Transcript:
Hi, I am Chris Tidswell, and I am the incoming president for IFLA Asia-Pacific region. A bit about myself. I am an Australian landscape architect and I was born on a farm, which is a big property with the bush with no one around, so very different from a lot of the Asia-Pacific country that we visit. But I am a landscape architect and I love being a landscape architect. I look forward to next 2 years as IFLA-APR President.
I think the most valuable thing about our region is we've got so many fantastic countries' associations, so many different cultural backgrounds, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan, China, Japan. They all come from different great background, all different ecologies, all different environments. So if we can all get together somehow partner and collaborate, we’ve got the most riches experience layered approach to landscape architecture. So it's really important to communicate, to partner, to collaborate on all ideas that help advance the profession of landscape architecture.
Transcript:
So there’re 3 things that I would like to focus on as objectives this year. It’s the communication and collaboration which we’re just talking about. It’s our impact on the environment and that means landscape architects are the gatekeepers for the environment and we as profession typically have a very subdued profile in all of our different countries and associations. We need to raise that profile up and use climate change as a real mechanism to bring that profile up.
And the third one I’d like to focus on is the corporate governance side of IFLA-APR. All the different regions' associations have different levels of corporate governance and IFLA-APR especially with Taiwan and Australia or Japan or wherever we are, can help with facilitating good strong corporate governance. It gives us better foundations to tackle the other objects that we’re trying to do.
We are gatekeepers. We’re in a unique position here. We know everything about ecology. Seeds, engineering, planning, urban design... all these little. We know everything about everything. There’s no other profession that’s set up to tackle climate change. There’s actually no other profession. And it’s just unfortunate that historically landscape architects have always been down here because of architecture which they just do buildings we do everything. So it’s important to raise our profile throughout.
We have exactly the same challenges in Australia.
Australia comes from a landscape architecture background it’s a little bit older. 50 years now. We had our 50 year anniversary a couple years ago. So we’ve got a little bit more profile within Australia as a profession in the built environment, still a long way to go. Architects are absolutely seen as sort of the design leaders and the design lead consultants in projects. Landscape down here, we still got a long way to go. But if we can use that learning in the last 50 years to help the other associations like Taiwan alike, Singapore, China obviously as well, Japan.., we can help by just sharing that knowledge and bring the profile up.
