Events Calendar

CPD points: 0.5

The next speaker in the ‘Thinkers and Doers’ series is Maria Gabriella Trovato (Lebanon) presenting “Spaces of crisis and conflict. Landscapes in emergency”.

This lecture focuses on the migratory pressures of the Mediterranean region that currently are exacerbating inequalities, undermining human rights, and environmental justice. At the end of 2019, 79.5 million people were forcibly displaced worldwide. Nearly 50 million of them are internally displaced while 73% are hosted in neighbouring countries, with the majority of the world’s refugees (85%) hosted by developing countries. Lebanon is host to nearly 1.2 million Syrian refugees, representing around a quarter of the country’s total population. The transformation we are witnessing in the last decades is leading to a societal shift and to the production of entirely new landscapes in which old and new narratives and memories are mixed up.  This lecture questions the role of landscape design in envisioning scenarios at varying scales and phases of intervention to address social and environmental emergencies. The work presented acknowledges those challenges, focusing on defining liminal paths between humanitarian design, right to shared landscapes, and wellbeing of communities. The lecture also explores the work of the Landscape Architects Without Borders (LAWB) of the International Federation of Landscape Architects, committed to working with vulnerable and disadvantaged communities, especially those affected by war, conflict and natural disaster, helping them to re-create safe, sustainable and dignified living conditions.

Maria Gabriella Trovato is an Assistant Professor at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon. She is a licensed Architect and a Landscape Architect with a PhD in Landscape Architecture. As an architect practising and teaching landscape design, Maria Gabriella is interested in investigating new forms of urban living in a world of change and fluxing conditions due to climate change, depletion of natural resources, conflicts between globalization and local development, and re-localization of war refugees. Her work urges us to respond to such pressures by investigating and proposing combinations of ecological performance and design culture. Most recent research projects focus on landscape in an emergency, landscape assessment and waste management, migration governance, among others; funded by many agencies, such as European Union, Cross-Border Cooperation in the Mediterranean, UN Food and Agriculture Organization, etc. As chair of the IFLA Working Group Landscape Architecture Without Borders (LAWB), she is working on informal Syrian settlements (ISs) in Lebanon, exploring landscape methodologies that could permit the definition of a flexible, relational and creative strategy capable of managing continuous changing and transformations. She has worked in several countries, teaching landscape architecture at undergraduate and graduate programs, seminars, and design workshops in Europe, Canada, Africa, and the Middle East.