ASSOC. PROFESSOR MARGARET GROSE

Associate Professor in Landscape architecture
University of Melbourne School of Design

Margaret Grose is an ecologist and landscape architect, and an agricultural scientist, with a broad knowledge base across ecological science and landscape architecture. 

Her research focusses on articulating synergies between ecology and landscape architecture and on approaches to teaching the translation of scientific ideas into design. She explores ecological knowledge for designers, artificial light at night, ecological agriculture and conservation, trees in the landscape, public open space, and tree colour as a component of botanical conservation. She has published sixty papers. Her book, Constructed Ecologies: Critical Reflections on Ecology with Design, was published in 2017; this contains new concepts for landscape architecture. She is currently working on other books. 

In 2016 Margaret was Visiting Scholar, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, at the Center for Advanced Urbanism. In June 2017, she addressed the transmission of ecological knowledge to practice to young academics from across China at Tongji University, Shanghai. In 2018, she was awarded a Sargent Visiting Scholar from Harvard University and was based at the Arnold Arboretum and the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology. 

Margaret has been at the University of Melbourne since 2007. She teaches undergraduate and graduate landscape architecture core subjects on ecology and design. 
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COLLAPSE PROPELS US FORWARDS

Collapse is both a noun, a verb and synonymous with inability, disability, weakness, inaptitude, incompetence, and incapacity, among others. The core agents of collapse as considered today are biodiversity loss and climate change, which has become the over-riding narrative of our times. In this presentation I will discuss climate change as an imaginative idea that is propelling us forward to a re-evaluation, renewal, reinvention, re-working, and re-engagement, with greater breadth of vision than has dominated immediately before and how landscape architecture has a large role to play. This short talk is inspired by students who have thanked me for not being negative about their future, and the real need to point to positive ways forward that give them a sense of future in a world full of the negative talk of collapse.