Conference Review

Abstract

LANDSCAPE ARCHITECTURE EDUCATORS in Australia and New Zealand are scarce. With only IO institutions in the region offering landscape architecture degrees the number of educators is small. Byway of contrast, the Council of Educators in Landscape Architecture (CELA) has some 64 member institutions, including 700 landscape educators. In geographical terms, Australia alone is nearly the size of the United States of America and, stretching the region even wider, New Zealand is located a further 2,500 kilometres to the east. The small number of educators and expansive region malces the creation of any sense of a community a challenging prospect. The opportunity to gather together in one location was therefore a very welcome one, overcoming the friction of distance in a way that supersedes any form of electronic communication. The Australasian Educators in Landscape Architecture group (AELA) has experienced a patchy history. As a result of being a fairly informal organisation, ongoing meetings have relied on the initiative of individual institutions rather than a governing body. For a time during the 1980s and early 1990S conferences were held on a fairly regular basis, The last conference was held at the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology (RMIT) in 1996, followed by a period of silence. The need for another meeting was shuftling up the agendas of various institutions, but it was the University of New South Wales (UNSW) who made it happen. Spurred by a period of change within their faculty and programme, the pre-Olympic happenings in Sydney, and an approach from CELA following the Boston meeting in September 1999, the UNSW put out a call for papers for a conference in early February 2000. In a period of just three months Linda Corkery, Landscape Architecture Programme Head, and her team at UNSW put together a very memorable conference. Twenty-five academics attended the conference, 19 of whom presented papers. With such a large proportion of the delegates speaking, the atmosphere was collegial rather than hierarchical, encouraging discussion and debate. One of the undercurrents of the conference was a concern with definition and identity, reflecting a perception of marginalisation in both a disciplinary and geographical sense. This surfaced in a range of ways, for example in defining the nature of creative process as research, and defining landscape architecture against incursion by architecture, defining this community of educators as discussed at the end of this review. Professor Helen Armstrong addressed the issue of defming landscape architecture's creative processes as research from her experience and practice in refereed studios at the Queensland University of Technology (QUT), (Issue 1999: 5 (2) of Landscape Review, explored this idea in depth, and features a key article by Professor Armstrong.) Defining and defending creative processes as a legitimate form of research and scholarship is critical to addressing the perceptions oflandscape educators that they are marginalised within traditional research frameworks.