SEDRD Participates in Seminar at Wageningen University, the Netherlands

Expert seminar ‘Designing for Urban Climate Adaptation’, Wageningen University, the Netherlands, April 25, 2013

Professor Robert Brown and recent MLA graduate Victoria Cox participated in a very inspiring one-day seminar at Wageningen University, the Netherlands.  The seminar explored ways that landscape architects can design urban environments to mitigate the effects of both global climate change and intensified urban heat islands. The seminar was hosted by Professor Adri van den Brink and Dr. Sanda Lenzholzer of the Landscape Architecture Group and included participants from Canada, Germany, Latvia and the Netherlands who all brought their different experiences and backgrounds. We had very lively discussions about suitable methods to analyse and depict landscape and urban climate and climate responsive design methods.

One conclusion was our joint concern for knowledge dissemination: how can we provide people who design cities with the necessary and suitable climate knowledge, and how can we encourage their enthusiasm for implementing climate adaptation? Apart from informing professionals (with books, workshops, videos) we think that one of the best way to achieve this is to educate landscape architecture students about urban climate. When students learn about urban climate and how to design for it in the first years of their landscape architecture education, considering urban climate becomes a natural part of their design process.

Therefore, one of the major outcomes of this seminar will be a position statement or manifesto that will strongly encourage the inclusion of the topic ‘urban climate modification’ in landscape architectural education. 

Image: Victoria Cox (back row, left) and Robert Brown (back row, middle) participated in the international Expert Seminar.  Other participants were from Germany, Latvia, and the Netherlands.