Last week the Institute for Landscape Architecture in South Africa and it’s Cape section hosted the 49th IFLA 2012 Conference in Cape Town. 500 Landscape Architects from around the world could not resist the temptation to travel to what some call ‘the most beautiful city on earth’. The right time chosen, good weather and a very good preparation turned IFLA 2012 into a memorable event for most of them.<\/p>\n

As far as our one delegate could overlook this, the scientific content of the conference was generally of higher value than the Z\u00fcrich IFLA 2011, though entertainment value was also similarly good. 300 African registrants where the majority among the 500 participants this year in Cape Town (for Z\u00fcrich 2011 more than 1000 where reported).<\/p>\n

To illustrate the scope of the conference we mention some memorable keynotes: Charles Hutchinson spoke about large wildlife reserve parks in Ghana and Suriname. His notion of park is of course very different to our urban parks, and this is just one example of the wide variety that IFLA covered. Simon Kilbane a PhD candidate from Perth showed his GIS based work on a Green Infrastructure for the whole of the 5th continent Australia. It was amazing to see, how a subject like this can still be pioneer work in Australia, while our last Dutch government just decided to suspend our roughly 20 years invested into the Ecologische Hoofdstructuur EHS for the Netherlands. While some shining example like Kathryn Gustafson’s speech (3) was maybe hard to connect to every interested local landscape architect’s own daily practice. But in our still relatively young professional and scientific field it is always not only refreshing but of great value to research to take a distant view and compare the perspectives.<\/p>\n

Mihaly M\u00f6cs\u00e9nyi was awarded the Sir Geoffery Jellicoe Award of IFLA for his lifetime achievements. He is multidisciplinary educated Professor of Landscape Architecture form Hungary and also former IFLA President like Jellicoe long before him. A grand old man gave an independent and strong view (and data) on vapour as a source of climate change.<\/p>\n

These Highlights can give an idea of how IFLA 2012 was an impressive conference in it’s width and diversity. Most speakers referred to papers they had written, so we can hope to expect comprehensive proceedings (4).<\/p>\n

TU Delft Chair of Landscape Architecture had entered several of the 382 abstracts. After abstract peer review in February we submitted two papers and got invited for one of 64 oral presentations as well as for a poster presentation on a different subject. We could present our 2011 & 2012 Oerol projects “Landscape Mirror” & “Feed the Wind” (5), and another paper & poster (6) as part of the PhD research “Architecture with Landscape Methods”. All was well received and discussions where fruitful for the oral presentation, but unfortunately no feedback sessions where organised for the posters.<\/p>\n

In such a scenery and biosphere than Cape Town it is hard to call the side programme of many organised and spontaneous site visits a subordinate part. For HowDoYouLandscape and his own delight your blogger by times escaped hard scientific work in the colonial style City Hall.<\/p>\n