I’d like to thank all those who have supported us in some way as we continue to work hard to organise the ELASA minimeeting ‘Back to Basics’ to be held in Edinburgh this April- a great opportunity to showcase Landscape Architecture in the UK (This event has not occurred in the UK since 1995, and never before in Scotland). We are excited to announce that our website went live last week, and continues to evolve.

Visit it here:

http://uk2010.elasa.org/

Applications have also opened and will remain open for the next week, places are filling rapidly and we are very pleased with the range of students from all over Europe who will attend.

So far, as part of our diverse programme we can confirm:

• A day workshop in collaboration with NEA (North Edinburgh Arts) and the regeneration of Muirhouse led by Cit of Edinburgh Council through their 21^st Century Homes programme. Participants will design and build a series of installations and performance spaces from 230m2 of turf donated by Lindum. This day workshop will also be open to an additional 40 UKstudents

• Guest Lecture from Eelco Hooftman, founder and director of Gross Max Landscape Architects

• Lectures from horticulturalists from the Royal Botanic Gardens Edinburgh

• Workshops led by leading artist Donald Urquhart

• Workshops led by sculptor Lara Greene

• Final Exhibition showcasing the minimeeting to be held at Edinbugh College of Art on the 19th April

We continue to seek financial support to help us meet the costs on the meeting and offer the lowest possible fee to participants, ensuring it is as inclusive as possible. If you or your organisation are able to contribute further, please do not hesitate to contact me. Visit out sponsors page at: http://uk2010.elasa.org/more/sponsors

Follow us on Twitter: http://twitter.com/ElasaEdin2010

Follow us on Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=332477828332&ref=mf

Many thanks

Rowan Longhurst

ELASA 2010 Coordinator

rowanlonghurst@hotmail.com

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The ELASA Edinburgh 2010 Team

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Three students from ELASA Guntis Ratkevics (Latvia) Thilo Grassmann (Germany) Johannes Richter (Germany) participated at the EFLA meeting held in Bruxelles from 20th to 22nd of November 2009 to represent the ELASA, strengthen the contact between students and professionals and keep ELASA up to date about what’s going on in European landscape architecture.

At the Meeting of the Committee and Working Groups we joint the meeting of the Educational Committee (EC) and held a presentation about ELASA. We pointed out, that we want to improve the contact of students and professionals. Almost all of the committees members know ELASA and many have participated there themselves.

In order to strengthen our connection with professionals in field, we made some suggestions what ELASA (all of us, students in LA) could do, and here are some:

• Program of students interviewing professionals
• Publish on the EFLA newsletter
• Get involved in the Le:Notre
• EFLA will support us finding professional speakers for our meetings

Read more in: Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.

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By filling this in you will be directly contributing to a wider understanding of the issues that face students throughout their studies. Gathering such information has never been done before in this way and helps to get ‘hard facts’ which we can use to improve the study of Landscape Architecture across Europe. The results will be published and highlighted at the EFLA (European Foundation of Landscape Architects) General Assembly in November 2009 but will also help establish areas which need to be addressed.

Thank you for your time, please encourage your coursemates to complete the questionnaire as well.

Fill it in HERE

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Following the Representatives meeting attached are the links to a presentation that I said I would make available for you all to use to publicise ELASA at your home universities.

You will see it is quite simple (thank you to Felix for the original template!) and includes a quick overview of the organisation, what we do, and a brief explanation of the most recent meetings. It is available both as a powerpoint and pdf. Feel free to alter it in any way/language to suit your own needs. I gave this presentation at my university and it really was popular, particularly with lower years.

It would be great if you could use this (it doesn’t take long at all) and watch this space for a link to the Education Questionnaire coming soon. Please publicise this link when it arrives and encourage your coursemates to fill it out.
Note: There is a file embedded within this post, please visit this post to download the file.

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For those who haven’t heard of  LE:NOTRE yet, it is a Thematic Network Project that was founded by ECLAS (European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools). This thematic networks connects over 100 landscape architecture universities as well as other important European stakeholders, and more recently (LE:NOTRE TWO) an even wider group of organizations and individuals, such as landscape architecture students and practitioners. Besides from strengthening the European landscape architecture academic community, the project website (le-notre.org) functions as a resource database where information (literature database, design projects, images,…) can be shared and found. Most likely your school is already connected to this network, which means they have the ability to create a login for their students. So in case you weren’t provided with a login to the site already, you could ask for one to your school’s listed contact person.

Each year LE:NOTRE organizes a Spring workshop to which we are glad ELASA is invited as well. This year’s workshop focused on ‘e-learning’. You might remember an email that was sent out to the ELASA mailing list (March 30^th, 2009) in which we asked to fill in a short and anonymous online survey about this subject. This was done in preparation for the LE:NOTRE Spring workshop 2009 with the idea to broaden the insight into possibilities of e-learning and the way landscape architecture students are already making use of them, or envision the subject. After having looked through the received responses, we decided during the LE:NOTRE workshop to compile a short written report on the survey results, as we felt these outcomes could be beneficial to the LE:NOTRE working group. This report can be found by clicking on this link.

The workshop itself took place in Versailles (Paris, FR) at the ENSP (‘Ecole Nationale Supérieure du Paysage’) from Thursday 2^nd until Sunday 5^th of April 2009. Altogether, we were with eight ELASA-members to join the professors during a 4 day Spring workshop, and we participated in seven different working groups. During the previous LE:NOTRE Spring workshop (Brussels 2008) the idea came to mind to create a poster to be distributed to the LE:NOTRE school network in order to draw new students in the direction of both ELASA and LE:NOTRE. After multiple brainstorms – during which we evaluated different approaches for the poster – it finally came to its final form. This joint poster was distributed to the teachers during this year’s Spring workshop event and should be hanging up in universities across Europe by now. Additionally it can be viewed by clicking on this link. Please feel free to download it and put it up in your university if you want to promote ELASA and LE:NOTRE at your school.

More detailed information providing an overview of our reflections and findings after the LE:NOTRE Spring workshop 2009 can be found in a report that we put together. This report was in the first place valuable for the ongoing evaluation of the LE:NOTRE project, but it also gives an idea of what goes on at these LE:NOTRE workshops. Clicking on this links takes you to that report.

Ana B., Katarina H., Ruben J., Maria K., Florian L., Andreea P., Haris P., Guntis R.

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I also wanted to email you all briefly to let you know about the main outcomes of the Reps meeting and to raise a few thoughts that we had in relation to ensuring ELASA’s healthy and strong future.

So… Firstly you will receive another beautifully written Annual Report from me soon (supported by Reps meeting minutes from Paul Diehl from Germany). I hope that this will give you a good detailed outline of ELASA this year and of course I will circulate a draft first in order for people to make any contributions they wish. There are of course areas of ELASA that I have not had any involvement in this year so will appreciate contributions (mainly LE:NOTRE, ECLAS etc).

THE EXCITING BIT….. It was decided that the 2010 Mini meeting will be held in the UK (most likely Edinburough). Myself and Nicolas will work our hardest to provide you with an exciting (and cheap as possible!) programme here in the UK in the slightly reduced timescale we have to organise.

The 2011 Annual Meeting will be held in…..GERMANY. A fantastically strong appearance from Munich this year meant we were able to decide very quickly that this will be a great country to host and look forward to an exciting programme.

Reminder Annual meeting 2010- Latvia

Without making this too long (and to encourage you to read the annual report!) the last thing that I wanted to mention was in relation to ensuring ELASAs strong and successful future. I’m sure you’ll agree this year has been a little unsettled, whether it’s to do with global finances, politics, or simply unavoidable circumstances. However it is important we move forward and support each other. I would like to call on everyone to take a little more responsibility for the future of ELASA, particularly in tougher financial times. If you can offer advice, ideas on sponsorship for meetings, ideas on guest speakers, experience from organising previous meetings etc etc, please do so if you are asked. The spirit of ELASA rests on the enthusiasm of its members so please help in any way you can.

So, here’s to a continued happy, healthy and strong ELASA where we continue to represent ourselves and our countries within the world of Landscape.

Best of luck to you all wherever you are, of course you will hear from me again soon!

PS: Photos by Lukasz

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Now what we got here. For those who are familiar with bloging it is easy to notice that our site are now based upon WordPress bloging system which make it easy to:

• add new articles and pages – keep it up-to-date
• register admins, authors and/or users
• change appearance
• and expand in a ways we need it

Right now not all parts are finished yet it is just beginning so check the site sometime. You can also suggest some ideas and I will make something like wish list so we can decide together which one we should realize.

Also if some one is wary good at coding and have tons of time maybe he/she wants to build custom site template for elasa.org or modify existing one (Atahualpa) just get in touch with elasa webmasters.

Until then we can change default header images (images which changes when you click something in site) to more relevant ones. So I suggest to do some thing like little competition where we decide about best header images. You send images to us (elasawebteam[at]gmail.com) and We post them in separate page where You can vote fore them. Size can be changed but I think it is better if we all stay with one 150×1280 px. And I have to remind You to use only your own images and if there are some persons face visible You should get permission to use that picture. Pictures can be photos from past elasa meeting or something else connected with ELASA

If you have any questions ask in comments or use elasawebteam[at]gmail.com or mailing-list

cheers

Guntis

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