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Reviewed by:
  • Dilemma: Debate Cela Annual Conference, Utah State University
  • Jayoung Koo (bio) and Lisa Orr (bio)
DILEMMA:DEBATE CELA ANNUAL CONFERENCE, UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY03 23–26, 2016

Editors’ Note: We commissioned Jayoung Koo and Lisa Orr to write independent reviews of the conference. Their comments are presented below.

Jayoung Koo writes:

The conference’s theme, Dilemma:Debate, was particularly appropriate in a state experiencing competing pressures for both development and preservation. The base for the conference, Salt Lake City, along with areas to the northeast of the state, accommodates 85% of the Utah’s population. Local geography has facilitated the development of a unique cultural and historical heritage but has also set limitations, particularly in terms of resources and climatic conditions. At the opening event, past-president and host Sean Michael, head of Landscape Architecture and Environmental Planning at Utah State University (USU), welcomed 374 attendees from nine countries contributing to 255 sessions, 25 posters, and six films. The conference was a wedding of people and place where diverse participants gathered to celebrate their accomplishments and endeavors in educating, designing, planning, and managing for twenty-first century landscapes. From students to emerging scholars, CELA is a conference at which landscape architecture and allied design educators, researchers, and practitioners gather to share works in, of, and for progress in the design, planning, and management of landscapes. Presentations and encounters help delegates to shape their intellectual inquiry and teaching objectives with respect to questions of why and how we shape our landscapes in vastly diverging settings.

The first day included a series of workshop sessions including publishing people-place relationships, and advanced technology, and was capped with a keynote address by social psychologist José Duarte of HeterodoxAcademy.org. During two intensive days of concurrent sessions—Thursday and Saturday—attendees presented their work under the theme Dilemma:Debate, further divided into the eleven now standard CELA conference tracks. Presentations in the landscape architecture continuing education session [End Page 310](LA CES) tracks shared more measurable research, experiments, and evaluations pertaining to ecology, implementation, performance, and sustainability. Presenters disseminated implications they believed could be shared or applied to projects in similar contexts. These included, for instance, tactics, criteria, and tools to conserve landscapes by applying habitat suitability index criteria in greenway planning; historical documentation of the miasma theory for public health and environmental relationships; and testing performance of green infrastructure. Additionally, building on existing efforts of the Landscape Architecture Foundation’s Case Study Investigation (CSI) series, a panel came together to frame replicable social performance research that can further enhance case studies to make them comparable across different settings.

Contributors in the theoretical, pedagogical, visualization, place relationship, and service tracks addressed and shared methods, processes, and lessons from more procedural and effective communication and delivery aspects of landscape architecture education. As a common outcome from the place relationship and service tracks, students, stakeholders and communities involved in the design projects benefitted from service-learning. Several cases addressed the needs and visions of challenged communities from coastal North Carolina to the Intermountain West, as well as internationally. Comparable environments included small towns or ex-urban communities with decentralizing populations as a result of changes in their social, economic, or physical contexts. Projects such as these should be more widely published regardless of any weakness in innovation or incremental progress.

During the intermission day, field trips to four representative landscape sites were scheduled en route to the USU campus in Logan. From the planned community of Daybreak based on traditional neighborhood development (TND) principles, to The Great Salt Lake Shorelands Preserve—a major habitat along a migration route—the sites provided an opportunity to observe valuable contemporary practices that aim to balance coexistence between humans and nature. During the visit to USU, distinguished practitioner and Laurie D. Olin shared his experience as a landscape architecture academic and concluded his keynote session by addressing what he considers a central/premier dilemma: the need to retrofit settlements effectively in the future. Mr. Olin was later honored with the inaugural Lifetime Achievement Award by the CELA Fellows. The campus visit ended with a presentation by the Crossroads Project, a unique science and arts collaboration that attempts to...

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