The first PGR presentation of this year will be held on Wed 5th April at 15.00, and will be given by postgraduate research student Ben Tosland, with his talk entitled ‘The development of green spaces and influence of western landscape architecture in the Persian Gulf during the late twentieth-century’.
Ben’s research aims to show the extent of Western influence over landscape design in the Persian Gulf and its relationship with town planning movements throughout the twentieth-century. Supported through archival research and several case studies, Ben will argue that the Western design of landscapes in the region is due to both the influx of people from Europe and America who worked with oil companies, and their subsequent funding of landscape work. Added to this, there are changing sociological and political forces in the region during this period that will also be assessed. Several themes and sub-themes that will be shown through his research will be:
- Identity and representation
- Segregation and inequality
- Morphology of spatial design
- Relationship between landscape and townscape
This short talk will attempt to give the context to this research by representing statistics through maps of the region before looking at a chosen case study and briefly explaining how the aforementioned themes affected the design process and the eventual outcome.