Changing Cities: Martha Fajardo in Melbourne
Leading Colombian landscape architect Martha Fajardo gave an intriguing lecture on May 10 to an audience of 400 in her MSD Dean’s Lecture entitled ‘Changing Cities: Landscape as an integrated perspective’.
Martha is CEO of Grupo Verde Ltda, a firm dedicated to the professional practice of landscape architecture, landscape urbanism and urban design, based in Latin America.
Using Colombia as case study, Martha examined some of the key challenges facing all landscape designers and urban planners: a shortage of resources, climate change, expanding urbanism. She outlined the role that landscape architects have had in her home-country in forging a national agenda of urban renewal and the reclaiming of public space for inclusive use.
A widely supported movement in Colombia enabled substantial change in three cities – Bogotá, Medellin and Cartagena - over a three year period. Working in a country in which criminal activity had rendered public space as unsafe and perceived as undesirable, design professionals were instrumental in transforming places that, in turn, transformed the social fabric and feeling within these communities.
Martha highlighted in her lecture that the complexity of the modern world presents great challenges and opportunities to all of us and called for a reinvention of the way we approach planning in urban spaces. A new holistic approach is required – one which focuses on the places where people live and empowers clients and communities to be involved in the planning process. The centre of the planning process is the people Martha believe. Landscape designers and planners need to have a flexible and overarching approach to help empower clients and communities to create creative and harmonious spaces.
“A comprehensive understanding of how people's lives shape and are shaped by their territory is the starting point for the design and planning of places on all levels,” says Fajardo. “It is the global ecological and environmental crisis that gives us the opportunity to reinterpret and understand the new meaning of the landscape; to redefine professions and practices; to make cities better places for people to live in.”
The aim, Martha told her Melbourne audience, is to create ‘affordable landscapes’, landscapes where people can be happy.
“I am not a professor, I am a dreamer,” said Martha. “I have a passion for what I do – and I think that is the key.”
Download Martha Fajardo’s MSD Dean’s Lecture here: Audio