5.5.2018 16:00, Faculty of Architecture TU Delft, room BG west 030
Lecture in the How Do You Landscape? series organised by the Landscape Architecture chair, TU Delft
Lizzy Hirsch – Birth of a Park. Strategies on community activism in sustaining a vision.
Greater urbanization, in combination with fraying community ties, has resulted in greater pressure and conflict around open space development. This conflict is evident in cities like San Francisco, where “turf wars” arise at every park opportunity. Given such polarization, Hirsch believes that the aspirations of 20th century Landscape Architect Frederick Law Olmsted, who saw parks as catalysts for democracy, is still an urgent precept. But how do such aspirations translate into a contemporary urban park? Is there an optimal process to achieve a truly democratic place that reflects the best ideas of the community?
Hirsch has over twenty-five years of landscape architecture experience; sixteen years devoted to the development of public space in San Francisco, including streetscapes, playgrounds, and parks. She has effected change in the city, in roles of community activist, client agent, and design consultant, that resulted in the successful delivery of over 25 diverse projects. She is currently a team leader of the Recreation and Parks program within the SF Public Works Landscape Architecture Department.
Through her experience in the public sector in San Francisco, Hirsch has devised specific strategies to garner public support and curate new ideas for parks. In her talk she will share the underlying strategies she has learned, that allow for an inclusive, community-driven design approach that promotes deeper community ties.
Taktyk is a Franco-Belgian landscape and urban design studio, whose work is expressed as a multi-disciplinary fusion of design, research, teaching, workshops, publishing and art installation.
Exploring the complex processes of drawing and designing on sites that lie at the intersection of landscape and urban infrastructure, the creative process is based upon the development of operational tactics. These tactics establish an investigative mental map and are able to stimulate the necessary tools for implementing transformation, supported and guided by a strategy adapted to serve metropolitan conditions, as diffuse as they are compact.
Taktyk was declared winner of the “Emerging Landscape Practices 2005-2006” prize, awarded by the French Ministry of Culture, the “Young Urban Designer 2010” prize, awarded by the French Ministry of Ecology, Housing, Energy and Transport, and the “Topos Landscape Award 2012”.
Dr Sebastien Penfornis is in charge of metropolitan landscape projects in Paris. His research focused on the notion of play as a tactical approach into the creative process of city making.
Living Tracks Lab is a transnational cooperation that focuses on the urban transformation of vast brownfields located along railways tracks in Paris and Brussels.
A research by design lab with a triple meaning that understands the tracks:
– as the context for socio spatial innovation
– as a framework and a vehicule to speed up an intensify the production of knowledge for the Living Tracks Lab that already started with commissioned projects and volunteer practice.
– as the bringing of the antagonistic practices of grass roots initiatives and systemic planning. So doing addressing the urban challenges of community, health, climate, and nature.
The main transformation task we are pursing are:
– transversal and integrative knowledge sharing among experts,
– bridging top down and bottom up actions.
