Design for Conservation: News 2025

Lecture Title: Landscape and planning in the predictive state: New negotiations for landscape architecture in the smart Earth era

Lecture Synopsis: Environmental planning is undergoing a transition from the environmental state—characterized by regulatory processes like environmental impact assessment—to a “predictive state” driven by machine learning, geospatial artificial intelligence, and real-time environmental sensing. This predictive turn complicates the role of civil society, experts, and democratic deliberation in environmental governance. This talk for landscape architects and planners is delivered in three parts: (1) a rapid introduction to key issues raised in critical geography on the socio-ecological implications of the real-time monitoring, prediction and regulation of landscapes; (2) a few examples in Southeast Asia of scientists and civil society deploying predictive models in ecosystem services and ecological connectivity for landscape assessment and infrastructure planning and design; and (3) some strategic approaches for landscape architecture during this transition.

Bio: Ashley Scott Kelly is assistant professor in landscape architecture at the University of Hong Kong. Ashley’s work focuses on scenario-building and filling knowledge gaps for sustainable development, applying design methods to land change and landscape ecology for the study, advocacy, design and delivery of projects in ecologically complex and contested landscapes. Recent works include tropical road design guidelines, wildlife corridor modeling, and coupling remote sensing with historical narratives for novel impact assessment. Ashley teaches landscape planning and geospatial technologies and engages civil society across Southeast Asia. He is co-author of Critical Landscape Planning during the Belt and Road Initiative (Springer, 2021).

Congratulations to Maggie and Marcus, two of our HKU Landscape BA(LS) graduates who won the Prize for Outstanding Water Sustainability Undergraduate Capstone Project awarded by HKU’s Water Centre for their final-year studio projects.

Project: “Embedding landscape in riverine reserve design: Ecological metrics and manageability to strengthen unplanned community-based conservation networks in northern Thailand”

Marcus Leung Lok Yin proposes a landscape planning framework for increasing the sustainability and resiliency of one of Southeast Asia’s largest networks of community-based fish conservation zones. The roughly 50 existing zones were established and managed by the majority ethnic Karen villagers in Thailand’s Mae Hong Son Province over the past three decades. Existing freshwater ecology research on this network suggests it had a net positive effect on fish sustainability but that overfishing pressures continue to have adverse ecological impacts. Marcus’s framework challenges and extends a previous ecological assessment of this network by considering several additional landscape metrics for gauging the suitability and capacity of individual communities to fill gaps in the conservation network with additional zones. Karen people are deeply attached to the water, and these fish conservation zones provide a wide range of community benefits, including food security (fish is their primary protein source) and cultural sustainability. Marcus uses his landscape architecture and planning skillsets to accomplish the difficult task of simultaneously considering traditional ecological knowledge, science on freshwater ecology, and the political-economic legacies of Southeast Asia’s highland communities.

Project: “Field operations on hydrosocial territories: Landscape impacts of reservoir construction on the lower Yuam River, Thailand”

Maggie Yao Renyue proposes a series of strategies for the majority ethnic Karen communities living along the diversion tunnel’s planned 20-kilometer-long reservoir in Thailand’s Mae Hong Son Province. The diversion tunnel requires over one thousand check dams (weirs) to be constructed within the immediate catchments surrounding the reservoir to regulate water flow and sediment. Maggie first interrogates the planning and construction process of this highly dispersed system of weirs and considers their potential impacts on both the freshwater ecology and communities’ agricultural livelihoods. She then proposes (1) repurposing these weirs to maximize benefits to both agriculture and local ecology, and (2) taking advantage of nascent ecotourism opportunities. Maggie’s project has numerous compelling strengths, including her investigation of past legacies of development in the project area, consideration of cross-sector impacts beyond the status quo assessment, focus on community livelihood and cultural sustainability, scenario-building to deal with the uncertainty of large-scale development, and incorporating tactical landscape architecture and civil engineering interventions into larger-scale planning.

Final-year Bachelor of Arts in Landscape Studies students presented their final proposals for landscapes impacted by a planned 60-kilometer water diversion tunnel in northern Thailand. During this capstone studio on the Thai-Myanmar border, led by Ashley Scott Kelly and Yuan Zhuang, our landscape undergrads develop and present a 100-page research report to civil society organizations, visit a diverse range of development projects and programs across northern Thailand, individually design strategic planning proposals, and have their work juried by a panel of experts from planning, sociology, ecology, geography, and design.

This year’s jury included: Prof. Kelly Shannon (International Center for Urbanism, KU Leuven); Naruemon Thabchumpon (Fac. of Political Science, Chulalongkorn Univ.); Warong Wonglangka (Fac. of Architecture, Chiang Mai Univ.); Vanessa Lamb (Dept. of Social Sciences, York Univ.); Winnie Law (HKU Centre for Civil Society and Governance); Barry Day (Asia Design Director, B+H Architects); Zali Fung (Inst. of Geography and Sustainability, Univ. of Lausanne); Sunita Kwangta (Karen Environmental and Social Action Network, KESAN); Phnom Thano (Co-founder of Indigenous Media Network, Thailand); Xiaoxuan Lu (NUS Architecture); Cecilia Chu (CUHK School of Architecture); Inge Goudsmit (CUHK School of Architecture); Peter Cobb (HKU School of Humanities); Elizabeth Leven (Asia Ecological Consultants, aec Ltd.); Anhua Liang (SWA Group, Shanghai); Olgierd Nitka (Studio94); and several planners and designers from HKU Planning, Architecture, and Landscape Architecture.

The students, Ashley and Yuan express their gratitude to the jury and to HKU for its continued support for fostering critical and essential discussions about landscape development across the regions. Congratulations to all students!

Click here to view course synopsis and student work

HKU Landscape undergrads traveled to northern Thailand in early March for their final-semester studio on regional landscape planning. During the 10-day trip, students traveled more than 500-kilometers overland to document sites planned for hydropower, interbasin water transfer, spoil disposal areas, flow regulation check dams for reservoir construction, river dredging, access roads, and high-voltage transmission lines. Students also visited case study sites of urban reforestation in Bangkok, rural reforestation in one of Southeast Asia's most extensive chronosequences of tropical forest plots near Chiang Mai, and a vast network of community-based fish conservation zones spanning parts of Chiang Mai, Mae Hong Son, and Tak provinces. Students learned of the complexity of large-scale development and conservation project planning and of the challenges—technologically, politically, and physically—in working off-the-grid in remote and mountainous sites.

The students and their instructors professor Ashley Scott Kelly and Yuan Zhuang thank the People's Network of the Yuam, Ngao, Moei and Salween River Basin; the Karen Environmental and Social Action Network (KESAN); The Border Consortium (TBC); International Rivers; the Regional Community Forestry Training Center for Asia and the Pacific (RECOFTC); the Forest Restoration Research Unit (FORRU) of Chiang Mai University; landscape architecture practices Northforest Studio and TK Studio and academics from Chulalongkorn and Chiang Mai Universities; and generous support from numerous friends in the region. Wish the students the best of luck designing their studio projects in the second half of the term.