Michel Desvigne

Principal director of Michel Desvigne Landscape Architects. He initially graduated from the Faculty of Natural Sciences in Lyon and then from the Ecole Nationale Supérieure de Landscape Architecture in Versailles. Throughout his career and on current projects, Michel Desvigne collaborates with the world's leading architects, such as Paul Andreu, Sir Norman Foster, Herzog and de Meuron, Rem Koolhaas Renzo Piano, I. M. Pei, Christian de Portzamparc, Jean Nouvel, Richard Rogers, Bernard Tschumi... Michel Desvigne teaches and researches at the ENSP in Versailles, the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne, the Geneva Institute of Architecture and the Harvard University Graduate School of Design. In 2000, Michel Desvigne received the Medal of the French Academy of Architecture and in 2003 he was nominated for the Grand Prix d'Urbanisme.

Claire Martin

Claire Martin is a landscape architect and associate director of the Melbourne studio of OCULUS Landscape Architecture + Urban Design, where she has led the successful delivery of a range of education, health, cultural, infrastructure and public landscape projects. She is a member of the Office of the Victorian Government Architect’s Victorian Design Review Panel and a contributing editor of Landscape Architecture Australia. Claire is a regular guest lecturer at the schools of architecture and design at the University of Melbourne and RMIT University where she has taught, is an invited critic, and is a member of the Landscape Architecture program advisory committee. Claire was a co-creative director of the Australian Institute of Landscape Architecture’s Festival of Landscape Architecture: This Public Life, which brought together thinkers and practitioners from the arts and sciences.

Misato Uehara

Misato Uehara, Ph.D., JLAU, JNLA, is an associate professor, vice-chair of Environmental design unit, the Social Research Center, Shinshu University.

He serves as the International Federation of Landscape Architects Asia-Pacific Region’s Chair of Climate Change Taskforce team and is the official delegate of the Japan Landscape Architect Union (JLAU) at the IFLA-APR council.

The 2011 Tohoku Disaster brought a new and challenging theme to an area devastated by a large-scale natural disaster. His study, funded by the Japan Scientific Research, used the McHarg’s planning process and 1980s’ Japanese ecological database for holistic land-use planning. Fukushima prefecture, Shinchi-town chose the most suitable residential relocation sites from all of its lands by citizen participation, whereas many other towns used surplus land of the existing city plans for relocation sites. His study proved that Shinchi-town sites are robust for not only tsunamis and earthquakes but also other natural disasters. This town had recouped its population to pre-2011 levels in 5 years, while the population of other disaster-affected municipalities was reducing. This proves that landscape initiatives are important for regional resilience in disaster reconstruction.

He received her Ph.D (Design). from Kyushu University. After the Ph.D. program, he worked with Kobe Design University. He has published in both Japanese and English professional journals:Landscape Research Japan, International Review for Spatial Planning and Sustainable Development, and Springer Book, etc.