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, Master of Landscape Architecture and later a multidisciplinary Ph.D. in which he combined research into landscape planning in coastal areas with environmental psychology. His career has been both in professional practice and academic teaching and research. He joined the University of Melbourne’s Faculty of Architecture, Building and Planning in 1999. Before that he was with the Australian Housing and Urban Research Institute (AHURI) in their Queensland office. His professional practice experience involved him in a range of master planning and landscape design projects in various countries – Untied States, Mexico, Australia, Indonesia (particularly Bali), Malaysia, Thailand and Singapore - where he has been 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 has taught at universities in the United States, Australia and South East Asia, and been an invited guest speaker at a number of other universities around the world - e.g. Mimar Sinan University in Istanbul. He currently teaches landscape planning and design studio subjects and has previoulsy taught subjects ranging from landscape materials and construction to research methods. He has runs traveling postgraduate, cross-disciplinary design studios, for example one to Thailand in 2001 explored alternative designs for coastal tourism facilities on the island of Koh Samui. In 2009 he will be offering a master's studio in Chile, which will explore the design and planning of climate adapted coastal settlements. He also supervises several Ph.D. students at any one time who are researching topics related to his areas of expertise - which are as divrse as the impacts of tourism to how various change within the context of botanical gardens settings are perceived.
In broad terms, Ray's own 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 is both to advance theoretical understanding in the area of landscape perception to generate inforamtion that can help guide landscape design and planning decision-making. This has ranged from development of methods for assessing the perceptual consequences of urbanization in threatening fragile environments, such as in coastal, wetland and mountain settings. This has focused on facilitating community participation in modeling perceived place character and assessment of community responses to proposed design and planning actions and their possible associated impacts of thesde action on ecological, social and cultural conditions. Recent examples include a three-year Australian Research Council (ARC) funded project that investigated how local communities in coastal towns along Victoria's Great Ocean Road conceptualize town and neighborhood character and how it is changing due to increased development. He has also undertaken similar research in Thailand where he has explored perceptions of inhabitants of coastal settlements with regard to environmental and social impacts resulting from rapid tourism development. He has also employed digital technology as an aid in measuring community attitudes toward landscape changes. For example, he undertook 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 fellow co-chief investigator (Professor Ian Bishop), used geographic information systems 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 3D simulated landscape presentations were displayed to participants who were involved in assessing, in real time, 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 obtained 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. This resulted in 2006 in him being commissioned by the Victorian Department of Human Services to write the landscape component of 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 the correlation between how people perceive and evaluate vegetation in the landscape in comparison to its ecological value.
Ray is the 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. He was also lead editor, and co-wrote five chapters, for a research monograph (Design for Change, 1985) that explored approaches to planning and landscape restoration of settlements damaged by the 1983 ‘Ash Wednesday’ Victorian Australian bushfires. His forthcoming book is entitled Coastal Towns in Transition: Local Perceptions of Landscape Change (Springer, expected 2009), which documents his research in coastal towns along Victoria's Great Ocean Road. He has disseminated his research findings and the outcomes of design studio teaching in numerous journals, in both international peer-reviewed academic journals and professional journals, as well as in book chapters. In addition to published works he has delivered numerous papers at international research and professional conferences. He is also a regular reviewer for several journals, including the Journal of Environmental Psychology, Landscape and Urban Planning and Landscape Research and sits on the advisory board for the publsiher Springer's new Future Cities book series.
