Tag Archives: Prof Catharine Ward Thompson

Prof. Catherine Ward Thompson gives talk at the FOLAR Annual Symposium 2024 on Ecological Public Health

Prof. Catherine Ward Thompson gave a speech at last years FOLAR annual symposium on Ecological Public Health – the future of salutogenic landscapes, which is now available to view online.

The direction Catharine Ward Thompson takes in her research is based on salutogenesis, an approach to human health that examines the factors contributing to the promotion and maintenance of physical and mental well-being rather than disease. Having the types of environment that support good health makes much better economic and cost effective sense for public health. Landscape architecture and management can do a lot to support people in good health through planning, designing and managing the outdoor environment.

Green space is eugenic – it is associated with reducing the difference in health and life expectancy between the most economically deprived people and those better off. There is a need to prove the link between landscape and improved health, and also to determine the mechanisms behind access to green space and health. And this is what Catharine Ward Thompson quietly shares with us here. A lifetime’s research and collaborations with others looking at different age groups, over different time periods and their interaction with a range of landscapes reveals many exciting conclusions, instinctively known and understood by Paxton and Olmsted and Geddes and many others, and here based on peer reviewed evidence. There is huge opportunity with this to fight for and protect the role of landscape anew.

OPENspace Co-Director, Prof Catharine Ward Thompson, honoured with Lifetime Achievement Award

From left to right: Prof Frederico Meireles Rodrigues, Prof Catharine Ward Thompson and Dr Ellen Fetzer. Photo taken by Anna Rhodes.

Professor Catharine Ward Thompson has been honoured with a Lifetime Achievement Award at the European Council of Landscape Architecture Schools (ECLAS) annual conference in Brussels on 10^th September 2024.

The award is given to a leading figure in Landscape Architecture, for contributions to research, education, and public service. Catharine has served on the ECLAS steering committee and was involved in hosting an early ECLAS conference in Edinburgh in 1994. She was part of a small group of European colleagues who secured the funding of an EU Culture programme Thematic Network project on Landscape Architecture education, called “Le:Notre”, in 2001.

Catharine was presented with the award by ECLAS president Dr Ellen Fetzer of Nuertingen Geislingen University, Germany, and ECLAS Secretary-General Professor Frederico Meireles Rodrigues of University of Trás-os-Montes and Alto Douro, Portugal.

Jeroen de Vries, Catharine Ward Thompson, Richard Stiles and Karsten Jorgensen after writing the first ‘Le:Notre’ bid in 2001

Read more about the ECLAS Awards 2024 and other awards recipients: ECLAS Awards 2024 – ECLAS

Prof Catharine Ward Thompson’s essay published in ‘Garden and Metaphor: Essays on the Essence of the Garden’

Catharine Ward Thompson has a short essay published in ‘Garden and Metaphor: Essays on the Essence of the Garden’, a book edited by Ana Kučan and Mateja Kurir and published by Birkhäuser in October 2023. In this book, landscape architects, sociologists, architects, artists, philosophers and historians illuminate different aspects of the garden in the Anthropocene: the garden as a place of community, garden as art, and the garden as a place of enchantment and rapture. The book is in part a tribute to the work of the late Slovenian landscape architect, Professor Dušan Ogrin, whose work over many decades to support education in the profession was untiring, international and inspirational.