Design for Conservation: News 2021

COP26 just concluded after two weeks of intense debates, negotiations and compromises. New 2030 pledges, while steps in the right direction, now set a course for a catastrophic 2.4 degrees of global heating by 2100 (Climate Action Tracker.org). Much more needs to be done.

As landscape designers and planners help public and private sectors mobilize, implement and strengthen these pledges through projects such as sustainable land use planning, we must build guarantees into our projects at all scales that ensure diverse conceptions of sustainability.

As we mitigate coastal erosion, wildfires, floods, drought, and invasive species, we must not forestall democratic participation in the planning process. We must guarantee that technical decision-making is not further distanced from the human and non-human nature these mitigation strategies impact. Increased ecological efficiency and alternative technologies must preserve natural and cultural diversity.

As we decarbonize our modes of construction, we must scrutinize the lifecycle of construction technologies, including materials origins, and ensure the monitoring of our projects’ carbon budgets are robust. We must take a precautionary approach that is rigorously based on scientific uncertainty.

As we reduce and reverse deforestation and biodiversity collapse, we must avoid (not offset) habitat loss and fragmentation, acknowledge diverse land rights and livelihoods, and recognize and empower both formal and informal community conservation initiatives.

Landscape architecture at HKU focuses on understanding and engaging the overlapping technical, cultural and political dimensions of environmental change across scales and development sectors.

Policy and plans are necessary but are never enough. Sustainability is only possible through sustained engagement.

Don’t do development as usual.

Study Landscape at HKU

This open access book traces the development of landscapes along the 414-kilometer China–Laos Railway, one of the first infrastructure projects implemented under China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and which is due for completion at the end of 2021. Written from the perspective of landscape architecture and intended for planners and related professionals engaged in the development and conservation of these landscapes, this book provides history, planning pedagogy and interdisciplinary framing for working alongside the often-opaque planning, design and implementation processes of large-scale infrastructure. It complicates simplistic notions of development and urbanization frequently reproduced in the Laos–China frontier region. Many of the projects and sites investigated in this book are recent "firsts" in Laos: Laos's first wildlife sanctuary for trafficked endangered species, its first botanical garden and its first planting plan for a community forest. Most often the agents and accomplices of neoliberal development, the planning and design professions, including landscape architecture, have little dialogue with either the mainstream natural sciences or critical social sciences that form the discourse of projects in Laos and comparable contexts. Covering diverse conceptions and issues of development, including cultural and scientific knowledge exchanges between Laos and China, nature tourism, connectivity and new town planning, this book also features nine planning proposals for Laos generated through this research initiative since the railway's groundbreaking in 2016. Each proposal promotes a wider "landscape approach" to development and deploys landscape architecture's spatial and ecological acumen to synthesize critical development studies with the planner's capacity, if not naive predilection, to intervene on the ground. Ultimately, this book advocates the cautious engagement of the professionally oriented built-environment disciplines, such as regional planning, civil engineering and landscape architecture, with the landscapes of development institutions and environmental NGOs.