Published by Communications and Public Affairs (519) 824-4120, Ext. 56982 or 53338
News Release
February 06, 2004
U of G to host lecture on use of public spaces
The University of Guelph is hosting "The Productive Public Landscape: Its Design, Art and Governance" Feb. 17 at 2:30 p.m. in the Ontario Veterinary College's Lifetime Learning Centre. The lecture, hosted by the Ontario Agricultural College, is free and open to the public.
Moura Quayle, a U of G graduate who is dean of the faculty of agricultural sciences and a landscape architecture professor at the University of British Columbia will give the talk while in Guelph to receive an honorary degree.
Citizens have largely abdicated stewardship of publicly owned land — including parks and other green spaces, cemeteries and city streets — to city engineers, said Quayle. She calls for people to join debates on the use of public spaces and urges planners to think about those spaces as tools for community building, especially in urban development.
Among recent projects, she has studied greenways in the Vancouver, urban-rural land-use decisions and a sustainable region initiative in the greater Vancouver area. She chaired Vancouver's Urban Landscape Task Force in 1993 and was named a YWCA Woman of Distinction in communication and public affairs.
Quayle was appointed dean of the faculty of agricultural sciences at UBC in 1997. Formerly the director of UBC's landscape architecture program, she held a joint appointment between that program and the school of architecture from 1983 to 1996.
Quayle is president of the Canadian Faculties of Agriculture and Veterinary Medicine and a member of the OAC international advisory council.
After earning her bachelor's in landscape architecture from U of G in 1974, she completed a master's at the University of California at Berkeley in 1983. She has worked as a landscape architect in Victoria and Montreal.
As a Guelph undergraduate, she gained insights about the value of public spaces when she modelled the space on Winegard Walk outside the McLaughlin Library for a design course. "That was one of the first open urban spaces I looked at. I thought: ‘This is like figuring out how a public living room should work.'"
For media questions, contact Communications and Public Affairs: Lori Bona Hunt (519) 824-4120, Ext. 53338, or Rachelle Cooper, (519) 824-4120, Ext. 56982.
