Matt Baida featured in this week’s Eastern Courier in relation to his recently awarded Churchill Fellowship
Eastern Courier Messenger : November 7th 2012, Page 8
Matt’s Fellowship research aims to build a much clearer understanding of the issues surrounding the success and failure for post-mining areas and how to protect local community’s once mining declines or stops. From his travels he will start to develop a better knowledge on best practice community engagement, how communities have restored or reinvented themselves separate from their old dependency on the mining economy and how to creatively reclaim and reuse altered landscape where environmental systems have been permanently altered beyond recognition and function
As a landscape Architect Matt believes he can play an important role in meeting today’s environmental and social challenges associated with post-mined landscapes and mining communities. By accepting the impact mining has on our landscapes and moving towards a trans-disciplinary approach the creativity of a landscape architect can have a great influence on social and landscape investigations. Through such input he will start to challenge the traditional means of thinking around mine site rehabilitation and move beyond the idea that the original landscape should be restored.
‘Landscape architects can bring resolution through a process of analysis, design and prototyping that includes considerations for culture, form and social concerns not allowing landscape planning to rely solely on engineering or scientific methods’ Matt says.
By using science and design to inform and provide feedback for each other this leads to more intelligent results for post-mined landscapes and mining communities. Through this collaborative approach Matt hopes a new discourse between the mining world, community and design world can begin to pose the question ‘Is this really the best outcome?’