CAF was proud to partner with Arid Lands Institute on the 2012 Drylands Design Conference, which was held in March of last year and featured the research winners of CAF’s Turnbull Design Competition: Drylands Design. The conference continues to turn the attention of the design industry to water issues, most recently influencing the American Society of Landscape Architects to build the October issue of Landscape Architect Magazine around water scarcity design challenges and solutions. Below is an excerpt from editor Bradford McKee’s introduction:
This issue has two inspirations. One is that many of us are off to Phoenix for the 2012 ASLA Annual Meeting and EXPO. Phoenix is a place of beguiling extremes of heat and dryness, and the adaptations people make (or not) to live there and in places like it are fascinating. In climate terms, Phoenix is not unique. About one-third of the world’s population lives in arid regions; in the United States, millions of people are living on land you would call desert.
The other inspiration was the Drylands Design Conference I went to this past spring, held by the Arid Lands Institute at Woodbury University in Burbank, California. The institute’s directors, Hadley and Peter Arnold, have struck an important vein of thinking about development in dry lands. They brought together a range of experts in design, science, and public policy, all around a competition they staged to explore better ways of dealing with water, energy, and their scarcity in the dry places people insist on living. (Hadley Arnold writes about the competition and its revelations for us in Forward, on our back page.)
Click the image below to read Hadley Arnold’s overview of the Drylands Design competition and conference, reprinted here courtesy of Landscape Architect Magazine.
