Peter Fink, Creative Director of Studio Fink provided the following response to our recent article – What is landscape architecture?
The radical question for landscape architects today needs to be: How to reposition the profession in the quest for social and environmental sustainability? As the world is undergoing dramatic and, accelerated urbanization landscape architects need to respond radically.
As opposed to focusing predominantly on stakeholders and people with an active economic/social interest in the site of their projects, their reference frame needs to become more proactive. Through genuine social leadership, landscape architects need to unlock a way to collaborate with others while empowering wider societal networks concerned with awareness and urgency of climate change, air and water quality, and social equity.
The landscape architects in the 21st century should become a natural agent of change making the design process collaborative, more fluid, exploring connectedness and interlinking, a network contributing to a collective effort, a common end result. The landscape architect need to evolve into a 21st century, evidence-based social mediator and environmental facilitator providing a clear alternative to how our world and predominantly our cities are shaped by architects and planners in a western technology-based manner.
A proactive renegotiation of the existing hierarchical relationship between the fast, solid (architecture) and the slower and more complex void (landscape) needs to become the primary catalyst of this change.
Cover Image Credit: Peter Fink