6 minute read
New Models for Running Landscape Practices
The creation of new types of organisations offer a way forward for women landscape architects establishing their professional practice, argues the former chair of the LI’s Policy and Communications Committee.
Whilst honouring Brenda Colvin, Sylvia Crowe and others, it’s hard for us now to envisage a world of landscape led by women. Despite the fact that over half the UK population is female, men continue to dominate the public image of the landscape industries, appearing as leaders of major practices and companies, client groups, decision-making bodies, landowners and financial institutions. Women are at least as effective as male designers and planners (some might say even more so) but seem to be less interested or confident in broadcasting their achievements or competing for awards and honours than some men.
As a landscape planner, graduating initially in 1971, I observed that attitudes to women in landscape have barely changed in over 50 years. It’s hard to claim space and make your mark when the work environment is dominated by men. Anyway, doing what you’re told in the world of landscape design does not guarantee success for women. Ways of working are now rapidly changing, in part due to COVID lockdowns.
A recent Observer article (1) suggested that “the Great Resignation – or at least the Great Thinking about Resignation – is upon us.” In the 2020s, working practices don’t have to be more of the same. So, as well as encouraging women to compete with men for traditional leadership positions, my view is that we should set up our own supportive, inclusive, community-based organisations in order to break down the structural barriers within the landscape industries that hold women back. Non-hierarchical, equitable and collaborative organisations offer a way forward for young landscape architects seeking to establish their professional practice.
1. Pollination Street in Todmorden created by Incredible Edible Todmorden.
Once you have learned your trade, worked out what you are good at and if you have begun to feel that you are going nowhere with your present employer, think about any opportunities you’ve spotted in the last few months where you could make a difference.
Work out what drives you, which challenges you feel passionate about, and your personal appetite for financial independence, and look carefully at the motives of people who advise you to stick to a ‘conventional’ career path.
Eleanor Trenfield
Eleanor Trenfield (founder ETLA 2017, co-founder EDLA 2022) identifies the practice’s values as visual storytellers, as educators and as green innovators. Her 2021 blog – review of a ‘year of growth and gratitude’ – talks about her wish to build a practice that is inclusive and flexible, to appeal to younger generations who are looking for an equitable sustainable work environment. In a Q+A for International Women’s Day March 2022, Eleanor explains “it became obvious over time that the environment I was in was not supportive of more significant career growth. It was plain to see that men far outnumbered women in partnership roles and this culture can’t help but filter down throughout the business.”
Johanna Gibbons
Johanna Gibbons (Founding Partner, J&L Gibbons) has been named a Royal Designer for Industry (RDI) for her “pioneering and influential work combining design with activism, education and professional practice”. The practice website explains that “[they] are dedicated to collaborative practice and upholding the origins of the profession which cross the arts, sciences and humanities”, as demonstrated by, for example, the Urban Nature Project with the Natural History Museum in London (2019-22).
Johanna is also the founding director of a social enterprise company (CIC) ‘Landscape Learn’ which is concerned with developing a model that “provides adaptive learning that can support knowledge sharing, celebrates difference, enables personal development, encourages specialism in subjects that excite and challenge the individual, supports community empowerment.”
Kathryn Gustafson
Kathryn Gustafson (co-founder Gustafsen Porter 1997 + Bowman 2002) originally studied applied arts and became a fashion designer. She is now a landscape architect renowned for creating sculptural land forms. She has founded landscape practices in the US and UK; their designs are sensitive to community needs, incorporating the principles of inclusive design, connectivity, public engagement and sustainability. All but one of her business partners are female; 90% of her work is public, supporting the creation of healthy and liveable cities. For example, in February 2022, Gustafson Porter + Bowman’s landscape plan for the Eiffel Tower site was given final approval by the city of Paris.
Mary Reynolds
Mary Reynolds calls herself a ‘reformed Irish landscape designer’, author and nature activist. She started her career during the 1990s designing gardens in Dublin, discovered that the wilderness was her true inspiration, and currently specializes in healing gardens. Mary promotes an international movement ‘We Are The Ark’ which aims to create habitats and maximise diversity, eco-system services and provide sanctuary for wildlife. The Ark website says “We are not a structured organisation and we do not claim to have all the answers” but hope to re-educate people to live in harmony with nature on their land – to become guardians rather than gardeners.
Maggie Keswick Jencks
Maggie Keswick Jencks (1941-1995) – writer and garden designer – was the partner of Charles Jencks, architectural historian and landscape designer. Together they championed the transformative potential of designed environments to help people with cancer and their families, setting up the first Maggie’s Centre in Edinburgh in 1996. Fundamental to the Maggie’s approach is the belief (supported by documented evidence) that therapeutic landscapes, exploiting light, colour and a connection to nature, are places which “encourage feelings of well-being amongst their visitors and users.”
Pam Warhurst CBE
Pam Warhurst CBE co-founded Incredible Edible Todmorden in 2008, a local food partnership that reinvents community resilience through fruit and vegetable growing. She wanted to “focus on local food to re-engage people with the planet we live on, create the sort of shifts in behaviour we need to live within the resources we have, stop us thinking like disempowered victims and to start taking responsibility for our own futures. All with no paid staff, no buildings, no public funding: radical community building in action (motto: if you eat you’re in.)”.
The movement started small, with a seed-swap and a community herb garden on unused land in Todmorden, and today has spin-offs all over the world.
Kate Bailey
Kate Bailey
Kate Bailey is a landscape planner and landscape architect, former trustee of the Landscape Institute and former chair of the Policy and Communications Committee.
