| Fall 2009 Colloquium |
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Each semester the Landscape Architecture & Environmental Planning Colloquium brings together distinguished speakers (professionals, academics, practitioners, and graduate students) to present projects relevant to the landscape architecture and environmental planning professions. The colloquium attracts a diverse group of students from the College of Environmental Design, and the entire Berkeley community is invited to attend. Lectures take place Wednesdays from 1–2 p.m. in 315A Wurster Hall (unless otherwise noted).
Note: Speakers and lecture schedules are subject to change. Willow Lung Amam Colloquium Introduction
Shenglin Chang, Ph.D. New In Rural: A Departure of the New Ruralism Research & Development Center The presentation will introduce visions and actions of the New Ruralism Research and Development Center within the context of globalization, suburbanization and climate change. The New Ruralism Research and Development Center was established in the Graduate Institute of Building and Planning at National Taiwan University in the spring of 2008. The Center explores and promotes ecologically sensitive and socio-culturally diverse rural development models in the East Asia. It searches for successful green cases in rural villages, towns, and cities across the Taiwan Strait and around the world. Through professional practices, it invents alternative ways to balance socio-cultural, economic and ecological relationships among the countryside, suburbs, and cities. In this presentation, Dr. Chang will share inspiring cases in rural Japan, Taiwan and China, some of which are mature and successful, and others of which are just emerging about the aging rural towns and villages.
Gray Brechin, Ph.D. Another World Was Possible: The Explosive Growth of Public Education During the Depression The University and all other units of California's public education system face enormous cutbacks, contraction, and fee increases because of revenue shortfalls in the worst recession since the Great Depression. Franklin Roosevelt's New Deal fought that crisis differently, employing thousands to vastly expand California's — and the nation's — educational infrastructure in all dimensions. That investment paid off spectacularly after the Second World War. The remarkable panoply of buildings and landscapes created seventy-five years ago suggests we have alternatives to destroying public education in our own time.
Whose Right to the City? Global migrants now routinely live and work in cities located in countries other than those in which they were born. One effect of this heightened mobility has been that many residents of the world’s migrant destinations lack national citizenship in the localities they have moved to for work, refuge, or retirement. This disjuncture between the spaces of citizenship and daily life, in turn, has led to a devolution of citizenship claims-making from national to urban space. This talk will focus on the uses and limits of the discourse on “the right to the city” as a way to create alternative political spaces in which variously excluded groups of urban inhabitants might empower themselves. The talk details three strikingly different examples of widely diverse group actions and state responses to illustrate the practical strengths and limits of “the right to the city” discourse. September 23, 2009
Urban Scale Landscape Planning and Design Background In the background of economic globalization, China has entered into the phase of rapid development of urbanization. The development of new cities and new regions have entered into a peak period, while the imbalance of urban physical environment and spiritual environment, and the disappearing of city culture has lead to the similar characters and similar planning and design between cities. Solutions
The landscape planning is not only the green space system planning, but also is a part of city master planning. The landscape architects know about nature very well, which is basis of city forming. How to develop the naturalness of urban city is the spirit source of creation, and the landscape architects can provide various argumentations and alternative plans to the planners. Urban scale landscape planning and design respects the natural texture, inherits the urban culture, and supports the urban ecological and cultural construction with the generous natural conditions and cultural heritages. The goal of urban scale landscape planning and design is to minimize environmental pressure brought by urban growth, and bring traditional Chinese landscape design concept and modern ecological techniques into new city development. Cases Study 1. Beijing Olympic Forest Park Planning and Design
Marcia McNally/SAVE Green Growth or Green Washing: What Should American Environmental Planners and Designers be Doing in South Korea? Founded in 1997, SAVE is a volunteer group of professors, students, and staff from the University of California, Berkeley’s College of Environmental Design and National Taiwan University. Our work focuses in the area around the Tsengwen Estuary in Taiwan, wintering site to over half the world population of the endangered black-faced spoonbill. Working with local fishermen, national legislators, and Taiwan environmental organizations, SAVE successfully battled the development of a petrochemical plant in this crucial habitat site and proposed ecotourism as the sustainable alternative. SAVE also worked to ensure that the master plan for the Yunchianan National Scenic Area (one outcome of the Taiwan spoonbill fight) included adequate stepping stone habitat for spoonbills as the population recovers and grows. SAVE has recently expanded its work to include the spoonbill's entire flyway. Along with students in LA 205, for the past two years SAVE has been doing research on the threats to spoonbill breeding habitat in South Korea. One site is a planned campus that intends to be an international home for 11 American universities in Incheon City, which will be located in crucial tidal flat habitat if built. We have begun to develop alternative plans for this “Song Do” site as well as proposals for Ganghwa Island, another breeding ground, which LAEP students have traveled to Korea to present. But this is only the tip of the iceberg in South Korea, where President Myung-bak Lee is pursuing a “green” image to boost the country’s identity amongst developed nations. As a result SAVE and other members of the LAEP community have become involved in a related environmental disaster in-the-making, South Korea’s 4-Rivers Project. Touted as a river restoration project that will create a secure water supply and improve the nation’s ecology (their words), it appears to be a dam and dike building project that raises serious questions about its true need, its implementation costs, and how expected benefits are to be weighed against the possible negative impact on the riverine environment. We will present the Korea work and reflect on the tactics, challenges, and opportunities of informed, international environmentalism. Peter Bosselmann Urban Transformation: Understanding City Design and Form
“How do cities transform over time? And why do some cities change for the better while other deteriorate? In articulating new ways of viewing urban areas and how they develop over time, Peter Bosselmann offers a stimulating guidebook for students and professionals engaged in urban design, planning and architecture. By looking through Bosselmann’s eyes (aided by his analysis of numerous color photographs and illustrations) readers will learn to “see” cities anew.” “With Bosselmann’s guidance, we begin to understand the key elements of urban design. Using Copenhagen, Denmark, as an example, he teaches us to observe without prejudice or bias. He demonstrates how cities transform by introducing the idea of “urban morphology” through an examination of more than a century of transformations in downtown Oakland, California. Using the street grids of San Francisco as examples, Bosselmann explains how to define urban spaces. Finally, we find out how to interpret essential aspects of “life and place” by evaluating aerial images of the San Francisco Bay Area taken in 1962 and those taken forty-three years later. “Bosselmann has a unique understanding of cities and how they “work”. His hope is that, with the fresh vision he offers, readers will be empowered to offer innovative new solutions to familiar urban problems.”
Youth Voices for Change: Using Youth-produced Media to Influence Design and Planning Decisions Including youth in the research process provides genuine ways for young people to generate knowledge, as well as to influence decisions based upon this knowledge. Recent efforts have shown that youth can be true partners and leaders in research rather than passive spectators or recipients, resulting in mutual benefits for the participants as well as the organizations, communities or schools that they help improve. Numerous methods are available for eliciting this youth viewpoint including photography, videos, and map making. The Youth Voices for Change effort, funded by the Sierra Health Foundation, the California Endowment and the California Council for Humanities, engaged 17 youth, aged 12 to 18, over a 4-month period in identifying and recording conditions in their community that they liked and did not like. Group discussions, reflections and mapping activities complemented individual and group photography outings, audio recordings, and video production. This presentation will discuss the youth voices method, the findings and products (including a youth-produced Google map), and the dissemination strategies used in the project.
Tim Sullivan Peak to Playa: Landscape and Urbanity in the Great Basin The American West is growing as fast as any area of the United States and has been deemed by the Brookings Institution “the New American Heartland.” The heart of the interior West is the Great Basin of Nevada and Utah; few other places are as high, dry, sparsely inhabited — and urbanized. The vast share of the population of this region lives in the two growing metropolitan areas at its edges, Salt Lake City and its Wasatch Front and Reno and its Truckee Meadows. But the urban Great Basin is a paradox in that although almost everyone lives in a city, few seem to want to live in one — residents’ sense of place is often tied not to the city but to the mountains and open desert. The landscape provides illusions of limitless space and resources that are actually quite limited. As a result the urban fabric suffers. Some, however, are pushing for urbanism in these Great Basin metropolises, in neighborhoods and in regions. This harsh landscape provides clues about how cities can adapt to its geography, topography, ecology, and hydrography. What is the marriage of good urbanism with the land and culture of the Great Basin? Tim Sullivan explores this question in an upcoming book to be published by University of Arizona Press and will discuss his research.
Geohumanities: Art, Science, and Text on the Edge of Place Transdisciplinary concepts of space and place are becoming increasingly prevalent in most academic inquiries and design practice. Recent engagements between scholars in geography and the humanities have begun to open up a field some describe as the ‘geohumanities.’ Professor Dear's presentation outlines some of the major dimensions of this engagement, which draws upon artistic, scientific and textual analyses. The consequent convergence in theory and practice are exciting, insightful, playful, and innovative but they also reveal major intellectual fault-lines that may support Isaiah Berlin’s contention that different ways of seeing are ultimately incommensurable, and that we have to learn to live with these differences.
Victoria Chanse, Ph.D. Investigating Ecological Design Guidelines as a Framework for Planning a Stormwater Retrofit Project in Aiken, South Carolina With the development of LEED for Neighborhood Development guidelines and more recently, the Sustainable Sites InitiativeTM guidelines and performance benchmarks, ecological design guidelines play a growing role in all phases of project development. Since 2008, Clemson University Restoration Institute and the Center for Watershed Excellence have been working with the City of Aiken in South Carolina to develop a river restoration approach to resolve the severe erosion caused by stormwater runoff from the downtown area. This research investigates how one particular aspect of this project—the green infrastructure demonstration project in downtown Aiken—can be examined within the framework of the Sustainable Sites InitiativeTM design guidelines to assess sustainable approaches to project planning, materials, construction, stormwater, and ecology. This research will address the question of how Aiken’s stormwater management approaches, designs, and construction phases are evolving within the framework provided by the SSI design guidelines. This will build upon existing research on public involvement and stormwater management practices in Aiken. This talk will 1) introduce the project context and the Sustainable Sites InitiativeTM guidelines; 2) discuss the project details; and 3) evaluate how the Sustainable Sites InitiativeTM pilot project guidelines are shaping Aiken’s green infrastructure demonstration project. THIS EVENT HAS BEEN CANCELED Yociel Marrera River Restoration and Urban Revitalization Opportunities on the Rio Almendares, Havana River corridors through cities can provide important open-space, social, and recreational values, and if large enough, can provide flood conveyance whilst minimizing conflicts with human uses, improve water quality by filtering runoff from uplands and through uptake of nutrients from groundwater, and provide habitat for wildlife. Even rivers whose banks have been encroached by dense urban development can have a new lease on life as de-industrialization frees urban waterfronts and allows cities to reconnect people with the water. Most cities in Cuba are traversed by rivers whose pollution levels are so bad as to discourage developments linking people to the rivers. However, looking forward to future improvements in water quality, it makes sense to plan for river corridors that can serve multiple functions, and whose potential is not impaired by poorly-planned development within the bottomlands. The Almendares River drains a 400-km2 basin and flows through western Havana, forming the border between the El Vedado and Miramar districts. Much of its floodplain is undeveloped and set aside as parkland (the Metropolitan Park of Havana), but is currently underutilized, with informal trails, invasive exotic plant species, and a palimsest of land uses. Based on analysis of current and historical maps and aerial photographs, review of existing information, consultation with relevant agencies, field inventory of physical, ecological, and social conditions, and previous planning efforts, we assessed constraints upon and opportunities for restoration of the Almendares River. The river and its valley bottom have tremendous potential as open space parkland, urban agriculture, public education, and a continuous pedestrian and bicycle trail connecting southern suburbs with the Maricon. To reach its potential, we identify five key elements: (1) improve water quality in the river (through collection and treatment of sanitary sewage, and implementation of environmental stormwater runoff approaches), (2) re-operation of upstream dams to release minimum flows for water quality and environmental needs, (3) planning bottomland use to convey floodwaters (recognizing that floods are likely to increase with future urbanization of the catchment and climate change), (4) locate a continuous trail along the river through the reach designated as the Metropolitan Park (can mostly occupy the bottomlands, with only a few points where it will need to climb valley walls), (5) provide good access points connected to transportation routes (arterial streets and bus lines) with parking, sanitary facilities, and cafés to facilitate and encourage use of the park and trail by commuters and for recreation, and (6) re-develop abandoned industrial sites and other disused facilities along the river to attract and support public use, as conference, museum/public education, restaurant, and light industry/office facilities.
The Transect-Based SmartCode: A Model Code for the Building, Block, Neighborhood, Town and Region Local governments across the U.S. are increasingly replacing their conventional zoning codes, ones that enable auto-dominant development, with pedestrian-supported, form-based zoning codes. In this presentation, you will learn about a particular type of form-based zoning code, the model SmartCode, which is available for all scales of planning, from the region to the community to the block and building. The freeware SmartCode is intended for local calibration. As a form-based code, the SmartCode keeps towns compact and rural lands open, while reforming the destructive sprawl-producing patterns of separated use zoning. The SmartCode utilizes the rural-to-urban Transect as its core organizational and ordering concept for sustainable human habitats. The Transect is a powerful tool because its standards can be coordinated across many disciplines. Modules that utilize the Transect and plug into the SmartCode are currently being developed by practitioners in the fields of architecture, landscape architecture, planning, sustainable energy, etc., and include sprawl repair, food production natural drainage systems, affordable housing policy, visitability, architecture, lighting, signage, wind power, solar power, agricultural urbanism and more. Hear more about this progressive model code, including examples of how it is being calibrated by municipalities in California and beyond. Carolyn Finney, Ph.D. Bamboozled: Girl, I’m Going Green! And Other Stories |
Michael Peter Smith, Ph.D.
Jie Hu
In this presentation, Peter Bosselmann will talk about his latest publication Urban Transformation: Understanding Urban Design and Form. The following description of the book is provided by Island Press:
Patsy Eubanks Owens
Michael Dear, Ph.D.
Laura Hall