LANDSCAPING INTERNS COME UP WITH BEAUTIFICATION IDEAS FOR PORT ALFRED
Positive response to pair’s town planning efforts
TAKE a moment to imagine what Port Alfred could look like with a few town planning redesigns.
Imagine recreational parks hosting young children playing sports around Pascoe Crescent, or a functioning railway station with a restaurant sitting behind the police station – which now serves as a cosmopolitan plaza.
These are two out of many of the town planning designs which were conceived by Hort Couture interns Lotte Embregts and Nikki Steerneman as to how to improve social cohesion in Port Alfred.
Embregts and Steerneman are interns from Holland, and their project for Hort Couture Landscape Architects & Planning was to each design a master-plan for reshaping the area between the Putt and the Nico Malan Bridges.
“Our project was to redesign public spaces between the two bridges on the east and on the west, basically,” Steerneman said
According to Embregts and Steerneman, the project was to conceive through landscaping and public space layout how to enhance social cohesion within the Port Alfred community.
“It’s an internship of 10 weeks working for Hort Couture,” Embregts said. “We’ve been working on this for 10 weeks.”
The master-plans were presented at the MyPond Hotel last Wednesday, where a representative of Ndlambe Municipality was present.
Yvo Suijs, who was once an intern himself, is now employed by Hort Couture as a landscape designer and candidate landscape technologist; which is one of the portfolios a future in landscaping and public space design allows.
“Their projects are landscape architectural proposals in which they applied their Dutch and new learned skills to the local context of their site,” Suijs said. “We are very proud of both of them and their presentations were a big success with great interest.”