Studio Laos: Strategic Landscape Planning for the Greater Mekong

Related Staff : Ashley Kelly, Xiaoxuan Lu

Strategic Landscape Planning for the Greater Mekong builds on six years of design-based experiential learning across mainland Southeast Asia by the Division of Landscape Architecture. This year, focusing on the regional impacts of China’s Belt and Road Initiative in northern Laos, students spend one term engaging issues of development vis-à-vis landscape architecture to define problems and produce innovative planning proposals. Before visiting Laos in early March, students reviewed literature on Laos’s major drivers of landscape change, including land reallocation polices, protected area development, watershed planning, drug eradication, illegal timber trade, and artisanal and corporate mining practices. Students synthesized these issues through maps and diagrams and distributed them as a 150-page report to organizations met in Laos. In addition to visiting several conservation management projects, students presented their work to the landscape ecology lab at Xishuangbanna Tropical Botanical Garden in Yunnan and civil society in Laos, including representatives from domestic NGOs, bilateral aid agencies and embassies from Germany, Switzerland, and the United States, as well as international organizations, including OXFAM and the UN-FAO. For their strategies, students developed proposals for a range of sites and issues, including: Chinese development enclaves at Vientiane, Luang Prabang, and the China-Laos border; Remediation potential of Chinese contract farming; China-led transboundary forest research plots and community forest initiatives; Ethno-botanical knowledge at Xishuangbanna, Laos’s newly opened botanical garden in Luang Prabang, and civil society learning centers; Resilience of China-Laos Railway temporary access roads; and Materials sourcing in large infrastructure and development enclave construction.