Raymomd (Ray) James Green
BSc (Connecticut) MLA (Arizona) PhD (QUT) ASLA, EDRA
Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning
e-mail: rjgreen@unimelb.edu.au
Ray began his academic career in the visual fine arts before switching to landscape architecture and obtaining a Bachelor of Science in Landscape Architecture (Cum Laude), Master of Landscape Architecture and later a multidisciplinary Ph.D. His Ph.D. dissertation explored community based landscape planning in coastal areas that were being impacted by tourism development. His career has spanned both professional environmental design and planning practice and academic teaching and research. He joined the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Architecture Building and Planning in 1999 and was Head of Landscape Architecture from 2001 to 2006. He is currently involved with management of the Melbourne Sustainable Society Institute, a University initiative to bring together researchers from across the University who are exploring issues to do with sustainable development. Before coming to Melbourne he was with the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) in their Queensland University of Technology Institute office in Brisbane. Ray has also taught at other universities in the United States, Australia and South East Asia and has been a guest lecturer at a number of other universities around the world, for example Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul, Pontificia Universidad Catolica de Chile (PUC) in Santiago and Kasetsart University in Bangkok, among others. His professional practice experience involved him in a range of master planning and landscape design projects in various countries – Untied States, Mexico, Australia, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore - where he is responsible for over 40 major built projects, primarily involving tourism, urban open space and housing developments, many of which are located in coastal sites (see the Professional Project section for descriptions of selected projects).
Ray currently teaches a site planning and design studio subject and a lecture based subject entitled Case Studies in Landscape Architecture. He has previously taught subjects ranging from landscape materials and construction, planting design to research methods. He also coordinated the final year master of landscape architecture research thesis project from 2000 to 2005. In addition, he continues to run traveling postgraduate, cross-disciplinary design studios, for example one to Thailand in 2001 that explored alternative designs for coastal tourism facilities on the island of Koh Samui and one to Chile in 2009 that explored the design and planning of a new town to replace one, the coastal town of Chaiten in Northern Patagonia, that had been destroyed by a volcanic eruption in 2008. He will run another studio in Chile in 2011. At any one time Ray also supervises several Ph.D. students who are researching topics related to his areas of expertise - which are as diverse as the impacts of tourism on fragile environments, public attitudes toward water use for public and private landscapes, community perceptions of freshwater wetlands, perceptions of the visual impacts of prescribed burning regimes in the context of botanical gardens to investigation of how children from lower economic families in urban Santiago, Chile, conceptualize natural environments with the aim of informing the design of urban open space and children's play areas.
In broad terms, much of Ray's research explores, in one form or another, how members of various communities perceive environmental change, particularly in the context of landscapes that are undergoing rapid transformation and which are threatened by development. The aim of his research is to advance theoretical understanding in the area of environmental perception and behavior to generate information that can guide landscape design and planning decision-making. This has included development of methods for assessing the perceptual consequences, for the user public, of development that threatens fragile environments, such coastal, wetland and mountain environments. A key focus has been on facilitating community participation in guiding design and planning actions and understanding the impacts of such actions on ecological, social and cultural conditions as perceived by the user public. Recent projects in this area include a three-year Australian Research Council (ARC) funded study that investigated how local communities in coastal towns along Victoria's Great Ocean Road conceptualize town and neighborhood character and how valued landscape character is changing due to increased development. He has also undertaken a similar project in Thailand that explored perceptions of inhabitants of coastal settlements with regard to environmental and social impacts resulting from rapid tourism development. In some projects he has employed digital technology as an aid in measuring community attitudes toward landscape changes. An example is a project entitled "Community exploration of changing landscape values", which was funded by the Australian Land and Water Resources Research and Development Corporation (LWRRDC), and along with his fellow co-chief investigator (Professor Ian Bishop), employed geographic information systems (GIS) and virtual reality technology to present simulated landscape displays for assessing community values relative to proposed alternative land-use changes. As part of this study a series of community workshops were held in rural areas of Victoria (Australia) in which simulated landscape presentations were displayed to participants to have them assess future land-use scenarios against various assessment criteria - economic, aesthetic, agricultural viability, tourism potential, etc. (For more information on this project see: http://www.geom.unimelb.edu.au/cudgewa/index.html).
Ray has also explored the potential health benefits that can be derived from human contact with nature, both within the context of urban open space networks and with respect to integration of natural features into the design of health care facilitates. For example, a 2006 project, which was commissioned by the Victorian Department of Human Services, focused on research with respect to the potential health benefits of having contact with nature in urban environments, which was used to write the landscape component for the design brief for the new Royal Melbourne Children's Hospital, a 900 million dollar project now being constructed at the edge of the city's largest and oldest park - Royal Park. Other recent studies have explored attitudes towards drought tolerant plants for use in public landscapes and the correlation between people's preferences for vegetation in the landscape in comparison its ecological value. Currently, he is focusing on questions related to how coastal settlements can be made to better adapt to the predicted impacts of climate change and finding ways of mitigating the causes of climate change (Greenhouse Gas emissions into the atmosphere) in these settings. This is the focus of a project he is currently working on securing funding for along with academic colleagues in Spain. His interest in climate change adaptation and mitigation has also resulted in him, and his colleagues, being awarded a four-year, half million dollar ARC 'Discovery' grant (2010-2014) entitled Configuring low carbon cites: An exploration of the role of spatial parameters in monocentric and polycentric examples in China, that explores links between greenhouse gas emissions, household behavior, land uses and the spatial configuration of Chinese cities. (See the Research section for details on these and other recent projects)
Ray's most recent book is entitled Coastal Towns in Transition: Local Perceptions of Landscape Change (2010 - Springer and CSIRO), which documents his research into community perceptions of environmental change in coastal towns along Victoria's Great Ocean Road. He is also co-author of The Green City: Sustainable Homes, Sustainable Suburbs (2005 - Routledge and University of New South Wales Press); a book he co-authored with an urban planner, architect and geographer and which looks at how individual actions of people within the context of their everyday lives - at home, work and play - can greatly influence the amount of greenhouse gases that are released into the atmosphere. He was also lead editor, and co-wrote five of the chapters, for a research monograph entitled Design for Change (1985) that explored approaches to planning and design focused on redevelopment of rural settlements that had been damaged by the 1983 ‘Ash Wednesday’ Victorian Australian bushfires. In addition, he has disseminated his research findings and the outcomes of design studio teaching in numerous journals based within various disciplines (e.g. landscape architecture, architecture, urban planning, environmental psychology), and in both peer-reviewed academic and professional journals, as well as in book chapters. He has also delivered numerous papers at international research as well as professional conferences (see the Publication section for details). Ray serves the academic community by acting as a reviewer for several leading academic journals, including the Journal of Environmental Psychology, Landscape and Urban Planning and Landscape Research, and also sits on the advisory board for the publisher Springer's new Future City book series.
