Carla Gonçalves is a Portuguese landscape architect graduated from the University of Porto, Portugal; she also has a Master Degree in Regional and Urban Planning from the University of Aveiro and nowadays she is doing her PhD at Faculty of Sciences, University of Porto. Here she teaches Landscape Planning, Landscape Management and Landscape Policies in the Landscape Architecture degree and master.
Her biggest interest lies in the inherent relationship between landscape and spatial planning. A relation in which people is (and must be) the focus of her approach. She understands landscape and all its implicit values, as a mean to construct meaningful spaces through, and with the people related to it. When merging landscape with spatial planning, she noticed she needed a platform to make real though participation what people wanted. As a result, she founded in 2014 with a group of colleagues, Evolving Landscape, Crl, a informal group dedicated to encouraging citizen’s participation and raising awareness on landscape issues.
Carla Gonçalves has also been following the implementation of the European Landscape Convention with great enthusias, which has inspired her to collaborate with different NGO’s, landscape initiatives, and other organizations in Europe and also in Latin America. She is CivilScape Treasurer, an international association of civil society organizations which dedicate their work to landscape protection in Europe. Carla collaborates as well with the Latin American Landscape Initiative (LALI), sharing the European landscape experience and translating it in ways of recognizing and positioning landscape in the Latin American context.