Tamsin Faragher

Principal Resilience Officer

Tamsin is a landscape architect who lives and works in Cape Town, South Africa. Whilst a keen designer and proud to list some of the world's premier projects on her CV, since returning to South Africa in 2010, she has worked mostly in the planning and policy space. Her most recent role is in local government where she's tackling water sensitive design, liveable urban waterways and policy/governance and food systems. In addition to this role, she undertakes research, part time lecturing and a little pro bono design work.

Why women? Why climate change? Why Now?

On Tuesday, Cape Town had a summer thundershower. We’re a winter rainfall area and have only started to emerge from the worst drought in recorded history, becoming the world’s first city to almost run out of water. Climate change is no longer an abstract reference in a UN Framework or agreement. 

In Cape Town, we know what climate change is. We survived on 50 litres per day. But as much as we may believe that we live in the most beautiful city in the world which gives us a certain uniqueness, I am certain that our experience is not unique, a belief that will be borne out in the coming years. Other cities and countries have been keen to learn from us because they know, they could be next, not because it is written in the stars, or declarations or strategies, they see it in the environmental changes around them.

Because women are more likely to head households alone and are largely responsible for nurturing children, they are unable to occupy fulltime employment and are therefore most likely to live in poverty than men. Resources provides access to resilience and in its absence, makes women disproportionately more vulnerable to heat waves, droughts, rising sea levels, and extreme storms. They also have less access to basic human rights and experience systematic violence that escalates during periods of instability, as we have seen through COVID. Even though the Paris Climate Agreement (2016) acknowledges womens’ vulnerability and includes specific provisions to ensure women receive support to cope with the hazards of climate change, there is little that can be measured on the ground. 

Landscape architects, who are the architects for nature, understand how the wellbeing of humankind is tied to the well-being of the natural environment. Consequently, we play a central role in responding to climate change to ensure that humanity is better able to meet the existing and coming challenges that include climate change. Who is better equipped to plan and design ecological infrastructure to effect climate adaption and mitigation? Or public spaces that makes towns and cities liveable through cooling and offering respite from city life? It is through our work that we will meet the challenges of our time and shift humankind’s war on nature, towards a loving relationship, based on respect.

South Africa’s proud legacy of women activism must now more than ever be ignited and galvanized towards challenging the status quo and making a climate positive impact that improves the lives of girls, women and the broader communities they live in. The time for waiting for policy, strategy and plans to effect has long since passed. It has failed. Fundamental behaviour change germinated through the understanding that we are all responsible for our actions and that our actions have climate outcomes.

What is the biggest challenge facing women leaders in male dominated field and how to overcome them?

In South Africa landscape architecture is not male-dominated, there is a fairly even spread across genders, possibly even a higher proportion of women. The built environment as a professional eco-system may however have a higher proportion of men. But the issues lie more in the dominance of an engineering approach to the built environment. Overcoming these issues, like all systemic and historically entrenched issues, takes time, respectful engagement and champions on all sides capable of “translating” and facilitating fruitful discussion.

What are the pressing issues you are contributing as a landscape architect for tackle climate change?

Cape Town experiences multiple effects of climate change from increased temperatures to water insecurity. Current climate-focused work includes preparing liveable urban waterways projects through a variety of transversal City teams. The Liveable Urban Waterways Programme seeks to demonstrate the value of waterway restoration, rehabilitation and development towards improved eco-service provision, flood mitigation, cooling, amenity, greater biodiversity, and water treatment and storage using nature-based solutions for non-potable use. It is expected that temperatures in South Africa will increase in excess of global estimations by up to 4°C. With a large proportion of Capetonians living in poorly insulated corrugated iron shacks, heat waves pose a grave threat. Projects that provide shade and cooling are therefore a key part of climate adaption, as much as they are important for re-establishing the connectivity of the natural and urban water cycles to improve the water quantities and quality in the city’s streams and recharge to water-storing aquifers underlying the city. As the City strives to transition towards water sensitivity, so the importance of all water sources increases, including groundwater which is gaining prominence in the City’s water augmentation plans.

How you approach your business/ your research as a woman who lead?

I’m a collaborator and enjoy bouncing ideas and exploring as a team. Important concepts I use to frame my work include systems thinking and urban and natural systems as metabolisms that are inherently dynamic, but also animated by the contextual governance. This approach allows for the exploration of the dynamic interface between these systems, which is in many ways the breeding ground for great ideas.

Dynamism, uncertainty and high levels of flux caused by climate change are pitting people against nature. A deeper understanding of this dynamism and inclusion of nature into our cities is an aspect of our urban environments that designers and policy-makers are needing to pay greater attention to, not as “beautification” but as hardcore, productive parts to a suite of services critical to survival. 

This approach affects social and economic systems too. Landscape architects are the shapers of public space and the environment and they are therefore the “service providers” of eco-services (whether through public space design or private landscapes), which are pathways to resilient, thriving, liveable cities. I however believe that shifts in academic training away from spatial planning towards a limited focus on “garden design”, eliminates the potential role of landscape architects in broader planning discussions where decisions are taken in relation to ecological and infrastructure.

Whilst my work is influenced by particular approaches, my leadership is less influenced by gender than it is by a sensitivity to South Africa’s diversity and the need for broader consideration that includes race, language, education and privilege.

What is the most frustrating moment/comment you’ve heard as a woman who leads in the profession?

The landscape architecture course at the University of Cape Town commenced its programme collectively with urban designers and planners. On the first day, an urban design student (with an architecture undergraduate degree) poked me in the back with his scale ruler and called me a gardener. His name-calling won him a deep frown and a filthy look, but to this day, it irks me when landscape architects are called gardeners or landscapers and it worries me that our academic institutions are setting the profession up to this end, which eliminates the value that we add at larger scales and policy, thus reducing our value to beautification largely determined by other professions.

To return to my former classmate’s comment and in his defense, I was toting a magnificent watering can-shaped handbag at the time of his comment that in part possibly justifies his jibe.

What’s the most important risk you took and why?

I attended a big landscape architecture conference in Dubai in 2008 (may have been the IFLA Gulf Landscape Architecture Awards and Conference), where I was living at the time. Participants and presenters jetted in from across the globe for what was a greatly anticipated event. One of the presenters spent an hour elaborating on the planet’s destruction and the role of Dubai and the Middle East in this destruction, apparently oblivious to his own hypocrisy in having flown across the world to attend in person. Outraged at what felt deeply unfair, I wrote an opinion piece for the UK Landscape Architecture Magazine. 

But before submitting it (and after much thoughtfulness) I decided that it would be best to get a second opinion from my associate at the time, as some of what I had written, though entirely true, could be viewed unfavourably by our clients which could result in the termination of my employment. Their feedback was supportive and I took their comments on board and toned it down as much as I felt I could without compromising the message. It all felt very risky at the time, but the piece was published and no harm came of it. Quite the contrary in fact, many colleagues were complimentary and supportive of the views I expressed, which was a big relief. 

It was important to me at the time to correct misconceptions and facts in a “discussion” that had, up until my opinion piece, been entirely one-sided.

They say “Gender Equality Means Business” -- what do you think about that?

I don’t think very much of it because it isolates only one of a number of complex issues in the unequal world in which we live which isn't representative.

How your work contributes to other women?

As previously discussed, I believe in team-work and support the notion that there is strength in diversity. I don’t believe that my work is therefore limited in contributing to other women, but would like to believe that by instilling a collaborative culture that is nourishing of all team members, including women and men, that all will grow and blossom and produce great work.

What advice would you give to the next generation of female design leaders?

Be bold. Be fearless. Be kind. Get out of “that” box! Go to site and build your designs. Site boots are cool, get a pair and wear them. Learn from your mistakes – you will make them. Be curious. And always ask stupid questions. Share information and dreams - it makes us stronger.

Inspirational message aside – get active and take action. Climate change is happening and it will be your single greatest informant, get expert at it. It is our responsibility and duty.