Title: The usual, the unusual and the overlooked: public space strategies for ambiguous times

Speaker: Prof. Gini Lee

Time:  Nov. 13, 2015, Friday, 19:00pm

Venue: The first floor, multimedia classroom of Number 27 building

Organizer:  School of Architecture, SCUT

Abstract

The "natural" home for landscape architecture dwells in the conception and delivery of projects for public space sustained by diverse practices and territories. Across the globe the provision of the constructed public - squares, articulated roads, communication networks and nodes, interstitial or liminal space and all manner of pop-up or temporary urban environments - is keeping landscape and its makers busy in the name of amusement for legible place-making. Increasingly, public space interventions seek the event; the spectacle resulting often in an overwrought materiality and in-your-face messaging. The range of tactics that cities employ to identify either their cultural approach to the modern city, or ways in which access and control are played out in public infrastructure, confront and challenge public design. Increasingly the ‘green’ agenda is regarded as a worthy proponent towards achieving resilient public space. Yet, is green (or blue) always good or necessary for sustainable public environments, particularly for a warming and drying climate where the lack of blue will ultimately turn the green to gold and ultimately brown?

The usual, the unusual and the overlooked examines planning strategies and/or urban spaces visited on recent travels where site specificity simultaneously contests and encourages diversity in design for public space. Here, the common ground lies also in the social and political agendas that frame dialogues between the public and their lived spaces – with and beyond the green. These usual, unusual and sometimes overlooked places utilise dissimilarity and provocation for the designed landscape through practices of association across the intersections of art, science, cartography, ecology and hopeful sociability.