How does the theme of Common Interests resonate with you and your work?

It feels like home. I fully agree that the public realm is both our common ground and the space of active tensions. Many of EMF’s project’s asymmetrically resonate with several of the six topics addressed in the Living Cities Forum: climate, ecology, diversity, activation, country and technology. Perhaps, I would like to take the chance of the debate in introducing an aspect that I believe that crosses them all: the current context of scarcity and lack of resources, both from the ecosystem (we are living on energetic and ecological loan) and of economical investment. Is the way we are project making sustainable? Can the solutions we build be systematically upscaled to a relevant scale? Is therefore design-by-practice research led to critical emergent topics? Or on the contrary are we often designing wedding dresses for a day of wonder? Therefore, I believe considering the real available resources is a key issue when defining an agenda for the Common Interests under the different prisms.

What are some of your favourite projects that have transformed urban space?

I will pick three. First ‘Girona’s Shores project’, a self-initiated constellation of projects ongoing for the last 10 years in my hometown. Based on the principals of Clément’s ‘garden in motion’ and the ‘design-by-management’ it has turn into a laboratory on how to marry the town’s outskirts with the surrounding rural/natural landscapes with frugal low tech, low cost solutions. An uncommon project in the sense of researching transformation through light recurrent actions of care and neglect, and above all of creating and sharing knowledge with the local actors and gardeners to extend the town’s public realm.

Second, the Club Med restoration project, done from 2005 to 2010 in Cap-de-Creus Natural Park, where we deconstructed a full holiday village with 430 bungalows, restaurants and facilities with re-naturalisation purposes. Fourteen years after is an example of radical hope in nature’s power to recover when left alone to work.

Third, an unbuild streetscape project in Barcelona, Rambla del Carmel, that adds up all the knowledge we have gathered around urban naturalization projects over the last ten years of working in one of the most dense and well-trodden cities in Europe. The three altogether somehow give tips on how green infrastructure could work when transecting from the more pristine remote natural contexts to the suburban peripheries and finally urban contexts. Each with its different levels of intervention, investment, technology, care or neglect, and modes of practice.

You’ve mentioned that you are influenced by Gilles Clément. Tell us more about his philosophy and how it informs or inspires your work.

Our project Girona’s Shores, and others, are based on the principles of Clément’s Garden in motion where gardening starts with observation and the recognition of the garden diversity according to its how dynamic. In Girona we have tried to upscale his experiences from a garden to the scale of a small town. This is an open process of learning and sharing with the town’s gardeners in order to make-do with the existing ecological dynamics and social demands. Truly a challenge. With much larger extensions and far less botanical knowledge than Clément, we were forced to simplify the regimes of care, and neglect (leave nature’s dynamics alone) and specify some basic spatial criteria. As the years pass, and common knowledge grows, more complex and botanical decisions are being gradually introduced.

That’s why I believe, as learned from Clément, this is basically a ‘software’ project, about observation, care and light inputs. After 10 years of – differentiated management - the landscape evolution is fascinating. In the same Girona’s shore project, and complementing Gilles Clément mode of practice, we were also truly influenced by the infrastructural ambition of Michel Desvigne’s works. I believe Desvigne is one of a few researching on basic, affordable, replicable solutions that might be upscaled at geographical scale to respond to major social and environmental challenges. He opposes doing masterplans, but does evolutionary stages, prototyping, and accepting doing only the first stage of a project allows time and future users to define the rest, his work has been a truly inspiring force to us.

What are you most looking forward to for Living Cities Forum?

Learning from the dialogue with colleagues and the audience. And the chance to come back to Australia.

Martí Franch
(Spain)

A landscape architect pioneering low-cost, large-scale green infrastructures in Catalonia, transforming neglected urban areas into vibrant, multifunctional public spaces.

Martí Franch is the founder and principal of EMF landscape, and design professor at the Landscape Master in ETSAB Barcelona. Franch’s interest focuses on the infrastructural potential of landscape by exploring the instrumental niches for ‘Time-grounded Design’. EMF's research explores how the time dimension can be operationally introduced in the design process. The ultimate goal being to prefigure landscapes which have the capacity to change and adapt at several spatial and temporal scales.

Franch holds an Honorary Doctor of Design from the University of Greenwich where he studied Landscape Architecture.

He also holds Horticultural Engineering Degree from ESAB, Barcelona. Franch has been awarded an ASLA Honor Award and the VII Landscape Biennial Rosa Barba Prize in 2012 and the Landezine awards in 2016, 2020.

This session is supported by the Embassy of Spain in Australia