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.
Student theses:
- Making an environmental authority: Development, negotiation and the technical production of agricultural land under Hong Kong New Agriculture Policy
CHONG Yan Suen Ceas - Conservation Watch: Nuanced modelling approaches for adaptive management of Hong Kong's conservation landscapes
SHUM Siu Kei David - Momentary solutions and least cost pathways to sustainability on Myanmar's BCIM corridor
FAN Junyi Roy - Justifying Sustainability: Environmental governance and the legitimacy of environmental analysis along the Myanmar-China border
YUAN Zheyi Zoey - An Environmental Rationale: Strategies to reconcile the graduated sovereignty of northern China's eco-modernization programs
AU YOUNG Chung Yan Samantha - Reconstructing Regional Conservation: Development synergies for Angkor's living temples, rural livelihoods and environmental stewardship
ZHANG Boyang Marina - Divergent landscape futures: Resilience scenarios for climate change, dam-building and regional development impacts on the Tonle Sap floodplain
LU Jingrong Lawrence - Bioremediation and Blue Tape: Regulating the uncertainty, assessment and negotiation of coastal development in Hainan
KWOK Siu Man Mandy - Green Belt, Grey Belt? Non-zoned approaches to landscape evaluation and management in Hong Kong
LI Man Hei, Bernice - Fabricating Site: Modelling nuanced scenarios and design responses to China's national environmental programmes
ZHUANG Zikai - The Phylogeography of Environmental Ethics: Regional landscape planning for China's decommissioning zoos
OU Kaiyun, Ivanka - Production Atypical: State agricultural policy and divergent resource management for the coastal plains of Laizhou Bay
JIN Jiayi, Jason - Parallel Development: The Convergence of migration and environmental policy in the deserts of northwest China
ZHOU Junlong, Juno - The Economics of Desertification: Complex land mosaics and replanting the commons of northern China's shelter belts
DOA Hoi Man, Cathy - Scoping Responsibilities: Environmental justice in future energy investment projects of Myanmar
KAN Shiu Sun, Tom - Fragmentation in National Desertification Policy: Environmental management and relocation for eco-refugees, Northwest China
ZHANG Zihui, Ffion - Geographies of Disconnection: Poyang Lake National Nature Reserve
WANG Tiankui, Cary - Large-scale Impact of Eucalyptus on Regional Economic and Environmental Sustainability
XU Jiayue, YY - Erosion in the Loess Plateau: Scales and silos of the Grain to Green Project, 1999-2003
PENG Rong, Ronnie
- 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 sovereignty of northern 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 (Ecological health and sustainability category, Bronze Award) titled Bioremediation and Blue Tape: Regulating the uncertainty, assessment and negotiation of coastal development in Hainan (2018).
- 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).
