Sweco – Transforming society together
“It takes a village to raise a child”
This old African saying illustrates for a long time an ever-true universal value.
Our communities and our living environment have become complex and its challenges are eminent. Therefore it is more than ever important to shape tomorrow’s world along the most sustainable lines possible. It will require necessary courage, creativity and innovation. As Sweco’s landscape architects and planners, we take up this challenge with the utmost ambition in the projects we aim for, in the way we work and promote these issues with our clients and in the way we organize ourselves internally.
The landscape architect as director
Our world has changed, and subsequently, our job has become tremendously complex over the last decades. As landscape architects, we find ourselves often on the crossroads of many disciplines that are involved in our field of work. At Sweco we believe that we have to be ready to take on this challenge as a conceptual thinker and as a project director involving innovative thoughts and knitting links between disciplines in a continuous search for sustainable and resilient (new) landscapes.
Together with our clients and the collective knowledge of our landscape architect ecologists, engineers and other experts, we co-create solutions that address urbanization, landscaping and nature and which make our societies more sustainable. Landscape is not only about planting trees. Landscape architects are working on holistic projects with a lot of experts on different fields, from planning and designing through ecology, mobility, heritage, and participation. All working for the next generations and transitioning our society.
One of our key strengths is our combination of landscape architecture and engineering services, enabling us to both plan and design the sustainable communities and cities of the future. Together we translate the joint ambition ‘Transforming Society Together’ into concrete visions and projects for the spatial transition. Our projects are very diverse, both in scale and content and across different domains. Not only in terms of content but also in guiding our policymakers, residents, stakeholders and government in the transition to a better society.
Spatial Transition Programs
With Sweco-wide expertise we are banking on innovation and knowledge-sharing in current sustainability themes. We work on programs that reflect the most important social issues of our time. They act as our compass guiding us into the future. By doing so we help to make breakthroughs for the benefit of tomorrow´s world. We align ourselves with the sustainability initiatives of the international Sweco Group. The integrated approach is deeply ingrained in the very idea and DNA of Sweco as an interdisciplinary organization and is based on both scientific theory and project experience.
Beauty is in the eye of the beholder
Like Petrarca observed the world from Mount Ventoux, we at Sweco believe there is no good landscape design without proper investigation into the existing layers of landscape. Many have lived, worked and walked in the places we are working on and we see it as our duty to keep and reinforce what is good and get rid or correct what is wrong. The understanding of the value of local knowledge in all of its aspects will always be our point of departure. It seems to us that this adagium is the only way of conceiving landscapes anchored on existing cultural layers, physical layers and communities that will add modestly and discrete a contemporary layer to its identity that hopefully will resist in time.
An interesting scenography and experience adds more to the beauty of space then trendy design or materials. Botanics, ecology and vegetation are essential elements of our design approach. Our ambitions in terms of climate, ecology, sustainability, inclusive society, sustainable mobility, and materialisation are not only given functional content in our projects but are also ‘designed’.
Published on January 22, 2024
