Hello,
This site presents projects across a multitude of topics and locations generally fielded in the design disciplines. I believe most complex problems can be mediated and advanced through design using a wide recognition of development processes and human-environment interactions.
My research and practice focus on scenario-building and filling knowledge gaps for sustainable development, especially in regions that lack adequate knowledge or transparency in development information and spatial data. I apply design methods to land change and landscape ecology, with wide expertise on the manipulation of geospatial data for the study, advocacy, design and delivery of projects in ecologically complex and contested landscapes. Recent works include design guidelines for tropical road infrastructure, corridor modelling for wildlife crossing design, and coupling high-resolution remote sensing with historical narratives for novel impact assessment. Key professional works range widely in scale, from new town planning to the winning entry for New York City’s 46,000-acre Gateway National Park. I offer studio and lecture courses on regional landscape planning, landscape media, and GIS and research-based seminars and studios on environmental conservation, modernization and rural development in Hong Kong, China, South Asia, Southeast Asia (Myanmar, Laos, Thailand), and Latin America. I have coordinated the thesis in landscape architecture at The University of Hong Kong for five years.
Date posted: 08 May 2023
HKU Landscape undergrads capped their senior year with the Final Review for our Thai-Myanmar Border Studio. This year, students focused on a set of controversial and long-delayed development projects along the Thailand-Myanmar border, including dams on the Salween and Yuam rivers, a coal mine concession in Chiang Mai province, industrial zones in Mae Sot, and the planned large-scale water diversion tunnel from the Salween to Chao Phraya basins. Taught by professor Ash...
www.designforconservation.org/news/thai-myanmar-border-studio-final-review
Date posted: 25 March 2023
On Saturday, academics from the design schools of The University of Hong Kong and University of California, Berkeley opened an exhibition with a forum at Hong Kong's Central Market: Trading Bays: Resilience Design Strategies for San Francisco Bay Area and China's Greater Bay Area As an increasingly mainstream criteria for sustainability, "resilience" refers to the capacity for a system, whether urban or ecological, to function and rebound from disturbances. Trading B...
Date posted: 15 March 2023
University of Hong Kong (HKU) students studying landscape planning travelled in March for roughly 600 kilometers along the Thailand-Myanmar border between Chiang Mai and Mae Sot in Thailand. Students met with several environmental and human rights advocacy groups, academics, and communities regarding a series of controversial and long-delayed development projects along the border, including dams on the Salween and Yuam rivers, a coal mine concession in Chiang Mai prov...
www.designforconservation.org/news/hku-landscape-students-travel-along-thai-myanmar-border
Date posted: 08 August 2022
For Myanmar civil society engaged in conservation and sustainable development, it is often difficult to make connections between government-published information and current remote-sensing data on landscape change, if such data can easily be accessed at all. This post contains a new series of 125 maps for Tanintharyi Region at 1:50,000 scale matching the extent of the commonly used map series published in 2007 by the Myanmar Survey Department, Ministry of Agriculture...
www.designforconservation.org/news/150000-maps-forest-loss-land-cover-tanintharyi
Date posted: 12 May 2022
HKU Bachelor of Arts in Landscape Studies BA(LS) students capped their senior year with the Final Review for Studio Laos: Strategic Landscape Planning for the Greater Mekong. The studio focused on northern Laos's rapidly transforming landscapes along its border with southwest China. Co-taught by professors Ashley Scott Kelly and Xiaoxuan Lu, this studio teaches students not merely how planners or architects or landscape architects might be involved in large-scale plan...
www.designforconservation.org/news/studio-laos-2022-final-review
Date posted: 23 November 2021
COP26 just concluded after two weeks of intense debates, negotiations and compromises. New 2030 pledges, while steps in the right direction, now set a course for a catastrophic 2.4 degrees of global heating by 2100 (Climate Action Tracker.org). Much more needs to be done.As landscape designers and planners help public and private sectors mobilize, implement and strengthen these pledges through projects such as sustainable land use planning, we must build guarantees in...
www.designforconservation.org/news/landscape-architecture-cop26
Date posted: 01 June 2021
A new book, Critical Landscape Planning during the Belt and Road Initiative by Ashley Scott Kelly and Xiaoxuan Lu, will be published by Springer Nature in November 2021. Backcover text: This open access book traces the development of landscapes along the 414-kilometer China–Laos Railway, one of the first infrastructure projects implemented under China's Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and which is due for completion at the end of 2021. Written from the perspective of...
www.designforconservation.org/news/critical-landscape-planning-released-november-2021
Date posted: 04 June 2020
Final-year HKU Bachelor of Arts in Landscape Studies BA(LS) students presented their strategic planning proposals for northern Laos to an international panel of ecologists, sociologists, geographers, activists, and philanthropists, in addition to designers and planners. For their proposals, students each asked difficult questions of development and sustainability practices, including: Challenging impact assessment scope; qualifying the remediation potential of Chinese...
www.designforconservation.org/news/studio-laos-2020-final-review
Date posted: 15 February 2020
"Strategic Landscape Planning for the Greater Mekong" builds on six years of design-based experiential learning across mainland Southeast Asia by the Division of Landscape Architecture. This year, focusing on the regional impacts of China's Belt and Road Initiative in northern Laos, students spend one term engaging issues of development vis-à-vis landscape architecture to define problems and produce innovative planning proposals. During this process, students develop...
