Dorothy Tang is an assistant professor of landscape architecture and program director of the undergraduate program at the University of Hong Kong. She teaches design studios and seminars that explore the role of landscape strategies at the intersection of everyday social operations and large-scale infrastructural systems. Her research and teaching explores regional scale landscape change in order to develop alternative methods for planning practices that could operate at a material scale. She investigates the impact of infrastructural development on urban form and design, resource extraction and post-industrial landscapes, and disturbed landscapes in events of floods, earthquakes, or other disasters. Current research efforts include the investigation of current gold-mining practices and its relationship to urban growth in Johannesburg, the process of industrialization and its impact on urban ecologies in the Pearl River Delta, and the effect of landscape systems and open space networks in historic Shanghai. Her landscape architectural practice develops design solutions that integrate current innovations in sustainable construction with indigenous cultures and technologies in order to build prototypes and demonstrations that can be replicated and adapted by local communities. Recent projects include sewage treatment wetlands in a rural elementary school, the planning and design for a village in Sichuan devastated twice by earthquakes and landslides, and the eco-tourism planning for a reservoir in Northern Sichuan province in China.
Prior to joining the University of Hong Kong, Dorothy was an associate at Michael Van Valkenburgh Associates in New York City. She received her BLA with Honors and Distinction from Iowa State University, and her MLA with Distinction from Harvard’s Graduate School of Design where she was awarded the ASLA Honor Award.