches to planning, in which we understand our "sites" as inherently multi-sited constructs dominated by different stakeholders' perspectives. In place of their field trip, each student was assigned pairs of existing development projects that we visited in previous years, and they were instructed to imagine the frictions between those sites' ideologies, aims, expertise, and longer histories.

The students and their instructors, Lu and Ashley, thank our panelists for joining and recognizing the value of the studio's critical "landscape approach" and the importance of the students' proposals to Laos's future development. Panelists included:

Prof. Emily Yeh (Dept. of Geography, University of Colorado); Francois Guegan (Conservation Director, WWF Laos); Alice Hughes (Centre for Integrative Conservation, Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden); Andy Brown (Executive Director, Kadoorie Farm and Botanical Garden, Hong Kong); William Bleisch (Research Director, China Exploration and Research Society); Matthew Hunt (CEO, Free the Bears); Prof. David Palmer (HKU Dept. of Sociology); Winnie Law (HKU Centre for Civil Society and Governance); Enze Han (HKU Dept. of Politics and Public Administration); Danny Marks (CityU Dept. of Asian and International Studies); Joseba Estévez (HKU Institute for the Humanities and Social Sciences); Inge Goudsmidt (Office for Metropolitan Architecture); Prof. Jeff Hou (Dept. of Landscape Architecture, University of Washington); and Elizabeth Leven, Cecilia Chu, Sony Devabhaktuni, and Merve Bedir from HKU Architecture and Landscape Architecture.

Congratulations to all for an incredible term!

Click here to view course synopsis and student work

Click here to view course synopsis and student work