The Foreground five: Our most-read stories in November
Popular November articles explored public realm rights and responsibilities: in Hong Kong, in privately owned public space, in restoring trust in public institutions, and in the art and science of managing landscapes facing increased threats from fire.
1. The protest landscapes of Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement
Hong Kong’s Umbrella Movement protests have reinvented the city’s public landscape through determined subversive occupation. Hong Kong’s Special Administrative Region (SAR) status, and its unique manifestation as a modern city, is no accident… As Chinese control has begun to encroach on the territory, important protests have occurred in response. These protests, significantly the Umbrella Movement, have offered a new way to think of space and its production, on an island so lacking in places to gather.
2. Pyrogeographer David Bowman on the art and science of living with fire
Professor David Bowman has made the study of fire his life’s work – from its ecological to its cultural dimensions. He talks with Foreground about how we might begin to create ‘fire safe havens’ in a burgeoning ‘fire scary’ world.
3. Wrong division: The rise of privately-owned public space
Privately-owned public spaces are increasing in cities. But while this is leading to some troubling outcomes, Claire Martin wonders just how useful binary divisions of public versus private actually are in managing our environment.
4. The square and the park: a festival review
Michael Smith reveals curatorial richness in the 2019 International Festival of Landscape Architecture staged in Melbourne this month by the Australian Institute of Landscape Architects.
5. The politics of value: good planning makes dollars and sense
Phoebe Harrison explores how planners and planning have a crucial role to play in reviving trust in public institutions and the democratic systems that should be building our cities.
