International Projects Post-COVID: One Expat’s Perspective

by Edward Flaherty, ASLA

image: Edward Flaherty

I can’t deny the romantic attraction of the places where I have worked and lived:

Tangier, where on the Strait of Gibraltar, Europe meets Africa. Tangier lesson learned: waterfront tourist district. I learned the hard way how important free access to multidisciplinary project information is.

Istanbul, where on the Bosphorus Strait, Europe meets Asia. Turkey lesson learned: 200km motorway connecting Europe and Asia. I learned how to scale ‘making a difference’ when working with senior engineers whose career had been on horseback.

Saudi Arabia, on the Red Sea in a port called Yanbu, where for centuries people have made their way to Mecca and Medina. Saudi Arabia lesson learned: new town in the desert on the Red Sea coast. I learned the hard way how small the landscape infrastructure is compared to the energy, port, primary industries, transportation, jobs, and telecom are to a city being built from zero.

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Large-Scale International Projects

At Qasr Al Sarab, a five star destination resort in the Empty Quarter, the Tourism Development and Investment Company (TDIC) managed a South African designer, a Saudi Arabian landscape subcontractor, thirty other contractors and suppliers as well as overseeing the transition to permanent maintenance to achieve this result.  image: Edward Flaherty
At Qasr Al Sarab, a five star destination resort in the Empty Quarter, the Tourism Development and Investment Company (TDIC) managed a South African designer, a Saudi Arabian landscape subcontractor, thirty other contractors and suppliers as well as overseeing the transition to permanent maintenance to achieve this result.
image: Edward Flaherty

Large-Scale International Projects, in Theory and in Practice: Challenges & Opportunities for Landscape Architects

Yogi Berra had it right. He said, “In theory there is no difference between theory and practice, but in practice there is.”

How does a very large and very complex project—1.5 kilometers long and more than thirty international consultants—get built?

Here’s the simple summary: there are three players. Number one: the owner—the owner has the money and property to develop the project. Number two: the consultant—the consultant does the design and engineering for the project. And number three: the contractor—he builds the project. Then the owner moves in and operates the project. Straightforward, right?

Almost…

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Working with Pirates

Even in the contractor's nurseries, the standard of care does not reach the level that the design landscape architect may expect--schedule control, procurement and construction documentation should be clear and complete. image: Edward Flaherty
Even in the contractor’s nurseries, the standard of care does not reach the level that the design landscape architect may expect
image: Edward Flaherty

You may wonder what it’s like to work in the cradle of Western Civilization—the trading posts between the East and West, the Middle East and North Africa, and, for millennia, primarily a landscape of traders.

But first, we’ll start with something you may be more familiar with. Large nurseries like Monrovia, Keeline Wilcox and ValleyCrest often have rows upon rows of trees, shrubs and ground covers, each properly pruned, grown to near perfection and available in seemingly unlimited quantities in any size you want. Selecting plants there is the same as going down the breakfast cereal aisle in a large American grocery store—huge selections, multiple sizes of each, in massive quantities. Just like cereal boxes, the plants in these nurseries are labelled, well displayed, properly set out and all uniformly healthy. That sophistication and mastery of horticultural and logistics processes—integral to plant growth—is a spectacular achievement that some landscape architects never fully appreciate—until they worked with the pirate landscape contractors of the Middle East.

In the Western Region of Saudi Arabia in the early 1980s, a large new town was under construction and street trees were part of the infrastructure work. That was the first time some landscape architects had seen—on a competitively bid, huge project scale—plants being grown in used, empty tin cans. Always rusting, the cans rarely even had drainage holes and were always stacked cheek-by-jowl to save on land rental costs. Plants were hand watered seemingly by chance. Pruning equipment? Just never around.

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Digital Sandbox: a new mentoring paradigm?

The Landscape Architecture Sampler: have students ever wondered what it might be like to work here, in the Empty Quarter, in Southwest Asia? image: Flaherty
The Landscape Architecture Sampler: have students ever wondered what it might be like to work here, in the Empty Quarter, in Southwest Asia?
image: Flaherty

Mentoring needs digital facilitation.

This is a brief review of how time, cost, and quality issues have impacted education and the practitioners’ offices in the past decade or so.  Schools have been pressured to streamline, yet teach more.  Practitioners’ offices have been pressured to help with education, yet reduce overheads.  Who loses?  Everybody, especially the students. Though internships help, they only give a narrow window for viewing and learning over a short period of time.  I contend that the pressures, both in education and also in practitioners’ offices, combine to negatively influence the next generation of landscape architects.  The students end up poorly informed and weak when it comes to two critical categories: what they want to do and how can they reach that goal.

The weakness comes from an insufficient understanding of how the profession works, how a project evolves, and how the work advances over time in the practitioners’ offices.  This is not a new problem, but it is an exacerbated problem these days.  How to correct this?  Digitally facilitated mentoring.

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