ECLAS2026 keynote speakers announced

The keynote speakers for the upcoming ECLAS conference have been officially announced. This year, the conference brings together four leading international experts and innovative thinkers. Each will reflect from their respective disciplines on the urgent relationships between landscape, society, climate, and theory. Below is the overview of the speakers, the dates and times of their lectures, and their biographies:

 

Noreen Masud “A Flat Place”
Wednesday 16th of September, 17:00 – 17:30

Noreen Masud is a writer, literary scholar, and Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of Bristol. Her work explores the relationships between landscape, memory, identity, trauma, and belonging, bringing together literary criticism, cultural history, and personal narrative. She is the author of the award-winning academic monograph Stevie Smith and the Aphorism: Hard Language (2022) and the acclaimed memoir-travelogue A Flat Place (2023), which examines the meanings of seemingly ordinary landscapes through the lenses of colonial history, personal experience, and complex trauma. A Flat Place was shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Non-Fiction, the Sunday Times Charlotte Aitken Young Writer of the Year Award, the Jhalak Prize, and the RSL Ondaatje Prize, and was widely recognized as one of the notable books of 2023. Her work offers a compelling perspective on the cultural and emotional dimensions of landscape, making her a distinctive voice in contemporary discussions on environment, society, and belonging.

 

Dirk Sijmons “Changing World Views: our most urgent transition?”
Wednesday 16th of September, 17:30 – 18:00

Dirk Sijmons (1949, Amsterdam) is one of the founders of H+N+S Landscape-architects where he was mostly involved in regional plans and research-by-design commissions (1990-2015). In 2002 Sijmons received the Maaskant award and in 2007 the Edgar Doncker award for his contribution to ‘Dutch Culture’. His book publications in English are = Landscape (1998), Greetings from Europe (2008), Landscape and Energy (2014), Moved Movement, (2015) & Room-for-the-River (2017) In the Anthropocene site matters in four ways (2020). Sijmons was appointed first State Landscape Architect of the Netherlands (2004-2008). He held the chair of Environmental Design (2008-2011) and that of Landscape Architecture (2011-2015) at TU-Delft. He was curator of IABR—2014 themed Urban-by-Nature. At the World Design Summit 2017 in Montreal, he received the IFLA sir Geoffrey Jellicoe award. Since 2018 he is involved in research on the implications for the design community of our Anthropocene condition. At the IUA Barcelona 2026 he presented the project Sea Level Rise? Land Level Rise!

 

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes “Politics of Maintenance”
Thursday 17th of September, 17:00 – 17:30

Charlotte Malterre-Barthes is an architect, urban designer, and scholar whose work explores the intersections of urbanization, climate emergency, material extraction, and social justice. She is Assistant Professor of Architectural and Urban Design at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology Lausanne (EPFL), where she leads the RIOT laboratory. Previously, she taught at the Harvard Graduate School of Design and directed the Master of Advanced Studies in Urban Design at ETH Zurich. Her research focuses on the political economy of space production and the environmental and social implications of contemporary development practices. She is widely recognized for initiating A Global Moratorium on New Construction, a call for rethinking architecture and planning in response to the climate crisis. Through research, teaching, and activism, Malterre-Barthes challenges conventional models of urban growth and advocates for more equitable and regenerative futures.

 

Tim Waterman “Reworlding: Planetarity and Future Imaginaries”
Thursday 17th of September, 17:30 – 18:00

Tim Waterman is Professor of Landscape Theory at the Bartlett School of Architecture, UCL. His research addresses imaginaries: moral, political, social, ecological, radical, and utopian. This forms the basis for explorations of power and democracy and their shaping of public space and public life, taste and manners, and foodways in community and civic life and landscape. He is the author of The Landscape of Utopia: Writings on Everyday Life, Taste, Democracy, and Design and editor of Landscape Citizenshipswith Ed Wall and Jane Wolff, Landscape and Agency: Critical Essays with Ed Wall, and the Routledge Handbook of Landscape and Food with Joshua Zeunert.