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Design for Conservation

Environmental Futures Initiative


Scales of Environmentalism

Instructor: Ashley Scott Kelly

At The University of Hong Kong

Course abstract:

2013 marks the 30-year anniversary of the first established nature reserve in China's Three Parallel Rivers of Yunnan Protected Area (TPR). This UNESCO site is constituted of 15 core areas that, when connected by buffer zones, amount to eight contiguous units spread over 50,000 square kilometers. This fragmentation and gradation is not isolated to the TPR area but characteristic of rural China, illustrating conservation and the creation of wilderness as a political and economic tool. A slow-down in dam construction in recent years, despite high renewable energy targets of the Western Development Campaign for the TPR's virgin Nu river valley, is attributed to local politics. In this course, we use hydropower planning as a lens to understand China's west as not resultant from central planning mechanisms but instead developed out of complex political-economic productions institutionalized within technology and conservation. The course expands the repertoire of the design disciplines to extra-urban, extra-social geographies of global, paramount importance. We use landscape design's physical and material agency to explore natural resources and the political motivations, imaginations, and scientific metrics that underpin them.

    Xijiang regional hydropower construction, resettlement, and regulation. By WANG Yang Vincent, 2012.
    Xijiang regional hydropower construction, resettlement, and regulation. By WANG Yang Vincent, 2012.
    Project introduction. By WANG Yang Vincent, 2012.
    Project introduction. By WANG Yang Vincent, 2012.
    Urbanization and water delivery infrastructure development of the Pearl River Delta. By WANG Yang Vincent, 2012.
    Urbanization and water delivery infrastructure development of the Pearl River Delta. By WANG Yang Vincent, 2012.
    Information visualization for Pearl River Delta hydropower. By WANG Yang Vincent, 2012.
    Information visualization for Pearl River Delta hydropower. By WANG Yang Vincent, 2012.
    Changes in farming practices of ethnic minorities before and after relocation due to hydropower development. By LI Perry, 2012.
    Changes in farming practices of ethnic minorities before and after relocation due to hydropower development. By LI Perry, 2012.
    Small hydropower production in the Nujiang valley, Yunnan. By ZHANG Yucong Viola, 2012.
    Small hydropower production in the Nujiang valley, Yunnan. By ZHANG Yucong Viola, 2012.
    Small hydropower production in the Nujiang valley, Yunnan. By LI Haoxin Yan, 2013.
    Small hydropower production in the Nujiang valley, Yunnan. By LI Haoxin Yan, 2013.
    Small hydropower production in the Nujiang valley, Yunnan. By LI Haoxin Yan, 2013.
    Small hydropower production in the Nujiang valley, Yunnan. By LI Haoxin Yan, 2013.