AILA Launches The 3rd City Festival

The 2017 International Festival of Landscape Architecture has launched in its host city, Sydney, with a bold vision to empower landscape architects.

“It’s about engaging landscape professionals at the beginning of the conversation,” Professor Helen Lochhead, Dean of UNSW Built Environment and Convener of the 2017 Festival Creative Directorate, told StreetChat.

“Whether it’s about on urban degradation, sustaining ecologies which are being destroyed, hybrid infrastructures and the people in the places that we make.

“There’s different scales and layers of intervention that landscape architects engage with, which we want to expose and discuss.

“We want landscape architects to acknowledge their agency. We are not at the end of the food chain. We don’t just respond to the brief. We can create the agenda, because the environment in which we work is so central to human health and wellbeing.”

Some 200 industry, government and media representatives attended the launch at the Calyx event space in the Royal Botanic Garden, designed by PTW Architects and McGregor Coxall.

More than 600 landscape architects are expected to attend the festival, titled The Third City, will run in Sydney from 12 to 15 October 2017.

The two-day conference will be held on October 13 and 14 in the Overseas Passenger Terminal at Circular Quay.

Street Furniture Australia is a proud sponsor of the event. Other partners include Austral Bricks, Austral Masonry, Lawn Solutions Australia, ACO Australia, JLT, WE-EF LIGHTING, Andreasens Green, Deuce Design and Landscape Solutions.