Newspaper
Changing of the guard
Past president Kathryn Moore will be representing the Landscape Institute at this year’s IFLA World Council and the 2006 ASLA Annual meeting and 43rd IFLA World Congress in October. The combined event will be the largest ever held for landscape professionals.
She will be attending the World Council meeting in Minneapolis alongside Hal Moggridge, the LI’s longstanding representative at IFLA, who she will now succeed. The meeting is a particularly critical one, as it will see the formal merger of EFLA and IFLA, which will mean that EFLA will become IFLA’s central region.
She told Vista: “While I’ve been president, one of the best things that has happened is that the two organisations have come together. That has been a tremendous coup and I have put a huge effort into trying to make that happen, but it is really finishing off the job that others, like David Jarvis and Hal Moggridge, started before me.”
The newly merged body will then have a crucial global role to fulfil. “The quality of the environment and landscape is such an important component of sustainable economic growth and that is being recognised by developers and politicians across the world. So, we have a big job to do to ensure that the professions in all these different countries develop and are able to meet those challenges,” she added. Hal Moggridge has represented the LI at IFLA for more than ten years and in that time he has strengthened the Institute’s voice substantially. However, he sees the encouragement of those countries with embryonic professions as a more significant achievement.
He said: “I particularly had a lot to do with getting China in. The Chinese landscape architects wished to join, but there was a political difficulty related to Taiwan already being a member. I did a lot of negotiation in order to sort out the problem of the titles of the Taiwanese representatives as against those from mainland China. It was extremely complex and sensitive, but in the end, a formula was found that suited everybody.”
As to the future, he thinks its essential that the profession plays a greater role in Africa. He said: “There used to be African representatives, but they can no longer afford to come to meetings and I think that, although Africa is in great need of landscape planning skills, it really has become cut off from the rest of the profession worldwide.
“The main work to carry out in the next two to three years is to try to make a bridgehead there and solve the problem of how Africa can, again, play a role on the international stage.” Discuss this article
Would you like to read more? To receive your copy of the Landscape Institute's monthly newspaper subscribe today.
