This Week in Landscape | 5 February 2012

This weeks round-up of landscape news and views from around the web

Emotional Landscapes: Interview with landscape architect Michael Van Valkenburgh | Gideon Fink Shapiro | BMW Guggenheim Lab
Michael Van Valkenburgh interview about urban landscapes and what they can do

The architecture meltdown | Scott Timberg | Salon
With the economy still in the doldrums where does architecture go from here?

How should we design urban parks? | The Urban Portal | University of Chicago
A social science look at parks, the important differences and the costs of parks in cities.

Building green cities using public/private partnerships | Matthew Kahn | Christian Science Monitor
Public funding for environmentally friendly urban centers benefits private investors, too

Re-greening the Plateau |Michelle Lalonde | Montreal Gazette
Residents are fighting to save their street trees, even if it means removing parking spots

For more news during the week become a World Landscape Architecture fan on Facebook,  Join our LinkedIN group,  Follow us on Twitter @wlandscapearch or Weibo and then  Circle us on Google+
Send your links to [email protected]

UK Survey finds shortage of landscape architects

Green space skills: 2009 National employer survey findings, a survey commissioned by CABE and English Heritage, is the first to reveal the full extent of skills shortages in the green space sector in the UK. The report has found that 14.9% of national employers found landscape architects hard to recruit due to skills shortage. Landscape architects were also on top of the table as the hardest to recruit out of all the green space skills.

22% of  respondents from the Private sector stated that it was harder to find landscape architects whereas only 8.5 of respondents in the Public Sector  found it hard to find landscape architects due to a skills shortage.

Green space skills shows an urgent need to address the skills shortfall to tackle climate change. Planning, design and management are what are needed to help to adapt green spaces to a changing climate, and these were exactly the skills which employers felt their staff most lacked.

The report also identified several priorities to counter the shortage including:

- Develop and maintain a strong evidence base to make the case for investment in green space skills

- Improve the availability and quality of training, including continual professional development

- Increase awareness of the sector and the opportunities it offers, to encourage more people into the sector

Download the report at the [SOURCE:  CABE]