Masters thesis section abstract:
This thesis section has for several years encouraged transdisciplinary landscape planning interventions into China's large-scale eco-environmental programmes (生态立州). With China's Belt and Road Initiative and increasingly diverse processes of going out (走出去), this section welcomes landscape-driven theses in transnational arenas heavily influenced by Chinese development, aid and expertise. Indeed, lessons from China's internal development, such as the long-running Western Development campaign (西部大开发), provide a critical lens for understanding new potentials for Chinese-led projects in ecologically complex frontiers. The global shift during the 1990s to models of "sustainable development" greatly influenced the establishment of China's environmental legislation and national environmental programmes. Such national projects as the Sloping Land Conversion and Natural Forest Protection Programs mold, sometimes with great conflict, to diverse geographies in which those people impacted have a direct attachment to the landscape (see Yeh, 2013). However, these frontiers are typically the domain of multilateral development banks and international environmental NGOs. The design and planning disciplines' involvement is both nascent and subservient (see disciplinary context in Weller, 2014). This thesis section suggests that landscape architecture has potential agency here in the mediation of technical practices (such as impact assessment for highway engineering or scientific prediction of ecosystem services) and practices of sustainability (such as technology transfers and resource governance) as discovered, studied, organized, and disseminated via iterative design methods and scenario-building. Long the arena of geography and anthropology, the landscape architect and planner find disciplinary footing from earlier periods of landscape planning, contemporary landscape urbanism, and emergent technologies and approaches from civil engineering and sustainability sciences (see interdisciplinary project types in Roy Chowdhury, 2013).
All theses in this section share a methodology:
i) Survey the successes and failures of region-specific projects or predecessors, especially their remnant material landscapes;
ii) Identify siloed approaches by political, environmental and social agents;
iii) Appropriate, through transdisciplinary immersion, analytical methods and tools from sustainability sciences;
iv) Employ critical counter-mapping strategies; and
v) Generate designs that synthesize environmental knowledge into landscape-driven scenarios and development narratives.
- Teaching award: Excellent Instructor award, 15th National Annual Conference on Architecture and Design Education, for supervising student thesis by Au Young Chung Yan Samantha (Landscape and Planning Design, Silver Award) titled An Environmental Rationale: Strategies to reconcile the graduated sovereignty of northern China's eco-modernization programs (2018). Samantha's thesis was later published as: Au Young, C. Y. (2019). An Environmental Rationale: Strategies to reconcile the graduated interest of northwestern China's eco-modernization programs. Landscape Architecture Frontiers, 7(1), 138-149.
- Teaching award: Outstanding Instructor award, 16th Annual Asia Design Awards, for supervising student thesis by Kwok Siu Man Mandy (Ecological health and sustainability category, Bronze Award) titled Bioremediation and Blue Tape: Regulating the uncertainty, assessment and negotiation of coastal development in Hainan (2018). Mandy's thesis was later published as: Kwok, S. M. (2020). Responsive bioremediation: Regulating the uncertainty, assessment, and negotiation for coastal developments in Hainan, China. Landscape Architecture Frontiers, 8(4), 152-163.
- Teaching award: Supervised thesis, Hong Kong Institute of Landscape Architects, Student Award, recognized for supervising thesis by Li Man Hei titled Green Belt, Grey Belt? Non-zoned approaches to landscape evaluation and management in Hong Kong (2018).
- Teaching award: Outstanding Instructor award, 13th Annual Asia Design Awards, for supervising student thesis by Zhang Zihui (Best Design Project for Landscape Architecture, Silver Award) titled Fragmentation in National Desertification Policy: Environmental management and relocation for eco-refugees (2015).
Student theses:
Producing peatland: Landscape strategies for reorienting the capital and habitus of peatland's scientific production in the United Kingdom
By LO Wai Ching
Abstract: Peatland benefits society and nature in diverse ways, including serving as ecologically important habitat, productive farmland, and an immense carbon sink. Global policy trends promoting carbon markets risk peatland management being reduced to a commercial practice, marginalizing both the current emphasis on ecological benefits and the authority of existing peatland management groups. This thesis in landscape architecture proposes a socio-technical system explicitly targeting reductive practices that have led to poor land management and significant environmental degradation. Using a hypothetical pilot site in East Anglia, United Kingdom, its design strategies produce peatland focusing on (a) ecological, (b) hydrological, and/or (c) alternative financial benefits while strategically organizing these approaches' varying implementation complexity, time investment, and uncertainty. Importantly, although natural forces shape peatland over geological timescales, the scope, function, and meaning of peatland is socially constructed. Technical peatland management practices and their entwined social networks and knowledge domains are also highly context-specific, as demonstrated by comparing UK management regimes with those in Europe, Russia, North America, and Indonesia. This thesis asserts that peatland production must be simultaneously socially plural and steered by rigorous ecological science, especially given broader trends neoliberalizing the production of science in applied ecology. The design strategies explicitly preference techniques promoting the authority of disadvantaged stakeholder groups in the decision-making, implementation and technologically diverse monitoring and maintenance processes of peatland production. Landscape architects, with unique capacity to leverage the social and political economy producing these landscapes, can help bridge the ecological science of peatland management with our mainstream planning institutions.
- Presented at HKU Landscape's Public Review 2021.
Green belt, grey belt? Non-zoned approaches to landscape evaluation and management in Hong Kong
By LI Man Hei Bernice
Abstract: Hong Kong's existing Country Parks, "green belts", and a multitude of conservation-related zones conserve the territory's natural landscapes and resources. However, these designations are often weakly defined and susceptible to ever-increasing development pressures. By examining six sample sites representative of the Hong Kong's diverse threats to conservation, the work challenges zone-based planning and evaluation systems and suggests new methods of land categorization to increase the resiliency and manageability of Hong Kong's valuable natural areas. Using contested development plans for North Lantau Island as design test site, a more flexible yet less ambiguous approach is proposed to evaluate ecologically sensitive landscapes. This thesis extends landscape ecology's large-scale landscape gradient model, as an alternative to zone- or patch-based models, to small-scale sites by incorporating four aphysical value metrics: Conservation value; ecological value; redevelopment susceptibility; and manageability of the site. Two landscape management programs are proposed: 1) A productive landscape which encourages social and economic growth that is mutually benefiting the environment and villagers; and 2) a conservation landscape which conserves and restores the ecological legacies and its intactness. Both programs view rural landscapes as dynamic systems. Such a gradient approach can allow or facilitate the negotiation of social and ecological values across urban and natural areas.
- Student Award, Hong Kong Institute of Landscape Architects (2018).
- Presented at HKU Landscape's Public Review 2017.
An Environmental rationale: Strategies to reconcile the graduated sovereignty of northern China's eco-modernization programs
By AU YOUNG Chung Yan Samantha
Abstract: From 1980 to 2010, the Chinese government introduced a series of large-scale environmental programs across northwestern China, including Three-North Shelterbelt Program, Suspended Village Migration, 1236 Yellow River Irrigation Program, Natural Forest Protection Program, Sloping Land Conversion Program, and Converting Pastures to Grasslands Program. Focusing on the Ningxia Hui Autonomous Region, this thesis uses Emily Yeh's (2009) deployment of Ong's (2000) concept of "graduated sovereignty", which theorizes the different modes of governing segments of the population, how these groups relate to global markets, and the different mixes of legal compromises and controls tailored to the requirements of special environmental zones. Overlapping histories and complex interactions amongst these eco-modernization programs have yielded diverse spaces of environmental governance. This thesis constructs a series of scenarios for the millions of refugees from these programs, tracing the overlaps and frictions of often coexisting programs that were defined as primarily either conservation- or economically oriented. Only through recognizing the heterogeneity of outcomes across these diverse landscapes can we find better ways to "green" northwestern China.
- Published as: Au Young, C. Y. (2019). An Environmental Rationale: Strategies to reconcile the graduated interest of northwestern China's eco-modernization programs. Landscape Architecture Frontiers, 7(1), 138-149.
- Landscape and Planning Design, Silver Award, 15th National Annual Conference on Architecture and Design Education (2018).
- Presented at HKU Landscape's Public Review 2018.
Catalyzing uncertainty and ecological risk: An Environmental archive for readying Hong Kong's plural ontologies
By Francisco CEVALLOS BARRAGAN
Abstract: Today, with a global environmental emergency alongside political battles for democracy and human rights, new strategies are needed to articulate trust and promote democratic environmentalist values, especially in contested regions. Contemporary society presents extreme discontents underpinned by ecological risk and an environment threatened by increasingly unchallenged dominant voices. Hong Kong's environmental decision-making occurs within a laissez-faire economic system best described as neoliberalism with Chinese characteristics. Critical analysis of Hong Kong's environmental governance system shows high relevance of advocacy groups, a lack of public participation, corporate pressure, weak institutions necessary for articulating various knowledges, and inadequate evaluation of the cumulative effects of environmental contamination. Following arguments across Hong Kong's legal, health, information technology, and environmental sectors for the implementation of an archives law, this thesis proposes creating an Independent Environmental Archives Agency (IEAA) capable of collecting and representing evidence of cumulative impact, supporting process-oriented environmental governance, and "salvaging" (Choy, "Ecologies of Comparison", 2011) scientific uncertainty for more sustainable development. Through a requirement of including the ontological perspectives of eight stakeholder groups with distinct yet closely aligned sustainability practices, this agency both effectively guarantees inclusion of diverse perspectives while also filtering knowledge and facilitating dialogue that privilege environmental uncertainty, longer-term objectives, and intergenerational equity. Examples of stakeholders include a director of corporate sustainability, an indigenous community leader, a Special Rapporteur to Hong Kong, a civil servant, an environmental activist, an environmental manager, and a developer-employed architect. Each stakeholder poses to the IEAA questions formed from distinct socio-political and disciplinary backgrounds (e.g., training in environmental law or corporate sustainability, degrees in social sciences or ecology, certificates in sustainable community governance), along with those backgrounds' attendant biases and assumptions. A species-based approach helps further focus the selection of evidence and design of monitoring programs. The IEAA's capacity for collecting, filtering and returning "data" from the archive on cumulative impact is improved as projects, assessments, and, most importantly, stakeholder queries are entered into and help strengthen its archive.
- Presented at HKU Landscape's Public Review 2020.
Making an environmental authority: Development, negotiation and the technical production of agricultural land under Hong Kong New Agriculture Policy
By CHONG Yan Suen Ceas
Abstract: The Hong Kong government unveiled the New Agriculture Policy in its 2016 Policy Address to promote the modernization and sustainable development of local agriculture. While questionable land deals and land-banking are prevalent at agriculture and wetland sites across Hong Kong's New Territories, the construction of the Agricultural Park (Agri-Park), proposed on active agricultural land at Tsiu Keng near Sheung Shui and Fanling, and its supporting infrastructure is controversial among various stakeholders for its technocratic planning and poor transparency. Using the complex developmental and ecological legacies of Hong Kong, this thesis designs a series of scenarios for the future of the Agri-Park that question our definitions of productivity and efficiency, biodiversity, land use categorisation and conversion, technical expertise and technology transfer, and legal implications of ownership versus stewardship. Rather than purely deconstructing the land development process, this work negotiates futures that recognise the productive tensions in the government's conservation mandates that allow it to make principled decisions in the face of powerful financial and development interests. The design proposes alternative ways to articulate the Agri-Park's objectives and wields existing ecological and developments metrics, such as risk and efficiency, to shift the development debate from physical planning to a broader, negotiated space for all stakeholders.
- Selected for HKU Landscape's Public Review 2019.
Bioremediation and blue tape: Regulating the uncertainty, assessment and negotiation of coastal development in Hainan
By KWOK Siu Man Mandy
- Published as: Kwok, S. M. (2020). Responsive bioremediation: Regulating the uncertainty, assessment, and negotiation for coastal developments in Hainan, China. Landscape Architecture Frontiers, 8(4), 152-163.
- Ecological health and sustainability category, Bronze Award, 16th Annual Asia Design Awards (2018).
Production atypical: State agricultural policy and divergent resource management for the coastal plains of Laizhou Bay
By JIN Jiayi, Jason
- Presented at HKU Landscape's Public Review 2016.
Fragmentation in national desertification policy: Environmental management and relocation for eco-refugees, Northwest China
By ZHANG Zihui Ffion
- Best Design Project for Landscape Architecture, Silver Award, 13th Annual Asia Design Awards (2015).
Fabricating site: Modelling nuanced scenarios and design responses to China's national environmental programmes
By ZHUANG Zikai
The Phylogeography of environmental ethics: Regional landscape planning for China's decommissioning zoos
By OU Kaiyun Ivanka
Divergent landscape futures: Resilience scenarios for climate change, dam-building and regional development impacts on the Tonle Sap floodplain
By LU Jingrong Lawrence
Reconstructing regional conservation: Development synergies for Angkor's living temples, rural livelihoods and environmental stewardship
By ZHANG Boyang Marina
Justifying Sustainability: Environmental governance and the legitimacy of environmental analysis along the Myanmar-China border
By YUAN Zheyi Zoey
Conservation watch: Nuanced modelling approaches for adaptive management of Hong Kong's conservation landscapes
By SHUM Siu Kei David
Longer-term landscape assessment: Feedback strategies for incorporating sustainability science in China's rural development planning
By WANG Xuting Julie
A Field science out-of-sight: Anticipating future forms of sustainable development for Kyrgyzstan's walnut-fruit forests
By XU Mingyang Simon
Constructing a land ethic: Relational assessment practices for rebuilding trust in land supply and land justice in Hong Kong
By CHAU Li Yin Sabrina
