The HASSELL Travelling Scholarship – Robin Edmond Award recognises graduating landscape architecture students who show outstanding potential for future contribution to the profession. The award provides the winner with the opportunity to expand their education through travel to a destination undergoing significant development or renewal.
Graduate Antonia Besa Lehmann’s thesis, titled ‘Waste Dynamics’, explores the agency of public space design to effect change in the highly-polluted informal settlements of San Martin, along the Reconquista River in Buenos Aires, Argentina.
In the context of UN-Habitat research that suggests almost a third of the world’s urban population in developing countries resides in informal settlements, Antonia’s thesis proposes a replicable design methodology, informed by the unseen local behaviours and movements of these settlements, to build missing connections with the more formal city.
Antonia’s thesis mapped waste dynamics and services scarcity in two of San Martin’s informal settlements to develop a series of practical multi-purpose public space designs that seek to improve the environmental awareness of these sites, their political identity within the city, and their relationship to the greater economic context.
Her design proposals aim to expand the programmatic possibilities of public space – from a recreation-focused to a more service-oriented and productive design model – one that responds to the urgent local needs of waste management and flooding in San Martin, while also drawing collective problem solving into these shared community spaces.
“Antonia’s design proposal shows how public space has the capacity to supply the tools and training for a settlement’s own upgrading process, and provide a vision for better quality open spaces in vulnerable areas that normally miss out on public investment,” said Angus Bruce, Principal and Head of Landscape Architecture at HASSELL in a statement.
Antonia plans to travel to Berlin, Germany and Barcelona/Gerona, Spain through the scholarship, investigating the landscape architecture of different contexts that, over time, have experienced various economic recessions.
“My challenge is to approach design critically, confronting contexts of scarcity and social inequality. I believe that through an application of the creative process, landscape architecture can embrace a public role to improve the conditions of built environments. This means understanding its socio-political dimension and responding to people’s needs rather than regulating their behaviour,” Antonia said.
