North American landscape architecture students analyze responses to the climate crisis in Gran Canaria over a six-week academic program.
Last Monday, fourteen architecture and landscape architecture students started the second edition of the Future Islands program, coordinated by the University of Oregon’s Department of Landscape Architecture in partnership with the Canary Islands Foundation Instituto20grados on the island of Gran Canaria. The initiative will conclude on Thursday, July 30, with an exhibition of the completed work at the cultural center “El Soco” in the island’s capital.
The students—eight from the University of Oregon, two from the University of Maryland, one from the University of Washington, one from Cornell University, and another from the Las Palmas School of Architecture on a scholarship from the Foundation—are working in a classroom provided by the organization and carrying out fieldwork in the ravines of Agaete, Guayadeque, and Guiniguada. The latter, which last year was explored from its source in the highlands down to Pambaso, is now being analyzed in its final, most urbanized stretch, all the way to its mouth at the sea. The students will study the types of hillside construction in the area and how the restoration of agricultural terraces, from landscape and environmental perspectives, can serve as a basis for designing a city that is more resilient to climate change.
Led by Ignacio López Busón, director of the program, and with the collaboration of Juan Palop-Casado, president of the Foundation, the students attend talks and are accompanied in their on-site research by geographers, civil engineers, environmentalists, urban planners, experts in governance and citizen participation, and hikers. They also establish relationships with local communities.
In line with the vision and mission of the Instituto20grados Foundation, the University of Oregon’s Future Islands program focuses on territories especially vulnerable to the climate crisis, such as medium-sized islands, and on responses that mitigate and adapt to its effects, one of the greatest challenges humanity is currently facing.
Landscape architecture, which operates within a transdisciplinary framework, goes beyond the boundaries of conventional urban planning, its municipal scale, and its predominantly real-estate-driven logic to address the territorial scale and the environmental dynamics at work within it.
The Department of Landscape Architecture at the University of Oregon and the Instituto20grados Foundation share a bioregional perspective, which studies territories based on ecosystem parameters rather than administrative divisions. In this way, the Guiniguada, like the other ravines included in the workshop, is analyzed as a continuous and autonomous entity whose dynamics exceed the boundaries of the municipalities it crosses.
In this regard, they approach the island’s ravines as a whole, understanding them as a structuring network of the territory and its environmental dynamics, through which water flows and around which human settlements are organized. Terraces, gavias, wells, galleries, and other traditional water-use systems are the focus of special attention because of their enormous potential across the areas addressed in the Future Islands program. The program also includes the use of parametric design, drone mapping, and geographic information systems—technologies whose application to landscape architecture has made the department led by López Busón a global benchmark.
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