200 Mile City, AILA 2004 National Conference, Brisbane, Australia

Main Speakers:

Brendan Gleeson is Professor of Urban Policy and Management at Griffith University. Before joining Griffith in March 2003, Professor Gleeson was Deputy Director of the Urban Frontiers Program, University of Western Sydney. His research interests include urban planning and governance, urban social policy, disability studies, and environmental theory and policy.

He is co-author (with Nicholas Low) of Justice, Society and Nature: an Exploration of Political Ecology (1998). This book received the prestigious Harold and Margaret Sprout award in 1999 from the International Studies Association. He has also co-edited three books with Nicholas Low on aspects of urban and environmental policy. Professor Gleeson’s urban social policy interests were reflected in his 1999 book, Geographies of Disability. In 2001, his book (with N.P.Low), Australian Urban Planning: New Challenges, New Agendas received the Royal Australian Planning Institute’s National Award for Planning Scholarship Excellence.

His latest book (edited with N.P. Low), Making Urban Transport Sustainable was published by Macmillan in March 2003. A further book, The Green City, will be published in late 2004.

Professor Gleeson has worked professionally in a range of countries, including Britain, Germany, New Zealand, the USA and Australia. In early 2002, Gleeson was appointed by the ACT government to act as a key adviser on a major restructuring of the territory’s planning and land development administration. He is currently a member of the ACT Planning and Land Council.

Brendan Gleeson will discuss the new yearning for community in our cities and suburbs and its implications for the planning of new urban development. Masterplanning strives to deliver community to eager consumers, but can a socially rich homeworld be supplied like a
commodity? What implications for democracy arise from contemporary masterplanning? Would a less 'programmed' form of urban development be more successful in creating socially confident communities. What would a 'deprogrammed' planning model look like?

Bill Hanway is the Managing Principal of the London office of EDAW and is a Vice President of the company. He trained and qualified as an architect in the United States and has been with EDAW London since 1997. He has 17 years of professional experience; combining the design and delivery of buildings with the urban design and the master planning of new environments. Prior to moving to the UK, Bill worked with an international architectural practice based in New York City.

Bill provides the design leadership and management of EDAW's multi-disciplinary teams and works in the United Kingdom, Continental Europe, United States and the Middle East. His projects consistently communicate the contribution that effective and high quality design can make to the commercial success of projects. In the United Kingdom, his work focuses on urban regeneration projects, new community designs and commercial developments. Internationally, his projects also include sustainable university planning, new town developments, eco-tourism/resort and entertainment/leisure destinations.

Bill has been an Enabler for the Commission for Architecture and the Built Environment for the past three years and is now leading EDAW’s corporate membership of CABE Space and the Design Code Panel. Bill has also recently been appointed to the English Heritage/CABE Urban Panel.

Tim Flannery is one of Australia’s leading thinkers on environmental issues. An internationally acclaimed scientist, explorer and writer, his books include The Future Eaters, The Eternal Frontier, and Beautiful Lies: Population and Environment in Australia. He spent a year as professor of Australian studies at Harvard and currently is Chair of the SA Sustainability Roundtable and director of the South Australian Museum.

Michael Fotheringham, ASLA, holds a Masters of Landscape Architecture degree from Utah State University, with an undergraduate degree in Fine Arts. He has practiced as a landscape architect in Canada and the United States over the last 26 years, and provides landscape design and planning services for a diversity of projects and clients.

Recent projects include being selected as the design competition winner and Design Landscape Architect for San Francisco’s Union Square, in partnership with April Philips, Golden Gate Park Windmill Interpretive Gardens, and the Santa Monica Downtown Transit Corridor, in association with Amphion Environmental. Since 1992, MD Fotheringham, Landscape Architects Inc, has specialized in residential community development, designing over 100 residential neighborhoods in Northern California. In addition, he has collaborated with public artists on several competitions and installations, including the National Peace Garden Design Competition.

In addition to his professional activities, Michael has served as Northern California Chapter President of the American Society of Landscape Architects (ASLA), and Director on the California Council of ASLA. He contributed to program and curriculum development and directed graphics and design studios at the University of California at Berkeley, UC Extension Certificate Program in Landscape Architecture. He is a Visiting Lecturer at the University of California at Davis in the Landscape Architecture Program, teaching design and drawing studios.

Over the course of his career, Mr. Fotheringham has been the recipient of numerous local and national design awards, and has presented research papers on topics such as “New Typologies of Public Space”. His current research explores the relationship between spatial behaviors and public space design.

Chris Johnson is NSW Government Architect and General Manager of the Government Architect’s Office in the Department of Commerce.

He is a member of the Central Sydney Planning Committee, Heritage Council of NSW, the Board of Architects of NSW and the South Sydney Development Corporation and is the past President of the Royal Australian Institute of Architects (NSW Chapter).

Chris chairs the Sydney Olympic Park Design Review Panel and the Sydney Harbour Design Review Panel and is Adjunct Professor of Architecture at the University of Sydney and at the University of Technology Sydney. He has three Masters degrees in Built Environment, History and Theory of Architecture, and Cultural Heritage.

Chris Johnson has written a number of books including Greening Sydney – landscaping the urban fabric, Shaping Sydney - Public Architecture and Civic Decorum, Celebrating Sydney 2000 – 100 Legacies, James Barnet, Australian Architecture Now and Geometries of Power.

In his role as NSW Government Architect, Chris Johnson is a contributor to debate about the future direction of cities particularly the metropolitan areas of Sydney. He has written numerous articles for newspapers and contributed to radio and television programs on these issues.

Michael Keniger is the Executive Dean of the Faculty of Engineering, Physical Sciences and Architecture and Professor of Architecture at The University of Queensland. He also holds the advisory role of the Queensland Government Architect. He has contributed to the design review and direction of many major projects including the Sydney Olympics, the National Museum, the Millennium Arts Projects, South Bank and the Queen Street Mall. He has written and lectured extensively on contemporary architecture and urbanism in Australia.

Mario Schjetnan G was born in Mexico City. He studied Architecture at the National University of Mexico and then obtained a Master’s Degree in Landscape Architecture with an emphasis on Urban Design at the University of California, Berkeley in 1970. In 1985 he was appointed Loeb Fellow in Advanced environmental Studies, by the GSD at Harvard University.

He is founding partner together with José Luis Pérez, of GDU - Grupo de Diseno Urbano (www.gdu.com.mx), a firm established in 1977 in Mexico City with projects in landscape architecture, architecture and urban design. GDU’s projects have received awards in Mexico, Argentina, the United States, and Italy and have been widely published in periodicals and books in the Unites States, Europe, Japan and Latin America.

GDU’s design philosophy is based on the conviction that urban or rural environmental design must be transformed by means of a creative process in balance with nature while carefully looking to local culture, climate and surroundings – involving the participation of the client or user.

Projects are set up in an interdisciplinary form and based, depending on its characteristics, on the advice of specialists in art, social sciences, economics, fiancé, ecology and civil and systems engineering.

GDU’s goal is to achieve imaginative and contemporary solutions to old, new or every day design problems. These solutions are to be feasible, efficient and aesthetic while considering the conservation and the improvement of the environment.

As a landscape architect I understand and accept, that most people love to mystify their landscapes. Let the public wonder, as professionals we need to be more precise.

For us, landscape is a cultural and physical construction that can be understood and must be dealt with. A growing world population with evolving demands, forces to continuous changes of the earths surface, urban and rural and natural. Necessary interventions are to be prepared and designed through landscape architecture.

It is according to my experience and a shared and strong professional opinion, that landscape architecture can be performed as an open research following a well known and well described method to reach the new goals: understanding, approval and influence of others in the design process, helping the public to understand, approve and influence the transformations as needed. And to reach higher goals of quality: defining form, function and aesthetics (colour, scent and proportion) in the renewed landscapes.

Transformations occur more often and more often cover the same area again and again. The follow up of changes is speeding up at the same time. I am sure that there is a need for more professionals to accommodate these changes in landscapes, in urban areas, in rural environments and even in natural habitats. And I am sure there is a need for a more generic and specific qualification.

If we as landscape architects can share and work with an approved and recognisable method we can improve the quality of interventions. We will be able to improve our business. We are able to offer a professional and scholarly education. And last but not least: a growing number of professionals can deal with a more responsible and responsive public. And therefore we will be able to catch up with the speed of changes too.

These intentions are written down, not to make the world a better place. To me the world already is a great (huge) and very good place. I have been (and still am) involved in the process of the production of some of the best and most sustainable, beautiful and practical interventions imaginable. And I am interested to contribute in the heart of the process to help educate a good part of that growing number of landscape architects needed in the real world.