Engaging infrastructure development through critical design practice: Campaigns in Southeast Asia

Abstract

Large-scale development, such as road-building, often progresses slowly, outlasting governments, evading principled environmental legislation, and changing investors, scopes, and designs. Conservation efforts here require sustained momentum and diverse forms of practice and expertise that can facilitate informed decision-making, importantly in the absence of otherwise crucial information. Through a cultural-technological campaign, which includes a species-specific road design manual, downscaled wildlife movement and ecosystem services modelling, 3D-printed stakeholder engagement models, and automated geospatial investigations and counter-assessments, this lecture will showcase transdisciplinary approaches and opportunities for landscape architecture to proactively engage development. Such engagement, whether it's applied, advocacy-, activist-, or action-oriented in development, raises important contradictions that result in considerable institutional, academic, disciplinary, and practical challenges. Carried out by landscape designers in collaboration with policy experts, biologists and geographers, this work offers an urgently needed model of design collaboration and has been disseminated to national and regional levels of government, developers, civil society, and agencies across South and Southeast Asia.